When Kevin Devine’s phone rings with my call, he has already been awake for several hours. While I was in a fit of restless sleep, he was hanging out with his young daughter, taking her to daycare, and writing a new song, working out behind-the-scenes kinks of his upcoming shows in Brooklyn, and getting sucked into a Youtube rabbit hole while trying to find a video to send to his friend on her birthday. In fact, he was watching a series videos of the Beatles talking about Bob Dylan and Bob Dylan talking about born-again Christianity in the seconds before I dialed his number. Next week, Devine is set to release We Are Who We’ve Always Been, an album comprised of stripped-back acoustic renditions of his 2016 album Instigator, a record anchored by fuzzy guitars and raucous energy.
“I thought it would be cool to see how that translated if you took away the volume and the built-in dynamics you get with a rock band,” he explained of the decision to release an acoustic record. “To me, it’s always about like, how do you make a song stand up however it’s presented? I want to be able to sit in a room with you and play you a song and have that be as impactful as if you were in the middle of a crowd of five or six hundred people with a killer sound system and an excellent band. I think that they need to be as good in both ways for them to matter to me.”
Intending to tour in support of Instigator as part of Modern Baseball’s spring tour that was sadly cancelled, Devine had to pivot and ended up performing a lot of the album’s cuts solo. What was unfortunate at the time turned into a blessing in disguise, as Devine was forced to sit down with these songs and really think critically about how he wanted to present them without the band behind him. “That tour going away kind of forced our hand a little bit. It forced me earlier to figure out like, how does ‘No Why’ work when it’s not that? How does ‘Both Ways’ work when it’s not that? And I really liked it, I liked what we found. Some of the songs were just clear. Some of the songs were more like you have to take out your tool kit.”
As with much of Devine’s solo work, Instigator and We Are Who We’ve Always Been contain lyrics with a focus on political and social justice issues; Instigator was released less than a month before the world began to react to the new reality of a Trump presidency. With lyrics both from Instigator and his past work now more potent than ever, Devine found himself in a strange place as fans approached him searching for clarity and answers about how they should feel or act efficiently in this new climate.
“As things continue to be scary and find new ways of being scary, I get feedback from our audience, whether it’s on social media or in person at the merch table. People talk about a song I wrote in 2004 or ’03 or ’07 or ’11 or ’13, and it’s increased relevance as time moves forward. I’m not sure how to respond to that, because it feels like a strange thing to take as a compliment. I’m not being prescient in that songwriting, and I’m certainly not somebody who knows more answers than any other person knows about how to navigate anything. If anything, all it means is that I got lucky in the worst possible way you could get lucky as a songwriter, which is that in communicating your analysis of and fear about the way the culture is moving, you turned out to be right for longer than you thought or hoped to be in the first place.”
Perhaps the most glaring number on We Are Who We’ve Always Been is “Freddie Gray Blues,” a song that Devine performed acoustic in its original capacity, but holds a whole new ambiance with the addition of piano instrumentation from Swivs. Almost a year after it was originally released, the lyrics still ring true. “Freddie Gray was not and is not and will not be the only young person of color who did not deserve to even necessarily be arrested or accosted, let alone killed in police custody. That story, until really radical structural changes are made to how things work, is not going to be a singular story. It’s still relevant, might be more relevant,” he said. With Swivs’ rolling piano notes, the song takes on an even more morose tone than it did on Instigator, slowed down so that the lyrics can really hold the weight they deserve.
Devine’s music can certainly be described as social justice music, with the full band material akin to that of The Clash or Propaghandi. However, with We Are Who We’ve Always Been, Devine likens the songs to more along the lines of Pete Seger or Bob Dylan. “It’s a totally different execution, but these are truth to power songs. So for me, part of what’s fun with that stuff is turning a punk rock song into a folk song, or vice versa. With those things, the message is the point.”
The record closes with the five-minute “I Was Alive Back Then,” which features harmonies and instrumentation from Nandi Plunkett of Half Waif and Pinegrove. It’s a track that made Devine cry when he wrote it, and he calls it a summary of everything that he has been working toward in his songwriting to date. Lyrically, the song tells a story that moves from talking to his brother on Christmas as an eight-year-old to the words of wisdom bestowed upon him by his mother in the weeks leading up to the birth of his daughter, representing a lifespan in one five-minute snapshot. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do with songs, was just paint a picture of what one person’s life is like,” he said. “Inner life and outer life.” The addition of Plunkett’s harmonies and haunting backing vocals makes the track the perfect closing number, and summation of Devine’s work as a whole.
After announcing that he will be quieting down his solo career to tour with longtime friends Brand New, it’s likely that there won’t be another Kevin Devine record for some time. But he thinks that this acoustic record is a good place to hit pause. “If I never write another song again, I wrote [‘I Was Alive Back Then’] so I’m fine with whatever happens… If the last thing people hear from me in album format for a little while is basically a guy with a guitar communicating, asking questions, trying to frame his life three minutes at a time, that’s kind of the first thing people heard from me.”
We Are Who We’ve Always Been is out 10/20 via Procrastinate! Music Traitors. Pre-order it here. To celebrate, Devine will play two special shows in Brooklyn in December.
