Northampton band World's Greatest Dad began its existence as a side project when two friends—musicians Luke Degnan and Gabe Sullivan—decided they wanted to stretch out a bit both musically and socially.
"December, about a year ago, at a party, Luke came up with an idea that we should get a band together with all these musicians from around town and create songs and kind of make it like a collaboration," recalls Sullivan, the band's vocalist. "Not really a serious sort of thing. Just to have fun and get a bunch of people together to make music."
"And get people we didn't know, too. That was important," Degnan adds.
The two had already tossed around a band name they thought would fit their nascent project. "We had thought about the name World's Greatest Dad as a band name for a long time," says Degnan. "Our thinking was that, as a joke, it would have built-in merchandising opportunities, but we also sort of liked the name because it had a lot of words in it; it stood out as a name. We thought it was funny."
Degnan says that material came quickly and easily to the two compatriots. "After deciding to create the band, we had immediately recorded nine songs under the name World's Greatest Dad, so we were kind of like, 'Hey, we're a band!'"
The duo had a loose concept for the band's style and sound. "Our old collaboration, Ouch, was a hip-hop band and a dance music kind of band," Degnan explains. "When we first started doing this, we wanted that element of it to be there somewhere, even if it was natural instruments. And maybe it's sort of cheesy, but it was definitely a sort of Neutral Milk Hotel thing that we really wanted to be coming from—a deep melancholy thing with a bunch of different and weird instruments. We really wanted something danceable and depressing at the same time."
A perusal of the band's catalogue displays an unusual number of songs with women's names as titles. "The initial songs were all about girls, all named for girls, because it was an easy way to keep Gabe on topic," says Degnan. "They were melancholy, but not necessarily love songs. If we picked a girl's name, he could go with it. It seemed to help him out a lot."
Degnan also thought Sullivan sang better when he was miserable. "Before we would record or before shows, I would try and get Gabe depressed, because I thought he sang a lot better when he was sad."
Was he better lyrically or stylistically?
"Both," says Degnan. "His singing style would be less fired up, more subdued. But lyrically too. I guess the band was supposed to be—and I guess it still is—kind of a downer."
Sullivan doesn't disagree. "It did start that way, through me. I was having a hard time. I don't want to mention too much, but people have hard times, and they get creative."
The band soon needed additional members to flesh things out. Staying true to their desire to collaborate with folks they didn't know, they sent out an online open call for musicians. "The first person to respond was Dani [O'Brien]—she had never been in a band before, but she was like, 'Yes!'" Degnan says. "She plays the omnichord. She just had it. And we were like, 'That's an amazing piece of shit right there. We need this in our band!' We knew we would need an awesome drummer. Gabe luckily knew one, [the singularly named] Hodges, who loves Afrobeat and lots of different kinds of music, and he brought that dance element that we wanted."
Adds Sullivan: "And [flutist] Amanda Freeman replied, too. Then we got a few more folks—Steve Yarbro, who is the clarinetist and saxophone player for Primate Fiasco, and Eric Lee, who plays fiddle. Ryan Crowley, of course, joined in—he played our first show."
"We wanted to form a chamber of sorts, you know?" says Degnan. "We originally wanted to have, like, 50 members in the band, have everybody we knew or didn't know up there. And then, as we all started playing together, we realized how things locked up and fit, and that if we had any more members, it would ruin it, you know what I mean? We wanted restraint, and we wanted dynamics, and we wanted people to think about that. If we got more and more and more people it wouldn't have been possible to do. So once we settled on eight, we were able to talk about when to all get quiet, and when to get louder and raise it up."
Fortified by the new additions, World's Greatest Dad grew quickly from side project to something more serious, according to Sullivan. "It was a kind of a way to have fun, at first, and then we really fell in love with the songs," he says. "And when the full band came and practiced with us we were like, 'Wow, this is really cool.' We all automatically got into it at the same time. A lot of the band members really have a lot of other stuff going on, including myself, and I just didn't think people would be able to commit—I thought it would just be for fun."
"Then it really snowballed and became something more," adds Degnan.
The sense of expanding beyond their comfort zones—both personally and musically—has opened up World's Greatest Dad's original construct and their sound. "It started out more acoustic and toned down," Sullivan says. Then Crowley brought an electric bass to a gig and Hodges, who had been primarily using percussion instruments, brought out the full drum kit.
With eight members from disparate musical backgrounds, the band's songwriting has benefited as well. While Degnan and Sullivan still compose the skeletons of World's Greatest Dad's tunes, everyone brings something to the table. "Gabe and I get together, like once a month, to work on stuff, get drunk and hammer stuff out," says Degnan. "Then we bring the tunes to the band; they evolve over time."
"Everybody is free to add stuff," adds Sullivan. "Everybody writes their own parts."
According to Crowley, it truly is a collaborative effort by musicians with varied interests: "There are a lot of things people bring that go into our sound, but it comes out as a cool, mellowish sound. We've got metal heads, hip-hop fans, people who listen to weird, out-of-tune guitars, indie rock."
The band is taking its repertoire into the studio this month. "We have two days set aside," Degnan says. "We're going up to Athens, Vermont to this place called Verdant Studios."
"We're doing eight songs, a full album's worth," adds Sullivan. "A couple of the songs are pretty long. Six of them are named after women. We decided we had to start straying away from that—we were getting made fun of a bit by friends."
Sullivan is excited about World's Greatest Dad's future: "All of it's become like a great accident—getting all these great band members, getting a manager, and now we're probably going to get a great CD. And that's probably what's going to happen. And when Hodges comes back, hopefully we'll hit the road."
Sullivan also invites everyone to join him Nov. 25 at the Basement in Northampton. He'll be hosting an open mic session, and members of World's Greatest Dad will perform a set and offer their services as backup band. The night also serves as a going-away party of sorts for drummer Hodges, who is heading down to Central America for five months to play music and trade instruments.
World's Greatest Dad is also slated for a show in Boston and a December holiday gig for charity. To counterbalance their female-based songs, Sullivan promises an upcoming performance filled with songs named after dudes. "When Father's Day comes along we'll do a special show," he says. "It will be a Father's Day show with a set of all guy songs—Bruce, Larry, Steve."
