After 12 years as a band, and over 900 shows, longtime Grand Rapids veterans Desmond Jones will plunge the depths of their past for their upcoming new album, Squids.
A project that goes back to the jam band’s beginnings as college students at Michigan State University in East Lansing back in 2012, Squids has stuck with the group over the years, popping up in album art, live shows, and other inside jokes ever since.
“It started in college,” guitarist/vocalist Isaac Berkowitz told REVUE. “I just had an idea. I was pretty much up all night, and I watched a Nova special on squids that’s like eight hours long. And in the morning, I called George (Falk), our sax player, and he came over, and we just locked ourselves in a practice room and wrote the first song, which is actually the second song in the series, but we wrote that one first, and then it was just kind of like a fun story, and a fun theme, and it led itself to a lot of big improvisation.
“So we thought we should extend it,” he added. “And then everyone got involved in the rest of the series. And so it turned into three songs, one big story, about squids coming from space and landing in the oceans, and humans battling them for supremacy, and them getting back into space... And George improvises a lot of lyrics in certain spots, so it’s almost like every time we play, it is like a different little snippet of the story that you’re getting.”
As a group of songs, Squids has really grown with the band. Evolving over the years, they go deep with each of the songs, often sprawling over 25 minutes of exploratory improvisation.
“We’ve gotten a lot of feedback recently, especially since we’ve been on Nugs.net with our live recordings,” drummer/vocalist/guitarist John Nowak said. “People who have never seen us live are sort of being drawn to the humor and the originality of the squid songs. So that makes me more pumped up about it, realizing that, ‘Oh, maybe they do like our music, and our weird stuff, you know, versus only wanting to play a dancey funk funky song, or something like that.’ So that, I think, is really exciting to have the artistry approach to it, and try to be original, and luckily have people who want to hear it.”
The band recorded the three epic songs that make up Squids with longtime collaborator Kevin McKay at InMuSo Studios. They mixed and mastered the record with Collin Pompey of Black Ops Audio in Kalamazoo. In addition to Nowak, Falk, and Berkowitz, Desmond Jones also includes fellow founding member guitarist/vocalist Chris Bota, and bassist Taylor Watson, who joined the band in 2019. They were joined on the album by Ashley Hansen on violin and viola, and Maddy Peters on cello.
“It’s definitely our most theatrical piece,” Berkowitz said about Squids. “And so it was kind of a tough thing in the studio to balance how much is too much? How much do we want to keep true to what it is going to sound like when we do it live? So I think we did a good job of mixing certain spaces. Where parts that really shine live, we kept more true to the live feel. And other parts we were able to embellish a lot with extra fun noises and things like that.”
The fun definitely carries over to the band’s live shows, where the whole Desmond Jones extended universe has taken on a life of its own that connects into their devoted fan base.
“We have these thematic things that we’ll add into our jams,” Chris Bota said. “That’ll happen often. So we’ll have little like characters, or little inside jokes, that if you’re listening to shows, or you’re at the shows you’ll understand. So I think every one of those themes that we incorporate into the band, we kind of end up absorbing. Like we have this deity called Opus, that is the band’s fictional god-like character. And then we’ve got the Squids thing. And now we have this whole relationship with Terry Puffer, who is a big part of our live shows. We have a cardboard cutout of this guy, and he comes to all of our shows in cardboard form, but he’s a real person.”
Last year’s winner of REVUE’s own annual Best of the West competition for Best Original Band, and a repeat finalist on our annual list, Desmond Jones has become a mainstay in the West Michigan music scene. Past winners of Listener’s Choice Album of the Year at WYCE’s Jammie Awards, and performers at the Electric Forest Festival, the group plans to make the release of Squids a night to remember, by playing the album, and combining it with their popular Thanksgiving Eve show at Elevation (inside The Intersection) Nov. 27.
Now in its sixth year, their Thanksgiving Eve show has become a fan favorite, building on the following the band first fostered in Grand Rapids by hosting a weekly residency at Tip Top back during their early days in the city.
“We did the Monday night residencies at the Tip Top, way longer than five years ago,” Nowak said. “I don’t even know. You kind of lose track, but to go from playing Monday nights for free, to having an annual headlining show at Elevation, there’s sort of like progress marks that you can look back on and be proud of. But it’s kind of hard to tell when you’re in the day-to-day grind of it all.”
Most recently the band has teamed up with Rockwood Booking, and plans on playing even more shows, leading up to their 1,000th show as a band. They also plan to continue to release singles of live songs on Spotify, and already have another new single ready to be recorded soon.
“As artists, I think we just want to keep creating more, and diving deeper into art, and diving deeper into connecting with more and more people, and playing with different musicians,” Bota said. “It’s just fun to know that I can continue that journey of being a musician, and an artist with awesome friends, and we all look out for one another.”
Desmond Jones Presents Squids
An Album Release show
Wsg. Ficus, Hannah Laine
Elevation (inside The Intersection) 133 Cesar E. Chavez Ave. SW, Grand Rapids
Nov. 27, Doors 7 p.m., Show 8 p.m., $15 advance, $20 day of show, 17 and older
sectionlive.com, desmondjonesband.com
