The Revivalists’ Andrew Campanelli reflects on the band’s success ahead of Friday’s Starlight show

The Revivalists. // photo courtesy the artist

This Friday, New Orleans’ The Revivalists take the stage at Starlight Theater for a co-headlining tour with The Head and the Heart. It’s a dream pairing for folk-inclined indie rockers and yet, despite it being a perfect combination, this marks the first time the two bands have shared a stage.

Speaking with The Revivalists’ drummer, Andrew Campanelli, via Zoom just after the release of their new studio album, Pour It Out Into The Night, he described the excitement both bands are feeling.

“We’ve known obviously about their band for a long time and listened to their music, but we never really crossed paths,” Campanelli says. “We’re just really excited about it. We met them a few months ago. I mean, maybe we met them in passing here and there at festivals and said, ‘Hi,’ or whatever but now that the tour has been booked, we we met them at the Innings Festival in Arizona a few months ago, and our trailers were right next to each other. We had a fun little moment of being like, ‘Oh, alright, cool. What do you do? Okay.’ I feel like we became friends in that moment.”

When you’re listening to a band such as The Head and The Heart who really put themselves into their music and then get to meet them, and they are as they seem in their music, it reinforces that this is a great band, continues Campanelli.

“It’s really fun to just see how they do their thing and how we do our thing differently and piggyback off each other,” explains the drummer. That said, both The Head and the Heart and The Revivalists have a lot in common, in terms of how their stories go. Each band worked their way up the ladder to end up where they are now, playing big outdoor theaters.

In the case of Campanelli and his bandmates, The Revivalists had been going for nearly a decade by the time 2015’s Men Amongst Mountains came out, and that just exploded, with “Wish I Knew You” going to number one on the charts. Being an up-and-coming band for so long and then all of a sudden, playing on TV shows and going to number one–that was wild, Campanelli admits.

“It’s interesting ’cause the destination was never really as important to us as the process of getting there–the journey,” the drummer says. “We’ve always put one foot in front of the other in terms of that.”

Campanelli explains it like this: the band started with The Revivalists EP and then they had the album Vital Signs. That EP was the inception of the band, and them being born.

“We’re in the hospital, we got vital signs and so we’re kind of figuring it out,” he says. “We’re playing locally, we’re becoming part of and accepted by the New Orleans scene. As a bunch of guys that came here, not from New Orleans, that was a wonderful thing.”

As The Revivalists became part of the city, they put out City of Sound, and that was when they started to grow into touring nationally. As we started touring nationally, they started writing songs inspired by the country they saw. On their first trip to Colorado, band members David Shaw and Michael Girardot wrote the song “Men Amongst Mountains” on the piano of a friend of Campanelli’s parents.

“’Cause we were crashing at their house,” Campanelli says. “We were in the ‘crashing at houses’ phase.”

These incremental growths weren’t borne out of a need to get on TV or anything like that, the drummer says. Obviously, they wanted to, but at the beginning, The Revivalists weren’t even able to be booked for shows.

“We would call a bar and say, ‘Can we play at your bar on Monday?’” Campanelli says straightfaced. “’I know 20 people in that town. We’ll bring our own PA. We’ll set it up.’ It wasn’t even music venues or places that traditionally had music. We’ve kind of grinded it out.”

It wasn’t a conscious thing for it to be Vital Signs, then City of Sound and then expanding out to Men Amongst Mountains. That was just what happened, Campanelli goes on. Then, when that album took off, that expansion was kind of hard to see inside of, sometimes because, as the drummer says, they’re the ones who play the music.

“The Revivalists can’t be any more in my worldview than they already are,” Campanelli offers by way of explanation. “As it became more in other people’s worldviews, the things that started to take hold on that was the shows got bigger. Being on the TV shows was a huge moment.”

But what really made the mark for Campanelli was going from people asking what he did and telling them he was in a band called The Revivalists, and them responding with, “I’ll check it out,” to them responding with, “I know that song!”

“That was the big way we could see the shift,” Campanelli says. “It’s kind of fortunate that we had that 10 year period before that happened because I think we got to go through a lot of the struggle of touring and figuring out how to work interpersonally and all that stuff without all the pressure of everybody looking at us and wanting something from us.”

That meant that, when the success hit, The Revivalists were an insulated unit and they were able to remain fairly level-headed about it, says Campanelli thankfully.

“I’d like to say it seems like the guys are the same guys I met when I was 20,” the drummer says. “To me, it doesn’t seem like anybody’s drastically changed.”

The Revivalists play Starlight Theater with The Head and the Heart on Friday, June 30. Details on that show here.