Among the lush plains and gentle, rolling hills of a rich and fertile Midwestern landscape, Omaha troubadour rockers The Big Deep are painting a musical image of the good life's quintessential, simplistic lifestyle. Their debut album, Roman Empire, is rooted in folk and alt-country and features a series of uplifting, classic transient travel songs. Incorporating gradual rises in vocal harmony, bending guitar licks and twangy harmonica vibrations, The Big Deep instills an almost vagabond mentality that may be best suited for a boxcar and a jug of wine, on a discovery-bound endless endeavor to wipe away all of life's worries and struggles.
The Waiting Room plays host to Roman Empire's release Friday Jan. 20. Opening will be Landing on the Moon, Blue Bird and Bad Country. Find more information here.
You can stream the entire album below today only. It becomes a pumpkin at midnight.
On a frigid Tuesday evening, I catch up with Nate Gasaway, Jared Bakewell, Tregan Albers, Bob Reynolds and Seth Graber, who sit in a semi-circle in the low-ceilinged basement nestled in the District 66 community that serves as their practice space.
Beyond the familiar roots feel that lies directly on the album's surface is a darker, sincere and meaningful lyrical message that runs throughout Roman Empire.
“I like songs that have an uplifting feel musically and melodically, but challenge you to think of darker themes lyrically,” Bakewell says, sitting on his bass amp. “It sounds like this happy-go-lucky approach, but it’s about societal decay.”
As the album's conceptual theme is prevalent throughout, much of the work is centered around the tile song.
“The song ‘Roman Empire’ brings about the degradation theme, tying the album together as a whole," Gasaway says, sitting Indian-style in the middle of the white carpeted basement floor. “The song is about how technology basically killed the civilization in a way – the things they [ancient Romans] invented that seemed convenient and awesome ultimately killed them. That correlates to the technological items we hold so dear today, and what is it really costing us?”
With solid song structure and a unique theme guiding their path, the band knew how they wanted the album to look and sound, though it took about a year to see it to completion.
“We had already played gigs on major stages in Omaha that include main stage at Slowdown and Sokol Auditorium, which got us thinking, ‘Oh crap!’ We don’t even have any recorded material yet,” Gasaway says.
After playing a show with Brad Hoshaw and the Seven Deadlies, they recruited Hoshaw's engineer F. Scott Gaeta at his Music Factory Productions to record the album. What started out as an effort to record demos to throw online quickly, evolved into a full-blown recording session. With respect to one another’s time, The Big Deep gradually began working with the few songs slated in their catalogue on a system that was financially manageable.
“I guess we kind of countered that pressure to do something really polished by taking a long time to do it,” Bakewell says. “We were in the studio with coats around it [the album] for more than a year. Once we got money together we could go in with new ideas and new gear that enhanced the original sound of the band.”
Given the resemblance of the recording space provided by Gaeta in his in-house recording studio, the band felt comfortable embarking on a new venture that was speckled with the reminiscent feel of their home.
The Big Deep hope to make Friday night’s album release a memorable experience by adding adding violinist Kaitlyn Maria Filippini for the performance (she played in Conor Oberst’s secret show at Krug Park Sunday). And they'll play an unreleased track.
“We’ve really been focusing since our last show back in early December on making this a truly amazing experience,” Blakewell says.
“We’re really looking on making this a show performance as a whole, rather than making this a series of songs, which should mark a new phase of our band,” Gasaway says.
Steven Ashford is a Hear Nebraska editorial intern. Welcome to Wednesday and fear not for Friday. Reach him at stevena@hearnebraska.org.