The resulting bricolage stirs a group dynamic inspired by a band who influenced millions. "We love The Beatles a lot, and a lot of what those guys did with the extra production, with the strings and the horns, and harmonies, was definitely a major inspiration, and over the last year, I've tried to incorporate those into the instrumental lineup."
In place of Lennon and McCartney musical imperialism, songwriting duties are spread among the Heymans and Schaffer. "Noah is the most prolific of the three songwriters," says Schaffer of the trifecta responsible for studio and live arrangements. "Underneath everything – underneath all the production, the cool guitar solo that comes in, the great swoop of strings or that big bombastic horn that comes in at the end – underneath all of that stuff is always just a good song. You could pluck it on a one-string shovel and sing along, and it still is powerful. That's something we definitely strive for.
"Sometimes you paint a song, and sometimes you want to start off with every color there is, you just want to put everything on the canvas and then take it away, because that's one thing you can do with music."
"Sisyphus Stone" – the song The Womack Family Band perform in this installment of "Live From Bad Racket," recorded at Cleveland's Bad Racket Recording Studio – was originally conceived as a slow, single acoustic slide guitar piece à la Robert Johnson. "The more the recording progressed in the studio … We went with the straightforward 'what if this was just a group of people singing a song on a porch somewhere,'" says Schaffer, whose Louisiana-born relations provided the antagonistic impetus behind the track. "My Mom's side of the family [is] extremely Republican, extremely conservative, extremely Christian religious to the most radical degree," he says. "The theme of that song came about when the elections were happening, and they had some rather colorful things to say about my mother and I because of that election.
"My mind went on a tangent about racism – how we can pass the Civil Rights Act and read about it in our sociology class, and think everything is honky dory now, but it's really not. I started looking into figures like Medgar Evers and Emmitt Till … that was the motivation for the song."
The band hits the road September 16 (closing at the Winchester Music Hall in Lakewood on November 5), playing Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, North and South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee and Michigan – a 13-state tour of the West Coast, from Maine to Florida, covering most points in between.
WATCH + LISTEN: The Womack Family Band - "Sisyphus Stone"
"Live From Bad Racket" is a monthly music video series that invites local acts to perform in Adam Wagner's Bad Racket studio in Cleveland. To watch Cleveland's Founding Fathers perform at Bad Racket click here. To watch Signals Midwest exclusive Bad Racket performance click here.
