Whiskey Treaty Roadshow proves that Democracy is strongest when it is diverse.
It’s hard to pin down Whiskey Treaty Roadshow. They are all over the map, stylistically, and as a collective. Over the course of more than 500 live shows in the last 12 years, and throughout this latest iteration of the band, Whiskey Treaty Roadshow has regularly swapped instruments (both onstage and in the studio) and written collaboratively. This democratic approach to making music often confounds critics and tastemakers (what we used to call record labels and music journalists) and results in live shows and albums impossible to categorise. They’re too rock for folkies and too jangly for rockers. They easily could’ve slipped through the cracks in your algorithm.
None of this is a bad thing. In fact, the strength of Whiskey Treaty Roadshow lies squarely in their eclecticism. There are four distinct songwriters who collaborate as Whiskey Treaty Roadshow: Tory Hanna, Chris Merenda, David Tanklefsky and Greg Daniel Smith. Together, they choose to set aside ego and write songs. If you know anything about writing, you know there are few things more intimate than collaboration. To achieve the best result, a songwriter routinely lays bare their anxieties, sometimes delving into the dark, unconscious places mere listeners fear exploring. In some cases, the songwriter may wear their politics on their sleeve. Doing this with a partner can be emotionally taxing. It takes vulnerability. It is difficult to imagine the challenges of songwriting as a 4-person collaborative enterprise. Compromise is never easy, and we are loath to give up the things we’ve written, to cut a line we thought particularly inspired here or change a note in a melody there, yet, in the case of Whiskey Treaty Roadshow, as in all successful Democracies, compromise is all. To form strong unions, we must work together, be vulnerable, talk to one another.
“We’re a pretty unapologetically big tent in that we want people to feel welcome, we want the music to be diverse and we want the audience to leave feeling like they got a full on rock show,” Tanklefsky says, according to press materials. “We live in a playlist-driven world. People don’t listen to just one type of music and neither do our fans. We’ve built this really incredible community where people who might not normally cross paths musically are all connecting in the same room. That is what this band has always been about and that is what we brought to life with Kept Rising.”
The members of the Whiskey Treaty Roadshow collective embrace the challenges of compromise and collaboration. Therein lies their strength: Each songwriter not only brings their own voice to the process, but they also lend a critical ear to the other members’ ideas. Working together, listening to one another, Whiskey Treaty Roadshow has done something impressive: they’ve concocted good songs and records and thrilled fans with unpredictable live shows, sure. But more importantly, simply by existing, Whiskey Treaty Roadshow prove that Democracy works, at least in art.
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