Premiere: The Restoration double-up with new songs, ‘You Know What to Do’ & ‘We Might Could’

The past can be as spooky and unsettling as a haunted house. Floorboards creak; an unseen presence runs your blood cold; and skeletons lie mutilated and dusty inside cobwebbed closets. If you’re careful, you may never have to confront any of it ⏤ but, if you’re like singer, songwriter and fiddle player Daniel Machado, the mystery of unfathomable depths is too great to ignore. Fronting South Carolina folk band The Restoration, he busts down the splintered front door to his past, namely his father’s, with an upcoming album titled West, a concept piece set against a classic western backdrop. 10 tracks ebb and flow between brutally-written images of abandonment and disillusionment and spellbinding poeticism, ultimately settling on the lives of Machado’s grandparents, Joe and Ruby, whose lives first came together through a chance of fate and were later torn apart.

With two new songs called “You Know What to Do” and “We Might Could,” both premiering today, Machado saddles up as thoughtful and compassionate narrator. He wields his voice as a shiny scalpel to inspect two lives that might seem very foreign to him, but he returns to a wellspring of storytelling, calling upon stories his father once told, to draw out a sense of understanding. “You keep me coming back to you,” he sings, pouring on the charm as thick as possible, on the former. “Joe” twirls his dance partner “Ruby” ’round and ’round the ballroom, and within such a fleeting embrace, he allows the ecstasy to spring from his fingertips. Layers of fiddle, violin and banjo prance and turn in wonderfully enchanting circles around them. The latter song, then, seems to depict the breaking and buckling the morning after, reality soaking into their bones and a gloom descending just on the horizon. “See, my skinny frame got stuck into a dress / And this mop of red hair grew to favor me, I guess,” he sings, the consequences of life choices coming up to wash over him. “We might could give it all away…”

On the release, Machado writes to B-Sides & Badlands over email: “[They] are both songs about coming-of-age sexual awakening ⏤ but while the former focuses on the excitement this experience can bring, the latter deals with the consequences, both real and imagined,” he says. “The album’s characters, Ruby and Joe, are based on my real-life grandparents, and the rest of the songs follow their journey from newlyweds, to young parents in over their heads, through a series of irreversible decisions that leave them estranged from their children and each other.”

The Restoration ⏤ also of Lauren Garner (violins), Sharon Ghanashekar (piano, organ) and Sean Thomson (electric guitar, slide, banjo) ⏤ are known to delight in concept-based work. Two previous full-lengths, Constance (2010) and Honor the Father (2012), are rooted in historical-laced fiction around a smorgasbord of characters living in their hometown of Lexington. Donning such a bold framework, Machado and company are given even more license to analyze humanity in its every sharp color.

West, which very much emerges as a tribute to Machado’s father and folk hero, drops everywhere this Friday (October 25).

Listen below:

Photo Credit: Kati Baldwin 

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