The Revivalists’ latest album, Pour It Out Into the Night, erupts in a single shout, a life-giving clamor over a thundering beat. Hey kid, they sing, the words like sunlight chipping away at a dense gloom. The lead single and opening track of their fifth studio album, “Kid” is the perfect introduction to a band made new.
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It was the first song that frontman David Shaw and guitarist Zack Feinberg had gotten together to write after the pandemic. “It’s crazy and mind-blowing to me that that’s the tune that we write,” Shaw tells American Songwriter. “It felt like a coming home.”
Home for the eight-piece—composed of Shaw, Feinberg, percussionists Andrew Campanelli and PJ Howard, bassist George Gekas, Ed Williams on pedal steel guitar, Rob Ingraham on saxophone, and multi-instrumentalist Michael Girardot—is New Orleans, and the group reflects their stomping grounds, a place of constant renewal and reinvention. It’s called the Big Easy, but New Orleans is a tough-as-nails town that has been rebuilt again and again, surviving in spite of itself because of one thing: love. Over 15 years together, love, Shaw says, is what keeps the octet going.
While that love translates into every one of their releases, it’s their latest one that needed it the most. Before Pour It Out Into the Night, their first full-length album in five years, the band was touring extensively, hitting every major city on what would be a nearly two-year run, and as Shaw describes, he was “white knuckling through it.”
“If I’m being perfectly honest, it took a pretty big toll on me,” he shares. Then the pandemic hit, a moment Shaw calls terrible, but also admits that, for him, it may have been “the best thing that ever happened.”
“It got me off the road,” he explains. “It made me take stock in myself and my life and all the decisions that I’ve made. And from there, I think I was able to kind of reconstruct and build back a life that was sustainable.
“My body was able to heal,” he adds, “my ears were able to heal, my heart was able to heal, my mind was able to heal. And I think once my body realized that it was OK and I wasn’t broken, that’s when the creative boom happened.”
From there, Pour It Out Into the Night began to, quite literally, pour out. “It was an extremely creative time,” Shaw details, adding it gave life to some of his greatest work. “I think it’s some of my most introspective, honestly. Some of the realest shit I’ve ever written is on this album.”
It was a fruitful time for his bandmates as well, he says. “We came out of the pandemic a lot stronger and a lot tighter and with a bit of a new perspective on life, who we are as artists, who we are as people, and what’s important to us.”
With that shift in perspective came much personal growth that has better served Shaw and his bandmates as musicians and has, in turn, translated into Pour It Out Into the Night, an album that finds The Revivalists revived.
The early June release features songs that sound hellbent on being heard, arrangements bursting like mighty eruptions after having been kept dormant for far too long. Even the more subdued tracks seem to have a fire smoldering beneath them, lyrics sharp and sparking in their all-consuming compositions. The album reverberates with their trademark rootsy alt-rock sound, but is also infused with touches of stirring soul and deep blues, and tinted with lovable throwback flourishes.
Most of the tracks were products of something needing to be purged. “I’ve got to get it out,” Shaw explains of his songwriting process. “Sometimes you have this like lightning in the bottle moment, and you just know, ‘This is what I’m writing about.’ But a lot of times, I’ll be sifting through an old notebook, because I’ve got this melody and I’ve got these chords and I need to find something that’s real to latch on to.”
All of the songs—“Only You” with its muddied divinity, “Alive” and its building desperation, and “Don’t Look Back” with its pulsing energy—echo with authenticity. They sound triumphant and hopeful, carrying with them a seize-the-day ethos that has sprouted from the band’s revival. The album is complex—songs blurring fact and fiction, defying genre, and re-introducing a band reborn—and at the same time, it’s so simple, a 12-track reassertion of what the band will always be no matter their evolution: themselves. Shaw explains each new album is “always mixed with a little bit of where we’ve been, a little bit of where we want to go, and a little bit of where we are.” Pour It Out Into the Night and this era for The Revivalists, as a whole, Shaw says, is a “turning point.”
Photo by Alysse Gafkjen
