Paul Bass Photo
Dean Falcone and Shellye Valauskas at WNHH FM.
The background singers were back in Memphis. So were the bass and drums.
Shellye Valauskas and Dean Falcone brought just their acoustic guitars to the WNHH FM studio, and poured unplugged energy into a preview of what’s coming.
The two veteran New Haven-area musicians form the core of the Shellye Valauskas Experience. They’ve been traveling to Memphis’s landmark Ardent Studios to record tracks for the eponymous singer-songwriter’s first CD since 2018’s History of Panic.
They played two of the upcoming album’s tracks during an appearance Thursday on WNHH’s the tiniest-of-all-tiny-desks “Acoustic Thursday @ Studio 51” program. One was an original called “Everything All At Once.” (“You better watch your back/ Never know what’s behind you / Like a panic attack, it’ll come back to haunt you.”) The other was an update of The Bee Gees’ 1968 hit “Gotta Get A Message To You.”
Valauskas, who by day teaches forensic science and biology at Branford High School, has been performing and recording harmony-rich Aimee Mann-style power pop since the 1990s, not long after after her musician older brother Ed gave her her first guitar (a 12-string with only six strings on it). Both in concert and on recordings, she leans heavily on originals with carefully chosen covers slipped in for variety, and a nod to how new music builds on what came before it.
The decision to record her latest songs (including one written the night before recording), along with the Bee Gees cover, at Ardent fits in that tradition: Sam and Dave, Led Zeppelin, and the Staples Singers to REM, Stevie Ray Vaughn and the White Stripes, among others, have recorded classic tracks there. The drummer and guitarist from the bands Big Star and The Posies played on the tracks Valauskas and Falcone recorded, along with Memphis-area background vocalists.
“Two of them stood on one mic and banged the whole thing out, three different parts,” Valauskas said. “It was beautiful.”
She said she found it exciting to record there, to “be in with that energy and see the drums from my favorite records set up. … There is something magic in those rooms.”
“That place started in 1966, so they still have a lot of that original equipment that is very hard to come by now and very, very expensive to get if you want to get it,” Falcone added.
Click on the above video to watch Shellye Valauskas and Dean Falcone perform unplugged on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program
Previous“Acoustic Thursday @ Studio 51” performances:
• Brian Ember
• Ceschi
• Wally
• Sketch Tha Cataclysm
• MJ Bones
• Johnathan Moore
• Charlie Widmer
• Sam Carlson
Shellye Valauskas’s“Acoustic Thursday” set list:
• 0:16 “Everything All At Once”
• 12:25 “Options”
• 25:30 “Gotta Get A Message To You”
• 33:25 “Do Over”
You can see Valauskas and Falcone perform Wednesday, Aug. 14, at Best Video, opening for Jon Auer, beginning at 7 p.m.