Night Moves’ John Pelant on duplicating Double Life at Thursday’s recordBar show

Night Move. // photo credit Erin Pederson

Minneapolis four-piece Night Moves describes their sound as “cosmic twang rock disco,” and you’d be hard-pressed to find a better descriptor of their genre-hopping tunes. A little bit country, a little bit rock ‘n’ roll, and an awful lot of  chill happens when you drop the needle on a Night Moves LP. Their latest, Double Life, out now via Domino, is no different, and works perfect “summer into fall” vibes.

“I love that transition of the year,” says bandleader John Pelant over Zoom, and we immediately agree, noting that transition is the mood on Double Life.

“I feel like every record is just kinda like a three-year snapshot of your life, kinda like a diary entry,” Pelant continues. “At that point in time, there was a lot of like stuff going on. My partner–my now wife, I got married this summer–her dad passed away, her stepdad killed himself. There was a like a bunch of shit and the list could go on, but there’s just a lot of stuff, so I guess you could say ‘transition,’ but maybe that’s a cop-out.”

There are no cop-outs on Double Life. From the get-go, Night Moves goes for songs that are hefty in both sound and lyrical content, starting with the opening track, “Trying To Steal A Smile.”

“It was a beast,” notes Pelant of the track. “It’s funny, because the first track was one of the first ones written, but there it was never supposed to be the first track on the record. There’s probably like 21, 22, 23 songs written for the whole full record, and it kind of just came down to it.”

Essentially, explains the bandleader, they chose the 11 songs that comprise Double Life as what they wanted to record the first time they went into the studio, with the intention of recording seven more at a later date, but unfortunately, that wasn’t an option, so they had to make it work with what they had.

“I wasn’t really worried about any of ’em not being good enough because they had gone through the paces of editing and we had lived with them for years at that point,” Pelant says. “Some of them years, some of them were new, but I was pretty confident in the structure and the tones in the songs. I just was like, ‘All right, well, I guess this is may be a good limitation to have.”

The visuals which accompany Double Life‘s release–from covers for both the singles and album itself, as well as the music videos for album singles “Hold On to Tonight,” “Ring My Bell,” and “Daytona”–show just how much the band can do with a little, as well. All of that was shot and directed by Shawn Brackbill, a Lawrence-based photographer and videographer.

“We put out an EP right before this record [2022’s The Redaction] and the guy at the label suggested we take photos with Shawn Brackbill,” explains Pelant of how they came to work together. “And I was kind of like, honestly, ‘We just need to get this shit done.’”

Pelant looked up Brackbill’s work, thought it looked great, and after a Zoom call, the photographer did all the album art for The Redaction, as well as its music videos, so it seemed like a natural choicec to use him again for Double Life.

“I had made quite a few music videos by 2021 when the band and I first started working together so it was nice to be able to combine those projects together,” Brackbill explains of doing both album art and music videos. “It sort of helps to unify the aesthetic.”

“I was just like, ‘Shawn’s cool,’” Pelant says of their relationship. “We like him, he gets what we want to do, and he’s good to hang out with. It’s fun to drink with him and stuff after the shoots and just hang. If you can do that, I feel like you’re not gonna be led astray.”

“I really love working with the band because John has a strong vision and is down to collaborate as well,” agrees Brackbill. “We have similar tastes as far as the aesthetic goes. We are all into analog video and you know, vintage-y things. They are great guys and I generally just enjoy the hang as well.”

What really makes Double Life such a delightful listen is the country lope which infuses many of the songs across the record’s two sides. It’s a warm and inviting sound, perfectly-suited for headphones, and Pelant can lay claim to a lot what makes it work so well. While drums and bass were recorded at Pachyderm Studio, southeast of Minneapolis, everything else was done by the bandleader himself in their rehearsal space, then mixed by Jarvis Taveniere of Woods, “so he should get a lot of props for the warmth,” Pelant notes.

The tones used by Night Moves have been honed from album to album, and Pelant taking the reins for much of the recording has led him to Double Life being the first of the band’s albums on which he gets a production credit. They’d reached out to people, but kept hitting a wall and butting heads with people, so Night Moves instead decided to do it themselves.

“We’ve never done a record ourselves, so we might as well just face the music and see if we can do it ourselves,” says Pelant. “Because I’m sick of having to re-record every fucking thing we do–to go into a studio, to pay thousands of dollars just to redo something, and try and make it sound like the demo.”

It was great not being under the gun and on somebody’s clock, notes Pelant as we conclude our chat.

“It was nice to be like, ‘This is my job,’” Pelant concludes. “’This is the only thing I do, so I’m just gonna fully commit and I can go in anytime I want and do anything I want. It is definitely a nice way to do things.”

Night Moves plays RecordBar on Thursday, October 16, with Sam Blasucci. Details on that show here.