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The Beauvilles are a Florida-based group that have been heating up stages across the country with their blues-rock-jam songcraft for nearly a decade. In fact, if you live in the Sunshine State, and haven’t somehow stumbled across the Beauvilles, you apparently have been quite content with hiding in the safety of your own home. Brasky caught up with Shawn Beauville, the once-and-for-all frontman of the group, and he offered some insights into the music biz, the religion of music, and why Florida holds a special appeal for their kickass brand of rock and roll.
“Snow” – The Beauvilles by sonshine
Brasky: Recently we’ve decided it was due time to start covering some regional music, and our first thought was ‘Gotta get the Beauvilles in on this.’
Shawn Beauville: Rock and Roll.
Brasky: It certainly seems as if The Beauvilles have been busy lately, logging seven shows at SXSW alone. That seems to be the requisite way to get noticed these days: head to CMJ or SXSW, play until you bleed, get signed. How many separate gigs at an event like that do you think it takes to get people talking?
SB: We really were not playing that many shows in that amount of time intentionally, I think they set us up to do so many shows to keep us busy so we stay out of trouble. With any ‘industry’ music event the main allure is that you have a captive audience of industry, media, and general music lovers who made the trek there from all over the world. But both CMJ and SXSW are drastically different than their legends tell at this point. Both have become media frenzies, with music writers and the like trying to figure out what the labels are pushing, and occasionally stumbling upon a band that no one has ever heard of.
For us, we don’t really have any secret motives of becoming famous or anything, if we are invited and it seems like a wild time, we will travel cross country to be there, especially to Austin and NYC; both cities and the people there have been really kind to us in the last year. As far as getting people talking, I think one show alone can do that, I would rather have one true lover of the music that we convert at a warehouse party than a packed club of trendy people who would forget about you tomorrow. But I don’t really think much about this sort of thing, I am just a guitar player.
Brasky: Indeed. Your rock and roll sensibilities have been compared to the likes of Robert Plant and Jack White…what sets you apart from the ‘iconic’ version of a rock star?
SB: Iconic means different things to different people. There are certain musicians that I love and still listen to on vinyl when I am back home. T-Rex, David Bowie, Thin Lizzy, the Byrds, Eddie Cochran, Otis Redding, Nico & the Velvet Underground, and of course Led Zeppelin and may more from that era all represent a particular kind of music that was as uncompromising as it was authentic. I think now more than ever, people need that sort of music. But, I have no real perspective on what I am actually doing at this point or how we are viewed… If you are in the middle of a river and may drown, you stop thinking about how you look trying to keep above the water.
Brasky: According to your biography, you list music as your religion. Who do you think is the sitting pope of the church of music?
SB: That’s a really funny question. At this point, probably Willie Nelson. He seems to have the cleanest soul out of all of the legends left alive.
Brasky: You’ve been playing around the bay area for as long as anyone Brasky can think of (except maybe Mike Tozier)… What keeps you in Tampa?
SB: I grew up in suitcase city in northern Tampa, and in and around the historic district of Ybor, which until recently was a pretty damn dangerous place. I was lucky and didn’t wind up in jail or worse. At first I was a painter, and then a glassblower, and involved in some of the undergrounds arts collectives that started to spring up at the time. I had a few great loves that lived here. I left and went out west for a little while and wandered back, met some musicians that were set to tour, signed on, almost got a big record deal with them, didn’t, got offered to move to Austin and join an act on a major label that had a hit single, chose not to because their music was horrible… when I recorded my first EP in 2005 all the band lived here in Florida, we were living in a house that was recently demolished, and it was our recording studio, with vintage guitars and such piled everywhere, when we were invited to perform for the Grammy foundation because of it, we couldn’t believe it. There was a time around then that I thought about relocating, but right before I got to the point to pull the trigger, I would be offered some sort of opportunity, and I would be back on the road or back in a studio or back on an airplane. And yes, I still live here, I sleep here most of the time, but that doesn’t mean that it is limiting. And in reality the sort of music that I do, it wouldn’t help me to be in LosAngeles, I can’t remember the last time I heard a good band come out of LA.
Also, I like soul food. You can’t get soul food in Los Angeles or New York.
Brasky: Yeah, I seriously doubt Los Angeles can put greens on the table that would impress anyone from the South. One last question: You’ve already kicked off the festival season with an appearance at Harvest of Hope in St. Augustine… anything big on tap for the summer?
SB: We do have a summer tour that is getting worked on. How far out we are going to go, I am not sure… we have already been tapped for CMJ again in New York this coming October, and the PlaySTL festival in St.Louis for September, so we may be doing a southeastern tour for summer and then the East coast in September-October behind our upcoming record. I have been trying to get the agent to book us at only house parties for a tour, just to get our heads straight. We love playing these big stages, but it is more fun to be packed into a crowd. No separation between the audience and us. That’s rock and roll.
http://thebeauvilles.net
Some free tracks for download here
And we leave you with the video for the song “Snow”… High quality stuff! Many, many thanks to Shawn Beauville for being a good sport on this one.
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