Karen Ponzio Photos
Shellye Valauskas
Right before the final song of the evening, Shellye Valauskas started playing around with her sound. Dean Falcone asked her what she was doing.
“I want it loud,” she answered with a smile. He laughed. “Turn it up! It’s your birthday!” he said.
Valauskas and Falcone are two parts of The Shellye Valauskas Experience — the other three parts being Jim Balga, Brian Stevens, and Bruce Crowder. This past Saturday was Valauskas’s annual birthday celebration at Best Video along with the band Tempest O’Brien, which is made up of Falcone, Stevens, and Balga. This was only the second show for the trio, the first one being last year’s birthday show for Valauskas.
A lot has happened in that year, according to Valauskas, including an album release for her band, celebrated with a show at Cafe Nine where something else pretty special happened.
That album, History of Panic, “took so much energy,” Valauskas said. It also led to yet another high energy moment. “We had Jon Auer [of The Posies] in from France, we made a video the day of the show [with filmmaker and friend Gorman Bechard] and then Dean proposed at the CD release show. Then all my energy went into planning the wedding which also involved getting people here from other countries” — including The Posies, who played at the wedding.
Valauskas and Falcone were married in September 2018. “It’s been quite a year,” she said. “It was pretty huge.”
SVE also opened for The Posies at their Fairfield Theater Company show back in June. Balga and Stevens, longtime friends who have played with the two for years, were asked to play drums and bass, respectively, with Valauskas and Falcone at that show and have remained with SVE since — though getting together has sometimes been a challenge due to both not living nearby. The band also includes Crowder on keyboards and percussion when he is available.
Valauskas also noted that she and Crowder would be joining Tempest O’Brien for a few songs, while SVE had “incorporated some of Brian’s songs into our set” as well. “He plays these great weird chords that I don’t know,” she said. “It’s good for me to branch out of my comfort zone.”
“It feels like a family,” she added. “You’re with people you love doing what you love, and when the two things mesh it’s so nice.”
According to Valauskas the band has no plans to record another album just yet, but may record one or two new songs and release singles at some point. She did note that they would be recording two songs for an XTC tribute coming out this summer, and would be playing with Boston band Love Love this May at Cafe Nine and at the Meriden Daffodil Festival this spring for the first time in 12 years. She and Dean are also performing a couple of songs at the 120 Minutes tribute at Cafe Nine on March 28.
But for this Saturday night, it was a birthday celebration complete with friends, family, and food, lots of it. Tempest O’Brien led the way with a six-song set that included Valauskas on guitar and backing vocals for three songs and Crowder on keyboards and percussion for one. The classic ‘60s comedy film What’s New Pussycat? played in the background as the band had their own madcap fun playing one pop rock gem after another and joking around with each other and the audience in between. At one point Stevens began to introduce a song saying it was “a cross between Led Zeppelin…” and then looking at Falcone, who completed his sentence with “and Tony Danza,” which got quite a reaction from the other two as well as the crowd. The video for the song is below. You tell me if they were spot on or not.
The final song was a cover of “For Pete’s Sake” by The Monkees, more than apropos in a week where we lost Peter Tork, and Stevens told the crowd to sing along.
“Shellye will be up in a minute with a backing band that looks remarkably similar,” Stevens told the audience, and that she was. Valauskas and Crowder joined the trio for a 10-song set, many from the band’s last album, though there was also a new song called “Everything All at Once” as well as a cover of “September Gurls” by Big Star.
Songs from History of Panic — including “Gravity,” “Leftover Mistake,” and “Do Over” — lend themselves to becoming songs that other bands may want to cover themselves, as SVE, from both a lyrical and musical perspective, bring the classic to the new and create pop perfection with an airtight rhythm section, powerful yet playful guitars and keyboards, and vocals that make you want to sing along. Valauskas is hard not to watch while she is performing, though you also want to see what Falcone and the rest of the band are doing.
Though they were also just having fun. When Valauskas told the crowd to go have some cake, she mentioned that it was Lithuanian coffee cake from Claire’s.
“There’s nothing better in life, not even pizza,” she said, which garnered boos from Falcone and Bechard (who was in the audience); both have been working on the documentary Pizza: A Love Story.
A piece of that cake was brought up to the stage with a candle in it after the final song, and Stevens led the crowd in singing to Valauskas, who made a wish (involving her dog) out loud and thanked the band “for putting up with me.” Though from the looks and sounds of it everyone there, including the band, were just as grateful for her as she was for them.
The birthday cake, of course
“I’ve always been weird about my birthday” Valauskas told me. “My dad and I shared a birthday and he passed away two years ago. It’s nice to have a joyous thing happen, it’s a nice distraction.”
“Birthdays are a reflection on time,” she added. “Another year passed and you ask what happened. Well, this year, a lot happened! It makes you sit back and be grateful and share with people.”
For more info about where and when to catch SVE live and/or listen to more of their music please go to their website.