Motel Radio With Special Guest Drew Beskin

From the venue:

Motel Radio

It’s been a particularly fruitful few years for Motel Radio, with new songs, new homes, and new lives all blossoming into a bountiful harvest. Looking back, the band’s growth and evolution may seem somewhat inevitable now, but it wasn’t that long ago that the acclaimed indie rockers were facing a harsh reckoning with their very survival, and so the sweetness of this moment isn’t lost on them one bit. In fact, if you take a listen to the quartet’s entrancing new album, The Garden, you’ll find that sweetness is very much front and center.

Written and recorded in the midst of a dizzying stretch in which nearly everything about the way the band lived and worked was turned on its head, The Garden is indeed a work of relentless hope, a testament to the power of love and commitment in the face of doubt and uncertainty. The songs are profoundly vulnerable here, laying their cards down on the table in candid acts of self-reflection, and the performances are warm and breezy, calling to mind everything from Andy Shauf and Cass McCombs to Beck and Tame Impala with an easygoing demeanor that belies the deep emotional work underpinning them. And while much of the collection was captured remotely in what marks Motel Radio’s first foray into self-recording and producing as a bi-coastal band, the results reveal a group whose bonds have never been more unshakeable, whose chemistry has never been more intoxicating, whose roots have never been more firmly planted.

Founded by Wellman and fellow guitarist/co-lead singer Winston Triolo while the pair were still just roommates in college, Motel Radio generated early buzz in their adopted hometown of New Orleans on the strength of their 2015 debut EP, Days & Nights, which helped land them dates with the likes of Kurt Vile and Drive-By Truckers in addition to festival slots at Firefly, Jazz Fest, and more. The band followed it up with the similarly well-received Desert Surf Films in 2016 and their first full-length, Siesta Del Sol, in 2019, touring the country on a seemingly endless loop as they built up their devoted following one night at a time.

Ever since completing work on Siesta Del Sol, the band had set a goal of becoming more self-sufficient and learning to record on their own, and when it came time to cut The Garden, they dove in headfirst, cutting half the collection in an old fishing camp south of New Orleans with the help of engineer Ross Farbe (Video Age, Esther Rose) and the other half fully remotely while engineering themselves.

That creative liberation is easy to hear on The Garden. Motel Radio has realized that there is no sweeter garden than the one you grow yourself.