Unsigned Spotlight: Dalton Deschain & The Traveling Show
Dalton Deschain & the Traveling Show are a pulp-punk band from New York City. The perfect intersection between Stephen King, Danny Elfman, Alkaline Trio, and John Cameron Mitchell, the band is known for dark but humorous experimental punk music, filled with pulpy lyrics about circus freaks, dark rituals, nuclear war, and demonic possession.
Please list all of your band members and their roles in the band.
Dalton Deschain (he/him) - vocals, guitar
Jo Kroger (she/her) - vocals, synth
Day Clancy (she/her) - vocals, bass
Phil Harris (he/him) - drums
For starters, were any of you a part of other bands/outfits prior to Dalton Deschain & The Traveling Show? How long has the band been around?
Every member of the band is an extremely talented songwriter in their own right, and it’s truly great to be constantly surrounded by these people whose music I love listening to outside of the band. Jo (jokroger.com) performs intense lyric-focused indie-folk in a band under her own name, Day (@dayclancy on Twitter) does melodic acrobatics over a distorted ukulele, and Phil writes quirky and haunting folk ballads that always make me laugh and also get stuck in my head for days.
I myself was mostly performing solo years before the band came together in the Spring of 2015. Our original bass player Mike left in 2016 to start a family, and so I asked Day to learn how to play the bass so she could be in the band, and boy did she learn fast.
What’s the origin of that name? Does such a long name ever pose an issue for you?
Haha, it definitely does. Sometimes it gets tough to fit on a flyer, and I can’t even count the number of times another band or venue has called us something like “the Traveling Band” or something. And having a hard to pronounce last name is just a further burden. But at the end of the day, I wanted a name that served as both a representation of our aesthetic, as well as a title to the narrative. So it’s got that kind of fantasy novel weight, while also painting us as this ragtag group of circus people.
Who writes your songs? I've read that your music tells a "continuous pulp horror story about a circus ringleader possessed by a demon in the 1940s." Where did the idea originate?
The concept of the band has been gestating in my head since about 2010. I was in college at the time and had always wanted to do a concept album, but never thought I’d ever come up with a concept worth writing an entire album about. Then one day I woke up from this awful nightmare that was so vivid I had to immediately write down every detail of it. I thought it would make a great album, so I filled in all the nonsense dream details with new ideas until I had the whole thing planned out. At the time though, I didn’t have a band, so I kind of kept it in my back pocket for a few years.
Every once in a while I would come back to it though and fill in some more details, or add some more characters, until eventually I realized that it all wasn’t going to fit on a single album. Currently the plan is to do it as three full-length albums, the first of which we’re hoping will come out next year. These three EPs have just been an appetizer, introducing people to the concept and the characters before we go totally crazy.
So because it’s sort of my baby, I do all the songwriting. I studied music composition in college, so I’m a big arranging freak and I tend to write out everyone’s parts in full sheet music before we start to learn something. The more comfortable we’ve gotten as a group though, the more I’ve started leaving room for everyone to contribute their own parts. It’s become a lot more collaborative over the past few years and I want to go even further. They’re all phenomenal musicians, and hey, the less work I have to do myself the better?
What artists/bands are currently inspiring your sound? Does your upcoming EP Casey take any new directions/inspirations in particular?
This band is sort of a wild mishmash of all of the music that was really formative to me growing up. You can hear a lot of Alkaline Trio in my melody-writing and lyrics, David Bowie and John Cameron Mitchell in our theatricality, Danny Elfman in the playfully macabre mood I try to bring to everything, and of course Coheed & Cambria in our multi-album concept insanity (as well as some of my more indulgent proggy diversions). “Rabid” I think is pretty representative of all of this, while the single “Man/Thing” also has a very distinct Modest Mouse influence that I think comes through pretty clearly.
Was there a particular band/artist or concert that inspired you to start a band?
David Bowie’s been my hero since I was a kid, and even if you don’t always hear it in our music, nobody’s been more influential on me than him. He’s the one that pushes me to always try new things, and to always get weirder, more theatrical, and not be afraid of trying something that nobody else is doing.
What do you do to prepare for a show? (Any flexing, exercises, ect)
You know, I don’t have much of a pre-show routine, actually. I tend to still get nervous right up until I walk on stage, so there’s a lot of jittery jumping around and trying to breathe normally, haha.
What has been the biggest highlight of the band’s career so far?
This past May we played a show at Piano’s in Manhattan, and as the first band was playing someone came up to me and told me that one of my longtime musical heroes John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Anthem: Homunculus) was at the bar. Then somebody else came up and told me he was here to see us. Apparently he had heard about us through a mutual friend and had come to check out the show. I was terrified, and thought I would surely fuck it up, but at that point we had been playing so many shows that our set was rock-solid. It might be the best show we’ve ever played, actually. John was so kind and loved the show, and hung out for the whole night. It was so surreal.
If you could tour with any bands, past or present, who would they be and why?
I mean we’d probably make a pretty killer bill with Coheed and Cambria, right? But I think the dream would be Oingo Boingo, Danny Elfman’s long-defunct New Wave band. I’d love to travel with those guys and just absorb all of his mad songwriting genius.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
Just that I hope people explore more of our music! If you dig our songs, there’s a lot more you can dive into. We try to stay accessible on multiple levels: if you’re a total nerd like me, we have the short story books we release to help you really dive into the lore we’ve got going on, and if you’re a more casual fan, we try to keep the songs fast and fun and catchy so you can just relax and have a good time. And our live shows are a good mix of the two, so if you’re in the NYC area, definitely come out to a show soon. I’m also super open to talking to fans of the music, so if anyone wants to learn more about this weird world we’ve created, send me an e-mail or a DM and we’ll chat.
Sept 26 - Rubulad - Brooklyn, NYC (EP Release Show)
Oct 12 - The Footlight - Queens, NYC
Oct 26 - The Way Station - Brooklyn, NYC (Annual “Devil’s Night” Halloween show)
Nov 13 - Arlene's Grocery - Manhattan, NYC