Banshee Tree makes music to wander to. It sounds like getting lost in the woods with those you love most as a summer storm rolls in, fading sunlight bouncing between raindrops and turning everything gold for just a few moments. It helps you realize that home is not a place but that it exists in the laughter of those that you surround yourself with, in the steps you take with them towards some unknown destination, the comfort that comes from accepting when you’re lost and don’t need to be found. It begs the realization that all on this planet share one home, this Earth of ours, with all its beauty and its impermanence.
Banshee Tree released their second full-length album Bad Luck on April 17th and the project feels like a search for what home can look like while also channelling the Earth itself, a conduit through which its crying voice may be heard clearer.
Following the release of Bad Luck, Denver Dive recently spoke with Banshee Tree frontman and guitarist Thom LeFond and drummer/vocalist Michelle Pietrafitta about the album, finding home wherever you find yourself, the band’s origin and evolution and much more.
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Both LaFond and Pietrafitta have lived musical lives since they were young. For LaFond, it started with banging on pots and pans when he was “about five years old.” He said, “I don’t know where it came from but I would just hit pots and pans around the house at a very young age.” He recalled a friend around that time, “who was about two or three years older than [his] brother and [him]” who would come over and put on pop radio. “It was mostly that mid-90s, R&B vibe,” LaFond said. “I got obsessed with it and tried to memorize every song. I didn’t even know what the words were but I just became obsessed and knew from then on that I wanted to make music.”
Pietrafitta’s first memories of music came from these tapes that her and her brother and sisters were gifted very young, when she was around two years old. She said that while she loved her tape, she became obsessed with her brother’s tape, “the Anthony tape,” as she referred to it. She would sit out in the backyard and scream for it until it was put on. It was her first experience with how all consuming music can be. She said, “At the time, I didn’t realize that music wasn’t just a thing you could tap into the ether whenever you wanted.” She recalled that in elementary school each individual classroom had their own song. Her classroom’s was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” She would sit on the roof of the playhouse her family kept in the backyard and sing the song to the neighbors over and over, day after day. Her mom quickly took notice of this and enrolled her in voice lessons and those lessons eventually led to her taking guitar lessons (which she said didn’t quite click) and then drum lessons.
LaFond’s first forays into actually playing music came when dealing with his mom’s cancer treatment when he was about eight. He said she had been through years of chemo and that through it, she had imparted on him an intense appreciation for life and living how you want to live. His mother asked him what it was he wanted to do with his life, a heavy question for such a young age. LaFond replied that he wanted to learn how to play the drums and the electric guitar and one day his dad took him to the local music shop to rent instruments. “The drums were a little too much, too expensive and hard to borrow,” he said. “But you could get a Fender Strat and an amp for about 15 bucks a month. I got that, this guitar and a little battery amp that I’d set up in my window so all the neighbors could hear the riffs.”
Though both had been subjecting their neighbors to their early musical inclinations, neither LaFond nor Pietrafitta had truly played with or for other people. Pietrafitta said this first happened while at Rock School, a camp/program that would put young players together in a band and have them learn songs that they’d then play in a showcase at the end of the week. She said this taught her “the language of music,” the idea that music, like any language, can never be truly learned in an echo chamber, in isolation. You truly learn what music can be when doing it with others. This was when she first knew she wanted to make music her life.
LaFond went to a similar kind of camp, put on through by Blue Sky Music Studios in Albany, where Thom took lessons. He said his program was two weeks and that he remembers playing everything from Operation Ivy to “The Wind Cries Mary” by Jimi Hendrix to some jazz standards. “It made me feel like I could start a band on my own, rather than waiting to be invited into one,” LaFond said.
LaFond has taken this DIY approach to music his entire life. When he got a little older, he was playing in groups that weren’t getting gigs and he decided to take to the streets and try his hand at busking. He started doing this in Albany but — as he grew up and traveled elsewhere — learned that it was something he loved, that he could make music anywhere. He took the busking to the Bay Area in California for a bit and New Orleans for a week before ending up in Boulder, saying that “Pearl Street is such a great place [to busk].” He says he “doesn’t see a distinction between those days playing on the street and where [he is] now,” that spirit alive in everything he does. “It’s just pure enjoyment and opens so many doors,” he said.
Banshee Tree itself has long been a Front Range staple band, their brand of hypnotic, jammy, indie-swing-grass able to capture a feeling not quite understood by those that don’t know what it is to live in the shadow of mountains. The band started with LaFond and his ex-partner writing songs and taking them to the streets, LaFond on guitar and her on the washboard. They eventually gained a bit of a name for themselves and were joined by still current bass player Jason Bertone as well as fiddle/violin player Nick Carter — who has since left the band but was an integral part in defining Banshee Tree’s sound.
Around the time Banshee Tree was starting out, Pietrafitta had been playing in bands, drumming between various groups. Though LaFond and her had known each other since around 2006, they had never actually played together. One year, about the same time that LaFond’s ex-partner stepped away from the band, the band Pietrafitta had been playing in “exploded” and parted ways. LaFond was worried that Banshee Tree was not long for this world as they felt they thought they’d have to scramble to find a drummer or another washboard player or something, anything to keep it going. LaFond recalled running into Pietrafitta right after her band had called it quits and asking if she was down to play with Banshee Tree, to experiment and see if it worked. Pietrafitta told him she was down and the first pieces of the Banshee Tree we know now started to come together.
Those that were in Boulder around 2017 or so most likely got a chance to see Banshee Tree during this experimental phase. They would play these free Saturday night shows at License No. 1, the bar underneath the Hotel Boulderado. The shows felt like these intense, intimate science projects, the band figuring things out in real time, Pietrafitta absolutely shredding the kit each night along with the rest of the band as they tore that little room apart every weekend. This was where the Banshee Tree sound heard today was truly honed. Pietrafitta said that they all had played around in jam bands prior to joining Banshee Tree but also listened to a variety of genres and felt they melded a lot of styles together, from jam to jazz to bluegrass to indie to swing and everything in between. Those shows/experiments allowed them to not only gain the confidence they needed in order to wield such a unique sound but also to figure out exactly what that sound would be, to let it breathe and evolve as they did as players and as people.
These shows led to them to becoming rather legendary in the Boulder scene. They soon began to play bigger and bigger shows at places like the Fox Theater, the Boulder Theater, eventually taking it to Cervantes’ Masterpiece Ballroom, the Bluebird and more. After playing countless shows, touring, building a hell of a name for themselves over the course of a few years, they then released their debut self-titled album in 2021.
Since that album’s release, the band has continued to tour, playing festivals all over, shows locally and nationally, and has grown and changed as all must do. They lost a member and gained another — sax and keys player Jesse Shantor — and have shifted from some of their more bluegrass roots to something a little more electric, yet still ethereal, enigmatic.
It’s all led them to now, to Bad Luck, released on April 17th. The album deals heavily with the idea of natural impermanence and the search for home. It’s a celebration of the natural world, the rivers and roads that get us lost and found again. LaFond, who writes the most of the lyrics, said that some of the songs featured on the album have been in the works for about a decade but that the feelings they hold within them feel no less relevant to him. He said, “Yes, there’s this feeling of looking for home but also feeling homesick and just being confused at what home is. I realized it doesn’t have to be a permanent thing and that home can just be this world.” He said the idea of impermanence applies to the natural world. “It feels like the world is screaming out at us like it’s trying to send a message. That’s in line with the whole concept of what Banshee Tree is. There’s this idea of impermanence in that the world around us is going to change in this drastic way and it’s trying to get our attention.”
In addition to her endlessly inventive and technical yet thoughtful drumming, the album also features Pietrafitta singing a lot more than on their previous album. Long known as one of the best drummers in the Front Range, she said the ability to sing in a more prominent capacity than before really excited her, has made her feel like an even greater piece of the band’s creative process. She said, “I feel like I went through a phase where I got a little bit shy about my voice. Being more present on this album helped me to come out of that more and learn how to blend and sing harmonies. We just had so much fun with the layers. Tom would would direct a session and he’d be like, ‘Okay, now we’re gonna like yell the line at this chord, whisper it at the chorus.’ It’s all this experimentation that made me feel a lot more part of the whole, especially since I had recorded the drums like two years ago.”
Pietrafitta also spoke to the importance of staying true to one’s heart when creating. “There are so many different ways to do art,” she said. “It can be acoustic in a room. It can be highly technical. Whatever avenue you’re going through, it has to be led from the heart. As as long as it’s led from there, whatever way you get there, I think, as long as it’s connected to the heart, that’s the point of music,
Bad Luck is a beautiful piece of art. It blows through you, taking your soul from your body and sending it out into the trees in search of adventure. It feels huge, like it captures the Earth itself and gives it a voice, beauty and confusion and acceptance and frustration all melded together to create a very human work that feels bigger than any one person or even one band.
Banshee Tree has never been stronger, the band’s future ever brighter. They are currently on tour, starting all over Colorado but will travel across the country while still stopping home to play festivals (such as the final Beanstalk) and shows until the end of the year. They always return home and you’ll have a chance to catch the band here in Colorado but keep your eyes open for them as they step into this new era, the sun shining through the mountains, laughter in your heart and an unclear journey reaching out ahead of you. Don’t miss them.
Stream Bad Luck here!
Check out the tour dates here!
