By Adam Buhck
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Local folk/Americana group Crystal City will headline a show at 10 p.m. Friday at the Mill, 120 E. Burlington St. Acoustic-folk rocker Dan Tedesco and indie duo Field Division will support the group for the performance.
Crystal City is the brainchild of blue-collar singer/songwriter Dave Helmer. Helmer, who hails from Marshalltown, Iowa, has long been interested in music and discovered a passion for songwriting and performing in front of a crowd around age 15.
Prior to forming Crystal City, he did some touring with his high-school band, the Zoo and Helmer, a group he formed a few years later. Both bands eventually fizzled out because of shifting priorities and friends moving away.
Helmer, however, stayed the course. When he met and subsequently started dating Sam Drella in the spring of 2009, the pair formed Crystal City, although the lineup wasn’t complete until they moved to Iowa City in 2012 and met bassist Randall Davis and drummer Dan Peterson.
Crystal City’s musical style has gone through an evolution since the group got its start as an acoustic duo. The addition of Davis and Peterson steered the group more in the direction of traditional rock and roll, but they haven’t entirely given up the acoustic side of things; Helmer and Drella just finished a 16-day tour playing acoustic every night.
“We feel it’s a strength that we can play on a rock bill as well as do finger-style in a brewery somewhere, and in both situations people seem to enjoy it,” Helmer said.
One thing that has remained constant is the inspiration Helmer finds in everyday life. Themes of love and heartache, life on the road, and the eternal quest for success all find a place in Crystal City’s repertoire. Right now, the band members are living life, hectic though it may be, and enjoying the opportunity to play their music in front of an audience. If she weren’t making music, Drella joked, she’d be “working in an office somewhere, wishing I was somewhere else.”
Also appearing on Friday night’s bill is folk-rock solo artist Tedesco. He is touring the country in support of his new self-titled album, which was released Tuesday. This album comes after his recent move from Nashville to Des Moines and represents a change in his approach to songwriting and recording.
Strangely enough, the inspiration for this change came from cooking; an art Tedesco has been interested in for the past five or six years. When you have high-quality food, you don’t want to mess it up with too many seasonings or by constantly flipping it or moving it around. The right thing to do is to sit and let it cook. Tedesco applied this philosophy to his music when he started writing for his new album. He wrote every song in his Des Moines home and recorded each of them on his iPad using the built-in condenser microphone.
“It really comes down to the songs,” Tedesco said. “This particular batch, and the subject matter within, didn’t feel like it belonged in a studio. While it’s not necessarily autobiographical material, it is deeply personal. I wanted to present it in a way that would be as direct as possible to the listener, with as little distance between the performance and their ears.”
He had occasional doubts about whether eschewing the traditional process of going into a studio was the right thing to do, but there was something about the simplicity and feeling from each song that dispelled these doubts each time they arose, he said. The result, he said, was an album of personal introspection and a fresh perspective, presented bare before the world, blemishes and all.
“I’m very proud of this new album,” Tedesco said. “And more than anything, the next step is to keep playing and keep writing. One song and one show at a time.”
Crystal City, Dan Tedesco, Field Division
Where: Mill, 120 E. Burlington
When: 10 p.m. Friday
