Interview: Folk rockers Palmyra opening Restless tour in Pittsburgh

It’s looking like a significant couple of weeks for the folk rock trio Palmyra as it gears up to head out on its first headline tour.

The jam-packed days for the queer band from Virginia start Wednesday with five shows at the South by Southwest musical festival. Their Restless tour kicks off locally with a show at Crafthouse in Whitehall on March 27, with Max Alan opening, and their full-length album, “Restless,” comes out the next day.

Named one of NPR’s Bands to Watch last year, the trio — Mānoa Bell (upright bass), Teddy Chipouras (banjo/electric guitar) and Sasha Landon (electric guitar/mandolin/mandocello) — sounded excited about their first release on Nashville’s Oh Boy Records. The first single, “Shape I’m In,” dropped in January, followed by “Arizona” in February and “Palm Readers” on Wednesday.

“It’s the first project that we’ve worked on for a long stretch of time. I would say the last couple of projects we’ve put out, we’re super proud of and we love the songs, but we went into the studio, we tracked everything, and then we put it out as quickly as possible,” Chipouras said. “This was the first time we went into the studio — we recorded 18 tunes or something — and were able to pick which ones work together, weave a story of the album through the songs, and we got to work with an amazing team.

“Our buddy Jake Cochran and Danny Gibney produced and engineered it. So it was cool to really see an album through to the end, and now we’re finally able to get to the place where we’re putting it out and starting to play shows around it. So it’s been really cool, but it was a different experience from our previous recording stuff in a good way.”

According to Bell, this is the most “rock” album Palmyra’s created, in comparison to their 2022 “Shenandoah” LP or their 2023 “Belladonna” EP.

“I think both, ‘Shenandoah’ especially, we were much more acoustic-focused. There wasn’t a lot of percussion on it,” Bell said. “‘Belladonna,’ we did have a drummer for those songs, but it was kind of done a little quicker, more scrappy. It was just an EP, and then this album ‘Restless’ is absolutely full production. Each track has, I don’t know, 13, 14, 15 different elements going on. It’s very much a produced final product, I would say.”

In a Zoom call Friday, the three bandmates discussed the recording of “Restless,” their favorites on the album and more:

It sounded like there was a wealth of material for this album, so how did you whittle down songs to make this a more cohesive piece of work?

Landon: We did demos with our producer and drummer, Jake Cochran from Illiterate Light, in his family’s lake house in Lake Louisa, which is like an hour from us here in Richmond, (Virginia). We came to him with a bunch of tunes, probably close to 30. And he wasn’t familiar with most of them. He’d heard us play some at shows that we had played with his band.

But we gave him this list. I remember we put songs in a bucket, just like names of songs in a bucket, and we pulled them out and just played them for Jake. And we did it a little differently every time. It would be, pull out a song that Teddy wrote and Teddy plays it by himself, or pull out a song that Mānoa wrote and all three of us play an arrangement that we already have. So we really counted on and trusted Jake as the producer to help us pick the tunes.

I think so many of the songs that we have written in the last four or five years since starting touring have been just about growing up and also learning how to be a full-time musician and the cool stuff that comes with that and also the difficult parts of being away from home. Between the three of us and Jake, we narrowed down the tunes that had created a good narrative for the record and also that felt the best as a full band.

What’s each of your favorite songs on the record?

Chipouras: I think mine right now at least is a tune called “Palm Raiders,” which will come out (Wednesday) actually as a single. That was one that Sasha was just talking about recording the demos at the lakehouse with Jake. That was one that we pulled out of the hat and I think maybe had played a couple times as a trio but hadn’t played with a drummer before. And Jake just immediately had a really cool idea for drums in that song and gave it this new life. From the demo to the final recording that you’ll hear when it comes out, it just has this great energy. It’s a great tune.

Bell: I think my favorite song is the second to last song, “Stones Throw.” That’s one of those songs that really grows throughout it. It has so many different elements. It starts with funky instruments. We used a bouzouki, which is a traditional Greek instrument. It’s got a piano melody right out front. And then it kind of grows into this hard-driving rock song and then ends in just absolute noise cacophony till it breaks down to just Teddy with an acoustic guitar. And I think I’m really proud of that song in that we went on a journey together as a band to find where each part goes. And a lot of that song was arranged and the chords were changed and new parts were added in the recording process. And I think it always feels really fresh anytime I hear the recording of it.

Landon: My current fave is a tune called “No Receipt” that, like all these tunes, changed a lot in the recording process, but it’s just so catchy. It’s the song that, after pretty much every show or soundcheck, I immediately have in my head.

For the song “Shape I’m In,” was that difficult to be that vulnerable and talk about your bipolar diagnosis? Does it get easier to share that kind of stuff?

Landon: Yeah, I don’t think that the tune was difficult to write in terms of it being vulnerable. It was more like I needed to write it at the time. There was something that happened a lot in that time period for me before and after getting that diagnosis where I just had a lot of stuff going through my head that I couldn’t make sense of. And the only way to make sense of it was to holler it out in a song. And that one, I brought to the group as this really chaotic long thing and we whittled it down a little bit, but also realized that kind of the gem of the song is how restless it is. There’s just such an unnerved thing to it. It’s really fun to play live. It’s so cathartic to play live and get to kind of scream and to hear now our fans sing it back to us while we play it has been really lovely and joyful and super grateful for that song.

Do you consider yourself Southern music? Do you feel like the definition of that has changed a lot in the last couple of years?

Landon: Yeah, there’s a lot of Southern music that we really love and pull from. And as musicians from Virginia — and Mānoa was born in Texas — we definitely identify with the South and we’ve learned so much from old time and bluegrass. We lived in Floyd, Virginia, for a while, which is kind of the old-time capital of the world and learned so much about acoustic music and just the tradition of Southern music in Appalachia while we were there.

I think there’s so many Southern artists that are really crushing it out there right now. What I think is different, that’s really cool, that’s happening right now is that there’s a lot of really weird Southern music in our genre that is flipping the narrative on what a Southern song is. If our country as a whole thinks of Southern music as country music, and then they hear a country song sung by a trans woman about feeling good, that is not something that we had as readily available in years past. And so I think there’s some really, really cool narratives happening in Southern music right now that we are really lucky to be witnessing and be a part of.

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The band was named one of NPR’s favorite new artists of the year. Does a tag like that put more pressure on you, or is that something that you just don’t even worry about?

Chipouras: I think we were just stoked to even get that shoutout. I don’t think we thought of it as a pressure thing. But it was cool to have a couple people come out to shows that were like, hey, I saw you because of this NPR article. We’re like, hell yeah, that’s awesome. What more could you ask for?

You also got to play at the Newport Folk Festival. Is that pretty daunting?

Bell: Yeah, definitely. I think that one, even more than the NPR one, there’s such a baked-in legacy there. And you’ve heard your whole life about moments that occurred at that festival that were really impactful on the music landscape. Specifically right now with the Dylan movie, it just feels like Newport is at this god tier of ‘This is culture, music, et cetera.’ So every time we’re there, we definitely are like, oh yeah, this is a big deal.

Have you ever been confused at all with the metalcore band Palmyra?

Chipouras: We have. (laughs)

Landon: That’s an awesome question. I just want to know if they know that we know they exist.

Bell: Have they been confused (with us)?

Chipouras: Yes, that does happen sometimes.