The Revivalists’ David Shaw Gets Brutally Honest on the Band’s Most Cohesive Album

It would be a few more years before David Shaw met the people who would become his bandmates in The Revivalists when fate started setting things in motion.

After letting a friend borrow his Suburban to move away to college, Shaw got the vehicle back with a Bob Dylan album stuck in the CD player. The record—Dylan’s self-titled debut—became his only option for music for months, the unavoidable soundtrack to every drive he took for almost a year. In that time, Dylan’s poetic songwriting style stirred something in Shaw.

Years later, he can identify that period as one of the things that pushed him to start writing songs himself.

“If it wasn’t for that experience, I’m not sure I would’ve ever gotten there,” he tells American Songwriter. “I probably still would’ve found my way to writing songs, but I’ve got to give it to my guy Bob. There’s just such a body of work there, and it’s undeniable. As cliché as it might sound at this point, he’s still kind of the GOAT.”

Since that early songwriting spark, Shaw penned dozens, then hundreds of songs, including those that formed The Revivalists’ 2026 release, Get It Honest. Shaw says that most of the newest record was written around the birth of his daughter, specifically in the six-week “twilight period” of new parenthood. 

The result is an album that leaves little room for distance or disguise, and perhaps one that can only be made possible by the sort of stripped-down exhaustion and emotional exposure that accompanies the arrival of a child. Early in the album, Shaw offers a startling admission, singing, I hate myself / It’s all my fault. Later in the LP, he confesses, I’m so bored of being sober, chronicling the mundanity in moments of his journey. Throughout the aptly-named Get It Honest, Shaw confronts himself with a bluntness that’s as engaging as it is disarming. 

He reveals that the lyrics for the title track came to him in a dream, marking the first time something like that has ever happened to him. “It woke me up out of my sleep at 3 a.m., and I wrote down 85 percent of the words,” he recalls. “The next day, I ended up writing most of the chorus.” 

The unlikely origin of “Get It Honest” mirrors the larger process behind the album. The songs didn’t necessarily arrive fully formed, but they came from a place that can be difficult for any songwriter to access: a willingness to strip away the filters and confront the darker, more vulnerable parts of interior life. 

“This album came from needing to be extremely honest with myself,” he says, nodding to the central lyric. “I think that I needed to make some space in my head. I needed to get some of these things out that had potentially been ruminating for years.” Those threads weave through some of the most defining parts of Shaw’s recent life, including becoming a parent, reflecting on his relationship with New Orleans, and confronting the challenge of breaking more harmful family cycles.

He acknowledges that his creative process used to be a little different, if not simpler, then, perhaps more free. Even the origin story of The Revivalists has a sense of romance and whimsy to it. Famously, Shaw’s future bandmate Zack Feinberg was riding his bike in New Orleans when he heard Shaw playing on his front porch. Feinberg introduced himself, and an impromptu jam session gave way to the foundation for a band. 

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In this current season of songwriting, Shaw worked hard to tap back into some of that open energy. “I think as you get older, your sieve for songwriting—the things you let pass through, the things you allow yourself to write about—gets smaller and smaller,” he says. “I think mine was a little bit more wide open. That was really good for me, to say, ‘Just stop censoring. Just let it go. Let it flow. Let it come.’”

That same sense of openness is something Shaw hopes emerging musicians can cultivate. After building a career around following instinct, embracing thoughtful collaboration, and maintaining persistence, his advice to artists finding their own path is simple. “It’s important to have an absolutely unwavering, undeniable, delusional belief in yourself,” he says. “You need love for yourself.” For Shaw, that belief has been a throughline from the songwriter who first picked up a pen after hearing Dylan’s words, to the artist still seeking ways to unpack some of the heaviest topics life has to offer. 

As he committed to widening his own creative aperture, Get It Honest became a record full of movement and momentum. Sonically, thanks to toe-tappers like “Holy” or the free-flowing spirit of “As Of Now,” the album never sinks into lamentation. 

Songwriting, for Shaw, has always been a process of collecting fragments that can bloom into proper narratives. “Songs are kind of like revolving doors of past things that have happened and things that are going on in my present,” he says. “I’m always writing things down, and I’ll take a little piece of something old that feels relevant to something recent. Then, through the craft of songwriting, I’ll massage them together and put them together into something new.”

This process ultimately shaped what he sees as one of The Revivalists’ most cohesive records to date. Recorded mainly in Guilford, Vermont, Get It Honest represents a different kind of creative focus for the band.

“Before Get It Honest, every album was very multi-personality,” Shaw says. “Every song had a very different vibe. You could have a country song and then a song that sounds like Rage Against the Machine on the same album, which I love about our band. We can step into these different worlds. But with this album, we realized we had an opportunity to make something that was cohesive, that had this feeling and thread all the way through it. We’d never really tried to do that before.”

Onstage, Shaw has especially enjoyed working in the new material and names “Get It Honest,” “Heart Stop,” and “Lost and Found” as recent favorites. Of those songs, the title track remains the one that continues to unlock something new in him each time. 

“Every time I sing it, I’m digging a little more of something out that I needed to get out,” he says. “It feels like I’m knocking rust off this plate that’s still there. Every time I sing it, I’m a little more free.”

After nearly two decades together, The Revivalists have developed the kind of shorthand that can only come from years of shared experience. Shaw jokes that he thinks the members of the group have gotten most of their fights out of the way but, on a more serious note, he observes that there’s something truly special about the connection that forms between bandmates.

“There’s a bit of an unspoken thing,” he says of their chemistry. “When everybody knows that we’ve got something good, it’s like this energy that rises and meets the occasion. That’s when the band aspect comes into it. There are certain little things that can only happen with bands.”

He’s right that the collective energy is tangible on the 2026 album. In an era when albums can feel increasingly fragmented, speed-run for streaming, or optimized for individual social media moments, it’s refreshing to encounter a record where songs are allowed to breathe, full-bodied and robust. Instrumentals stretch across songs like “Bad Bad Bad,” while “The World Is Not Enough” settles into an almost leisurely pace, reinforcing the sense that Get It Honestwas designed to be experienced as a complete work rather than a collection of isolated tracks.

There’s also a line on Get It Honest that feels especially relevant to this chapter of The Revivalists’ story. You don’t have to be who you are forever / Let it go, let it roll, let it all work out, Shaw sings on “Lost and Found.” It’s a fitting sentiment for him, The Revivalists as a whole, and this season of their collective story. This is a group of people that has weathered many seasons together, from the free-wheeling years of establishing themselves in New Orleans clubs to festival stages and lengthy stretches on the road.

But life never remains one thing, and people don’t, either. Many of the members of the band are now parents; Shaw himself has been candid about his journey with sobriety and the personal growth that has accompanied it. Decades after a small inconvenience with his car first nudged him toward songwriting, Shaw is still following the instinct to embrace the unexpected—because maybe things just might work out, after all. 

Photos by Tommy Moore