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Ellensburg band to play at The Grainery
Submitted photo
Better Day, with Quincy native Leah Shelton (second from left), will be playing at The Grainery on Friday.
There are several words or phrases one could use to describe the compositions of Ellensburg band Better Day. The specific genre of the music the quartet produces isn’t extremely easy for a listener to pinpoint, as evidenced by an iTunes review written about the band’s self-titled debut album, which was released last summer.
“What to call it?” the reviewer wrote. “Cascade Mountain folk? Bluegrass? Americana?”
Perhaps it’s a combination of all three, although to be fair, if Cascade Mountain folk music exists, it’s probably because Better Day invented it. But Leah Shelton, a 2000 Quincy High School graduate and member of the band, uses a different word when describing her musical stylings.
“Whenever anybody asks, I tell them that I want to play pretty music,” she said. “That’s what we play. Pretty music.”
Better Day will be playing at The Grainery on Friday. The show is scheduled to start at 7 p.m.
The band got its start about a year and a half ago, when Shelton moved back to Ellensburg, where she attended college, from the East Coast. She started talking to a friend named Sam Albright, a veteran musician who also owns a recording studio and record label, Velvetone Records. He told Shelton that he had started to play with a couple of other long-time local musicians, Bob Bayles and Billy McGuire, and invited her to get involved. Not long thereafter, the four of them began to write and perform original songs, mostly in Ellensburg bars and coffeeshops.
Shelton plays guitar and is “a great folk-pop singer/songwriter,” according to Albright. Bayles plays the fiddle with a bluegrass influence. McGuire is the band’s bass player, and Albright plays several instruments, including a variety of guitars and mandolin.
Right away, Albright felt as if the band could turn into something special.
“It was because of the combination of people,” he said. “We get along really good and have a good time playing music together. We enjoy supporting each other and trying to do the best that we can for each other. I realized that we had a lot of chemistry.”
After a few months, the band decided to take the next natural step and record an album at Albright’s studio in downtown Ellensburg.
“We thought we’d have to be crazy to have that option and not take advantage of it,” Shelton said. “With four songwriters, we had a ton of original material. We started recording, and it was super fun. We loved it. I think it turned out pretty good, although I know I’m biased.”
Apparently a lot of other people feel the same way. The album is getting solid reviews on iTunes, Amazon and its other distribution outlets, and the band is starting to receive airplay not only in the Northwest, but across the country.
Shelton’s name can be found alongside stars such as Jakob Dylan, The Indigo Girls and Kris Kristofferson on acousticmusicscene.com’s Roots Music Report, a list that compiles weekly radio airplay charts for various roots-related genres based on spin totals reported by music directors and disc jockeys from more than 400 terrestrial and Internet radio stations.
“It’s crazy,” said Shelton, whose official performing name is Leah Vik Shelton. (Vik was her mother’s maiden name; her parents, Dave and Sandy Shelton, live in Quincy.) “I never expected this. It was amazing and surreal to see my name on that list. I’m not sure if it means anything, but it’s really cool. It’s interesting to see how a record that’s released independently on a small label can make things happen. It’s encouraging.”
One of the unique elements about the band is the fact that all four members earn songwriter credits and take turns as the lead or quasi-lead singer. That decision was made based on several factors, according to Shelton.
“Well, we all think we’re really good,” she said with a laugh. “We all want to be playing songs that we write, and I think we feed off each other. When Bob writes a song, for instance, that gets me motivated and the creativity flows among us. We hear from people who have listened to the CD say, ‘It’s interesting. There are 16 songs, but I don’t get bored with it.’ At the beginning we were worried that it would be hard for us to find a collective voice, a hook to go for. But none of us wanted to be primarily backup singers. We all like to sing lead. As we were recording the tracks, we realized that this easily could’ve been four different CDs. But it’s put into one, and hopefully it’s more interesting that way and people can connect to the variety of sound.”
Albright said Better Day’s work is different from the other bands he’s been involved with because of the fact that it “is really acoustic.”
“I’ve done some electric stuff, and with that we might have some more variety of instrumentation, but we consciously decided to keep this in the Americana genre,” he said. “But then the unique thing about this band is the mix of styles within the genre. There’s a Latin feel. There’s bluegrass influences. There’s a little bit of rock influence. There’s a little swing influences. We’re definitely an American band. But the biggest strength is that we’ve written a lot of good songs. We all have a high ideal for good song writing.”
That being said, the songs on the album that are sung by Shelton definitely have a different kind of feel to them. Her music and lyrics reflect good and bad things that have gone on in her own life, making it easier, perhaps, for a listener to intimately connect to her personal experiences.
“You’ll notice that the majority of my songs are really sad,” she said. “I’ve definitely cornered the market on heartbreak songs. A lot of my songs come from a bad breakup. But again, it just comes back to writing stuff that’s pretty, and then I’ll sit down and pick at chords and add something and from there it becomes whatever it may become. I’ve got a whole book of lyrics that I’ve written that I’ll cherry-pick from. Most of my songs are about being heartbroken, and on our next CD they’ll be more about recovering from that.”
A listener can hear the kinds of things Shelton is talking about on one of the album’s most heartfelt songs, called “Sad Love:” I hope you’re listening right now / because I’m telling everybody how you hurt me you lied to me made me cry / because darling you don’t deserve this song / not after the way that you did me wrong / not after you were so damn cruel to me / how could you do that to me / but I’ve stopped wasting my tears on you / after all the hell that you put me through / I don’t believe in things like ‘meant to be.’
“Leah has one of those rich, complex kind of voices that really records well,” Albright said. “She is also a tunesmith. She really crafts stories and words skillfully. If you listen to her lyrics, they are deep. It may not come out during the first listening, but if you listen to them over and over again, you’ll discover new things. It always amazes me how she can turn phrases and use metaphors. I think you’re going to be hearing from her for a long time. I just hope that I’m playing with her for a long time.”
The band has several more gigs tentatively booked for the remainder of the summer around Eastern Washington, and plans on trying to get back into the recording studio as fast as possible.
“We’ve got a bunch of songs that we’re perfecting,” Shelton said. “For the next CD we might go in a different direction because we’re more comfortable with each other and more comfortable with the recording process. Our main priority right now it to work on the second CD and play as much as we can.”
Shelton’s musical interests took root when she was a student at Quincy High School – she played the trumpet in the school’s band. While she was attending Central Washington University, she sung and played guitars in two bands — Cha Cha Galore, a two-member, girl-rock outfit, and Rusty Bucket, a funk-roots ensemble that also included Albright.
Shelton has found what she calls a “dream job,” working as an assistant director for diversity education at Central Washington University, but she seemingly has a bright future in the world of music.
That’s a good thing for her, since music is one of her life’s strong passions. As long as that’s the case, Shelton and her band mates will always have better days ahead.
“Music is the thing that makes me the happiest of all of the things that I do,” she said. “With this band, I get to play the music I want to play with great musicians, which makes it an even better experience. It just makes me really happy.”
