DC Music Review had the opportunity to talk to Brian Roy (bass) and Louis Smith (vocals, guitar) of Kendall Street Company after an ambitious and creative year before wrapping up 2024 with five spectacular performances.

For those that are unfamiliar with Kendal Street Company, they are a DMV band based out of Charlottesville, Virginia.  This five-piece genre-fluid, eclectic rock ensemble has a pedigree of jacked-up rock, folk, heavy metal, and jazz that swirls in like a hurricane of fun and then leaves with a wave that crashes straight into the deep, guttural funk of soul.  Their live performances at venues and festivals across the country are legendary and include elements of crowd participation, off-the-cuff comedic bits, haphazard choreography, musical improvisation, and outstanding music.   Simply put, if you have not seen them, they are a must-see act.

For those in the DC Metro Area who do not already know, they will be performing with Pigeons Playing Ping Pong on Friday, December 13th, at the 9:30 Club, and if you keep on reading, you will find out about their holiday performance at The Jefferson Theater in Charlottesville, Virginia, which sounds like a must-see performance.  Tickets to both events can be found after the interview.

Between their relentless touring, hilarious stage antics,  and incredible body of work, it was a true pleasure talking with them on a cold winter night in the DMV.

DC Music Review: Hello!  Good to talk to you.  Where are you guys right now?

Brian Roy: Hey, we are on our tour bus.  Good to talk to you, too.   We're just in Charlottesville, so we just finished a day of making content and had another radio thing earlier, so we're at home.

DC Music Review:  Okay, I'm gonna make you all really big in Germany.  (Alluding to their companion/alter-ego Sauerkräut)

Brian:  Oh yeah. I've always wanted to be really big in Germany.  Actually if you could even just get us into the Netherlands, that would be phenomenal. Like, I've always wanted to get into the German market, but, like, I've heard it's cheaper to fly into Schiphol airport in Amsterdam and then take a bus to Germany.

DC Music Review:  But, you know, Sauerkräut, we're going to talk about them in a little bit.  But we wanted to first talk to you about 2024. You guys have had a pretty exciting year, and 2024 is almost over. Tell me how it's been. How's it going? Where do you feel like you have gotten to where you wanted to? Have you achieved what you wanted to achieve this year?

Brian:   This year has been awesome. 2024 has been super awesome for us. We've achieved a lot. We set really high goals for ourselves to keep us working and busy and creating.  We went into this year with a lot of material that we wanted to record, that we had written, that we'd played even a little bit live; some of it we hadn't played live. We decided that we're going to do a single every month, and we're just going to keep that train rolling all year. And it was a really fun, illuminating experience, just sharing an amount like that. It's definitely different than hunkering down and putting together a full album, which we've done in the past.   In the past, we have done a retreat, where we go for a week or two and hunker down and get everything written.  This was much more of a bring a song to the band, let's work on it, workshop it, get into the studio, record it, get it mixed, get art, you know, go through the full process over and over again.

Louis Smith:   The goal was achieved. The 12 months and 12 singles were achieved. We really, we did it. We released them. It's done.

DC Music Review:  I think you first announced your Final Friday of every month of 2024 initiative at The Atlantis in Washington, DC, in December 2023

Brian:  Um, I'm not certain that may, that may

Lous:  I think we had been talking about that in the lead-up to that performance.  It may have been the first time.

DCMR: You guys kicked it off by playing "Truckin' Trees for Christmas."

Brian: Yeah, and that song just came out this week.  Yeah, we played that back in December 2023.  We had decided sometime around November or December 2023 that we were going to do this project.   I do think the Atlantis show might have been the first time that we mentioned it live.  We had the idea together and we wanted to release a new song on the final Friday of each month.

DC Music Review:  We wanted to ask, how did you start the project?  You alluded to not wanting to just go into the studio and spending two weeks off the road coming up with an album. Did you just decide this would be a fun, fun project for the band?

Louis:  Well, we were in Charleston, South Carolina, and we were thinking about how do we want to do our releases for 2024.   We had a performance in Charleston, and so we had a bunch of material and a bunch of songs.  We looked at these songs and said they don't really fit together necessarily.  We've got a snow day, and we got "Porridge," so how do we release these? So we just decided we're just going to do a single a month. That's kind of how it came to be. We weren't like, "Oh, we've got this body of work that has to be in an album or on an EP."  We did toy with some ideas of releasing different EPs, like a metal EP, and there was, like, a folk EP, that kind of thing.  Instead of doing that, we liked the idea of releasing them as singles, and we did sort of group the heavier stuff together, and we sort of grouped the folky stuff together, and the funky stuff to like, the funky stuff was like the March, April, May, and the more folky stuff was in another part of the year, and then the heavier later in the year.  So we sort of or tactical, in a way, about how we released each month, sort of like we wanted one thing to kind of lead into the next in a nice way.  

And we're actually releasing a compilation vinyl called "Singles Going Heady 2024."

DC Music Review: I love it. What is your lead track? Is it going to be  "Catz in Zeh Haus" and release it in in Germany first before other markets? 

Louis:   Yeah man. (Laughs)

Brian: We are going to put them on the album in the order they were released, January through December, which actually worked really nice as six and six and will actually fit on the vinyl.  It actually flows.  But for "Catz in Zeh Haus,"  it is certainly on there. I think it might kick off side two.

Louis:  No, I think it's the last one on side one.

DCMR: I think we are just going to have to let fans come out, buy it, and find out for themselves.

Brian: You know, Sauerkräut is awesome because they're always on tour with us.  We met these guys. We met these guys at a club in Berlin.  Well, it might have been Munich.  I forget, but we met these guys at a club, and they're great, and they just decided, "You know what, we're just going to go on tour with Kendall Street Company." You know, permanently.  It actually says this on their website.  If you've been to their website they are just permanently on tour with Kendall Street company.

Louis:  Yeah.

Brian: I think they called us their best friends. 

Louis:  And the best band.

Brian: So we have to tour around in this small minibus that falls apart all the time while they go around in a jumbo jet. 

Louis: They fly in a private jet. But because they're just really wealthy, they're incredibly wealthy.

Brian:  They are incredibly wealthy because they invented the whole, you know, you know, the Dave. It's short for The Ze-Dave. It's a contraction, it's the Day Rave - but it's the Dave.  I know it's confusing because we're from Charlottesville, so when you say Dave, here, people here think Dave Matthews, which, you know, we love Dave Matthews. But the Dave is just, it starts at dawn and then goes until dust every day, one time, every day -  there's Dave.

So they tour around with us. Sometimes we call them up on stage, and they play their one song - because it's really a great song.  Yeah, most bands need to write, like, we have to write a lot of songs to keep people interested.   Probably the most amazing thing about Sauerkraut as a band is that they just wrote one song that's probably the greatest song ever written, right? Then they just said, “Well, it's all downhill from here. Why even let's just stay at the top of the hill? This is a good vantage point, yeah, for our careers, let's just keep playing this one song.” 

Louis:  Yeah, I wonder if they write another one. 

Brian: Yeah, maybe they could, I wonder. They're very creative guys.

DC Music Review:  I was going to ask before you told me about this new compilation LP if sauerkraut was going to release a debut album? Or are you going to make one contribution to your album and then, once again, leave on a high note?

Louis: Yeah... I don't know.

Brian:  I don't know.  Those guys party a lot on their jumbo jet, so it's kind of hard getting them to get down to business. 

Louis:  They don't get a lot done.

Brian: Kendall Street Company gets a lot done. But sauerkraut is, you know, they kind of turn it up to 11 on the party side, yeah, constantly. So we don't know if they're going to be writing more or releasing more. You know, you'd have to talk to them. 

DC Music Review: I wanted to talk more about this upcoming album. It's just great.  There's jazz, metal, psychedelic, just a bit of everything.  I thought I heard some "You Enjoy Myself" by Phish, influences on "El Perro Triste.”

Brian: Actually, "El Perro Triste" was one of the two a little bit older songs of ours that ended up on this compilation. We had some songs in the bag, and we were like, these don't fit on any projects we're working on now. So they kind of sat in the bag, and we want to take these out of the bag and put them out there for people to hear.  So that one we actually started recording in 2020, and and then tabled it for a while, and then picked it back up earlier this year and put it out. 

Louis: We were actually going to release "Catz in Zeh Hause", and "El Perro Triste" together as an EP. Call it "Cat Dog,” but it just didn't work out that way. So, we decided to release them as part of this project.

DC Music Review:  Well, you are all some of the most creative people on stage, and the number of artists you cover is incredible.  For Halloween this year, you covered ZZ Top.  You have also covered System of a Down, Jimi Hendrix, The Cranberries, and The Grateful Dead.  You name it, and it seems like you have covered them.  So the question is - is anyone who's off limits to you, and you say, "Nope, not going to cover them."

Brian:  It's funny that you mentioned that.  When we just started together as young, strapping students at the University of Virginia, we played a lot of Dave Matthews Band songs, and we are all big fans of Dave Matthews Band.  We even have a saxophone in our band (Jake Vanaman), and we are from Charlottesville, and we didn't want to be thought of as the next Dave Matthews Band or have that comparison.  So, for the longest time, we've not really done any Dave Matthews Band songs, but we've shied away from doing it because we want to carve out our own identity in this music scene.

Louis: Phish never did the Grateful Dead because it was too close.  So, we’ve never done a Phish song, and we don’t do the Dave songs anymore.  But I could see there is a situation where we pick one Phish song and one Dave song that we really like and would be a cool cover that we could lean into.

Brian:  Sometimes learning covers is a learning experience.  Sometimes, we just want to learn a song and play it on stage and do a "throw-in.”  We have a section in "Cars" where sometimes we throw in a funny cover or a new thing, depending on where we are.  We just played in Syracuse, which is the first place of Tom Cruise, so we played the theme from Top Gun and "Danger Zone," just a little snippet of it that we learned at sound check. 

But sometimes, we try to learn a cover, and then we'll work through it. We decided we didn’t really want to play it live, but the process of learning the song was a good learning experience.  It is a good way to get a lot of different influences on the sound of what you're putting out. I’ve always thought about how the idea of jam music because, in some ways, we're a jam band, and in other ways, we're not. But with the idea of jam, if you go to a jam band show, it's almost like an encyclopedia of music where you have all these different influences.  If you just listen to a jam band and then play that music, like listening to Phish cover Phish, you're like writing an encyclopedia entry from an encyclopedia entry, and then that's where you get into secondary sources, you know, tertiary sources. You need primary source material to be really, you know, getting those creative juices flowing, so to speak. 

DC Music Review:  Have you ever done covers where you are learning the song and learning the techniques in the song or chord pattern, and you think, "That's something that we're going to bring into our toolbox or our permanent canon, or somehow has affected you?

Brian: Absolutely.   It happens all the time.  I like more of a football analogy of adding plays to the playbook. I'll say, like, that's a play that we should be able to call. We should be able to audible to that play on stage without talking or communicating, beyond looking at each other or hearing what somebody cues a cue into it, right? You want to be able to call the audibles there. So sometimes you're learning a song, and it's like, ”Damn, I love how they go to the six here after that three instead of going back to the one after they've gone through it three times.” 

Louis:  It's the same with language, too. When we immersed ourselves in learning the ZZ Top record, it was a different dialect - a different language.  So when you immerse yourself in that, you pick up on things, and you start to incorporate them into what you're doing. "Checking Out" was inspired by Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club.  So, you hear these things, and then you think we're going to learn that, and then we'll kind of dig into that and try to write something.  After we did a Carlos Santana tribute, we wrote a song that was inspired by Santana. Then, after learning the ZZ Top covers, we wrote "Petrified" and incorporated the riffage that ZZ Top excels at.

Brian:    It could be really sudden, though, as well.  In the case of "Porridge," that came from just we played at this venue where they were playing Tool and Trent Reznor on the house sound system before the show.  So that just got me in a Tool headspace, and that song came out of the soundcheck at that show.

DCMR:"Porridge" is one of our favorites from this year's project.  We loved them all equally, but that song.

Brian:  Having songs. It's like having it's like kids; you love them all the same, but some of them go to better colleges. You know, it's, it's, you can love them all the same but still have a favorite one.

(All laugh)

DC Music Review: So, where did some of the heavy metal influences come from in this year's songs?  Who contributed to that? 

Brian: We all listen to a lot of different things.  I personally am a big fan of some of the heavier, louder rock that exists out there. We are also big fans of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, who also do this kind of flipping through genres. On "Planet B,” they released some really heavy stuff that also influenced us a lot. So "Porridge" came a little bit more from the Tool side of things, and "Marijuana Time Warp" came a little bit more from the King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard side of things. But it's all stuff that we're kind of all playing sometimes, too.  Our tour manager is into some hardcore music that they sometimes play in the van that we travel to shows in.

So, the influences come from all over, but I would say that I personally can bring a little bit more of the heavy stuff to the bands, maybe a bit more often. But, you know, it depends on how we're feeling on whatever day. I think everybody kind of does a little of everything.

DC Music Review:   So, all in all, 2024 has been great for you guys.  What plans do you have for 2025?

Louis :  Yeah, we were going to Colorado in January, doing two nights in Denver, two nights in Steamboat Springs, and then St. Louis, two nights in Chicago, two nights in Chicago, and then two nights at Grand Caverns in Grottoes, Virginia.  Then we're doing our Kendall Street is For Lovers tour.

Brian: (Emphasises) Fourth annual, fourth annual. 

Louis:  And then, you know, the tour will continue. And we've got some cool songs that we just recorded.  We're definitely releasing music next year. We don't know exactly what it's going to look like as far as EPs or full-length albums.

Brian:  It's probably not going to be the single every month thing. Again, it was a really fun experience, and maybe we will do it again in the future.  The work and energy that goes behind doing a single every month and makes it harder to sit down and make a cohesive EP or album, in some ways. So we're thinking we're going to move back a little bit to try and focus on making some albums and making some EPS but still having singles as well.  We have some other songs that we've been playing live for a long time, like "Dust Mites."

Louis: Another one is called  "Song for Colorado."

Brian:  Yeah, so we already have some stuff that'll be coming out, and a lot more material always will be coming out. We have to constantly pare down what we want to record because we do the ideas come from every direction. That's it's a blessing to be in a band where there are five members of the band, and all five of us write music, and we write together, and we write separately, and we bring it to the band, and we learn parts and teach each other parts, and, you know, give it like a song as a gift to the band.  So it's a blessing, but also, in some ways, it can be very difficult because we have a lot of material that we need to sift through right now, and we can't just go record 40 songs and put them all out there.  I mean, I guess you could if you had unlimited money. 

DC Music Review:  So you are doing this massive tour in your van there.  Colorado, Midwest, the Northeast.  What is your van's name anyway - "Old Bessie" it is?

Brian: So, for our last van, we had a serious problem and were in a crash.  We had to get a new van - so we did a GoFundMe to help us get money for this one.   So we put in the GoFundMe that the largest donor got to name the vehicle.  So our van's name is...

Brian and Louis at the same time:   "Bus a Nut"

DCMR: Wait, what? Bust a nut?

Louis:  "Bus a Nut"

Brian:  I think it sounds like an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, you know, like Pharaoh Bussanut.

DCMR:  For a band like you guys, I think that is the perfect name for your bus.

Brian: (In shock) You like the name Bus A Nut for a band like us.

(Both laugh)

DCMR:  You guys are so creative. You guys wouldn't want to have a van called Wilbur or Jermaine, right? 

Louis: Yeah,

Brian: Well, I've always thought it was funny when people give their pets a human name. It's like, you go, you're like, "Oh, who's the cute little puppy?" And they're like, "That's Frank."  You know, like, so I do think that's kind of funny, "It's like, oh, that's Bob, Bob the bus." 

Louis:  I mean, we probably wouldn't have named it "Bus a Nut" on our own.

Brian (Interrupting):   But when you adopt.

Louis: But when you adopt somebody that someone else has already named it.  Well, we're rolling with it.

DC Music Review:  That is the one problem with the internet. There are some really creative people out there.  

Well, you've toured all around. Is there a certain place that you just love, and you're like, gotta keep going there? Or is there a place that you want to go to besides, of course, Germany and The Netherlands with Sauerkräut?

Brian: Well, touring is so fun because you get to see so much of the world around you. But at our stage, the world around us that we're touring is mostly the United States?  It would be wonderful to get out of the United States. Maybe you would just go to Canada. I've always thought Latin America would be super fun. I'm not sure what the scene is like in some of those places.  I know there's a great psychedelic Latin scene in Mexico City.  Gettting out of the country would be really cool, and getting out west a little bit more.  Usually, we kind of stop at the Rockies. So getting out to California would be great, abd getting out there again would be really nice. 

But for me, the favorite that we go to regularly has got to be the great State of Colorado. Yeah, Colorado is just so beautiful, wonderful in the summer, in the winter, it's beautiful, wonderful and treacherous (giggles), but still a great place to be. And it's inspiring. The nature is inspiring. People are really positive. 

What more can you want? It’s fun to go up in the mountains and play in some of those mountain resort towns where you can go in the natural hot springs.  There's nothing like a natural hot spring, honestly,

DC Music Review:   Thanksgiving just passed, and Christmas is coming up.  Questions - Cranberry Sauce. No cranberry sauce? Turkey, no Turkey?

Brian:  I hate cranberry sauce.

Louis: I like cranberry sauce and I like turkey. It's good for Christmas and for Thanksgiving,

Brian:   Yeah, I can't do cranberry sauce, but I love turkey. Absolutely love turkey.

DC Music Review:  Speaking of the holidays, does Kendall Street Company celebrate the holidays together, or do you just go your separate ways?

Louis:  We are celebrating Festivus together.  That's December 23rd in Charlottesville at The Jefferson Theater.  We are doing our second annual Festivus show, and it's a really unique show because we air our grievances and we do feats of strength. So, like, the set is selected by pulling the grievances out of a hat, and it'll say, "You guys played 'Porridge' too late in the set."  Something like that - song-related grievances that people have and can be submitted to us. If they have grievances like "The break in 'Crab Surprise' isn't long enough."

(everyone chuckles)

Louis: So, you know, then we will play the song that's related to that grievance. We also collect out of the hat who will be arm wrestling one another in the band for feats of strength.  We might also have different beats of strength this year.  So it's a very unique show, and I don't think anybody's seen anything like it, really. 

DCMR:: So, is the show sold out yet? 

Louis: Not yet. 

(Editor Notes:  A ticket link to their Festivus performance can be found below.)

DC Music Review: You guys are great and wonderful to talk to you both. It's been a pleasure.

Brian and Louis: Thank you.  See you soon!

If you don't already have your tickets to what will be an unforgettable Kendal Street Company Festivus or Pigeons Playing Ping Pong show - what are you waiting for?  Both shows, like every KSC performance, are going to be unforgettable, with shenanigans, improvisation, throw-ins, and great music abound.