SARATOGA LIVINGThe City. The Culture. The Life.

When I was growing up here in Saratoga Springs, it was a rite of passage to go see the Dave Matthews Band perform at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC). Maybe you’d take an illicit sip from a liquor-cabinet combo beforehand—maybe a puff of a special cigarette. But the real magic came when you joined your brothers and sisters in the audience and did a full-on, throat-be-damned sing-off of “Satellite” or “Ants Marching.”

Dave Matthews Band’s happy marriage to Saratoga isn’t going away anytime soon—but they’ve got some formidable competition for the annual hearts and minds of the city in the Zac Brown Band (ZBB). The Grammy-winning country-rock octet has now been coming to SPAC for seven years and will be making their now-normal, late-summer drop-in at the venue this Friday, August 30, with Willie Nelson’s son (and another SPAC veteran) Lukas Nelson and his band, Promise of the Real, in tow (tickets to the show are still available here).

Whereas last year’s Down the Rabbit Hole tour saw ZBB supporting 2017’s Welcome Home—an album the band had been touring pretty long and hard on—this year’s SPAC performance will be under slightly different circumstances. On September 20, ZBB will be releasing their highly anticipated sixth studio album, The Owl, which means the band won’t be supporting a polished, finished product at SPAC, but rather giving it a good, old-fashioned test drive. Not to mention the fact that all of this will be happening the night before ZBB heads off to play a double-header at Boston’s sacred Fenway Park, the first night of which is sold out.

Now, if you’ve been privy to the rise of ZBB, you’ll know that their live sets are like snowflakes; no two are ever truly alike. And they’re also very much torn from the playbook of The Boss, in the sense that the eight-piece will likely roll through an enormous range of work during a single night’s performance. That might include new singles and choice cuts from their deep catalog of albums—subdivided into two or more sets—with a smattering of somewhat-surprising (and inventively arranged) cover songs spread throughout. Recent examples include Rage Against the Machine’s “Bulls on Parade,” and “Use Somebody,” by ZBB contemporary Kings of Leon. At their show in Bristow, VA, on August 25, for instance, ZBB plowed through 27 songs, 10 of which were partial or full covers. That covers-first aesthetic shows the band’s tremendous range (and the range of influences on ZBB’s members), and might make the first-time ZBB-er scratch his or her head as to what to actually call their music. Is it pop? Is it country? Is it rock? Are they a jam band? Why do I love this so much, and why’s that dude in front of me turning into a rattlesnake? (The latter might actually be something else.)

One of the band’s multi-instrumentalists, Thomaston, GA-native Coy Bowles, who’s been a card-carrying ZBB member since ’07, gives me a little insight into “ZBB as the world’s greatest cover band,” when we talk about his influences growing up. When Bowles picked up the guitar for the first time at age 11 and formed his first band two years later, he wanted nothing more than to emulate the sound of—wait for it—Pearl Jam and Nirvana. One of the songs that got him hooked on grunge? Nirvana’s “Drain You,” about as non-twangy a song as you can fathom. “[‘Drain You’ is] what inspired me to understand improvisation for the first time,” says Bowles, who often shows off his insane improv chops onstage to the glee of the ZBB faithful. “It had a middle part where they just made noise. I remember asking my mom what they were doing, and she said, ‘They’re just improvising. It just means you do whatever you want to and be creative.'” Suddenly, for Bowles and his young band, it was all Nirvana—and “going bananas” in the middle of the song—all the time. And to some extent, even though each member of ZBB plays a defined role in the greater unit, with Zac Brown clearly the leader of the band, the ability to think outside of the box and be impromptu-improvisational, is the key to what makes the band one of America’s best.

But back to Bowles. Fast-forward several years, and he’s found himself at West Georgia College, where he’s studying the most un-rock-and-roll thing ever—biology—and was dabbling in the local music scene, playing in the same musical circles as fellow student Brown. By graduation, he’d formed a working band called Coy Bowles and The Fellowship, which he “spent every dollar and amount of energy that he could to turn that into something.” But it was tough being a band leader, trying to support himself and the band at the same time. Then Coy Bowles and The Fellowship started opening for ZBB, and eventually, Brown asked Bowles to join his band on keys. He was playing double-duty for awhile, but whereas ZBB was a band full of guys that had been bandleaders, all of whom wanted to travel the world making life-changing music, the guys in Bowles’ band were more interested in launching their own solo careers. So he put his band on hiatus in 2006, joined ZBB full time the following year and never looked back. Talk about great timing: ZBB’s major label debut, The Foundation, dropped in 2008, and they went on to win a Best New Artist Grammy in 2010 (they’ve added two more golden Gramophones since then).

Although Bowles didn’t play on that first record, it wouldn’t be long before he began making his presence felt in the band, co-writing ZBB’s No.1 single, “Knee Deep,” from their Foundation follow-up, 2010’s You Get What You Give (the single would feature the unmistakable voice of first Margaritaville settler Jimmy Buffett). “I’ve always been somebody that listens to a [song’s] melody more than I do the words,” says Bowles. He chalks his melody-first songwriting process up to the Seattle grunge bands he grew up listening to. “Half the time, you didn’t know what they were saying but you could understand the emotion and the energy that’s coming behind them in the melody,” says Bowles. As far as how “Knee Deep” came to pass, it couldn’t have happened in a more organic way. Brown’s longtime songwriting collaborator, Wyatt Durrette (basically, his Tim Reynolds), was a wordsmith, first and foremost. “I remember sitting on the beach with Wyatt,” says Bowles. Durrette was humming melody lines to himself and working on lyrics, and the song had already taken on a beach-y, escapism vibe, because, well, they were on the beach. Bowles suggested to Durrette that it would be a cool idea to have the song’s narrator say he was writing a note and he’d be back in a minute—you know, like escaping life for a little while. And it made it into the finished product: The third verse of the song begins: “Wrote a note, said ‘Be back in a minute’/Bought a boat and I sailed off in it.” Bowles has gone on to co-write a handful of other ZBB tunes, including “Uncaged,” “Roots,” and a pair of other No.1’s, “Colder Weather” and “Sweet Annie” (the official video for the latter features actual scenes from Bowles’ wedding).

For fans looking for a sneak-peek of the new album, they’ll be getting it on this tour, for sure. But the finished product might throw some diehards for a loop, with co-writes by pop songwriter Shawn Mendes (single “Someone I Used to Know” was released last year); and another tune, “Need This,” co-produced by Ryan Tedder, who’s worked with popsters such as Adele, Beyoncé, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift. Another credit you probably never would’ve assumed you’d see in the liner notes of a ZBB album? Swedish producer Max Martin, known for practically inventing the modern-day ear-worm, with products such as “…Baby, One More Time” (Britney Spears), “Blank Space” (by the aforementioned Tay-Tay) and “I Can’t Feel My Face” (The Weeknd). But it’ll be impossible not to want to curl up with The Owl on a chilly fall day, when you know that there’s at least one track, “Finish What We Started,” featuring a duet with recent Grammy power-pipes vocalist Brandi Carlile. “I’m very proud of the album,” says Bowles. “The recording process was something that we’d never done before.” Whereas for their previous album, Welcome Home, the band ripped through the entire album-recording process in seven days time, this one was—to paraphrase one-time ZBB collaborator Kacey Musgraves—a much slower burn. They’d go in and record a few tunes, leave, then come back and cut a few more. Some of the songs they recorded didn’t even end up on the finished album. “On this album, Zac really wanted to go out and write and be around a lot of the bigger producers that had written bigger pop songs, and he wanted to see what it was like to work with them,” says Bowles. Brown would bring back rough cuts that he’d worked on in sessions with the Martins and Tedders of the world, and the rest of the band would then fill in the blanks. “The coolest part of the whole album is that the more we got into it, the more stuff blossomed,” says Bowles. So some songs that made the final cut were mere germs just days before they were completed.

Now, if you’re hoping to hear a Saratoga story like the one ZBB’s bassist Matt Mangano told me last summer—about running an injured hand under one of the Saratoga Spa State Park’s mineral-spring faucets, and it miraculously being healed in time for the band’s show that night at SPAC—Bowles’ memories of Saratoga are a bit more tame. When asked if he was going to try to hit the races before the gig, Bowles says he isn’t a gambling man and that, he’s content sticking around the park. “This is one of my favorite places to come, because there’s so much to see next to the venue,” says Bowles. “I’m an outdoorsy kind of dude, so I love walking around in the woods.” If I didn’t have so much on my desk at the moment, I’d play hooky on Friday and go on a ZBB-hunting…I mean, “hiking expedition” in the Spa State Park. Hey, the water’s free, right?

In 2003, a full year after I left college, I briefly returned home to Saratoga Springs to crash at my parents’ place, while I figured out what the next phase of my “real world” adventure would be. I’d spent the previous year as an expat, living in Madrid, Spain, eating lots of tapas, drinking endless cañas (quarter pints of beers) and teaching the businessmen and women I’d been assigned by my off-the-books tutoring company very little English. (I realized quickly that I didn’t have the patience to become a teacher.) That summer and fall in Saratoga, I spent a lot of time lounging on the couch at my parents’ house watching MTV and hanging out with my buddy Justin, who was also still living in town. And since he was working at Uncommon Grounds, by default, I spent a lot of time there, too. I got to know his crew of barista and bagel-maker friends pretty well. They were a spirited bunch. I had no idea that one of them, Josh Carter, would end up becoming one-half of Saratoga Springs’ greatest musical success stories since The Figgs: indie rock duo Phantogram.

Now, it’s entirely possible, if you’re from Greenwich, NY (pronounced green witch, not the way the English or Connecticutians do), you just stood up at your desk, shook your fist at your computer screen and said, “Now, wait just a minute here, saratoga living…!” That’s because, Phantogram, which consists of the aforementioned Carter and his longtime pal Sarah Barthel, both multi-instrumentalists, singers and songwriters in the band, are the most famous modern natives of the tiny speck of an Upstate New York town that is Greenwich (population: 1728), and you probably assumed, by default, that Phantogram was founded there. That’s actually not the case; as Carter confirms, Phantogram is, in fact, a Saratoga band, because the members were living in the Spa City at the time. But that doesn’t negate Phantogram’s importance to Greenwich; they’re the type of conduit between the “old” and “new” generation that any town tourism bureau would die to have. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, women’s suffrage icon Susan B. Anthony might’ve grown up in Greenwich—and however briefly, appeared on an oddly shaped collectible dollar coin—but she never made you want to get up and dance, right, Town of Greenwich?) Basically, the band is Greenwich’s modern-day Saratoga Race Course: It’s the one attraction that puts the town, otherwise relatively unknown, on the map.

Founded in 2007 under the much-less-memorable moniker Charlie Everywhere, Phantogram were very much a product of the Capital Region’s active arts community—specifically for them, the DIY indie rock, punk and hip-hop scenes. Bands in their orbit at the time included The Kamikaze Hearts (who re-formed to play one of my and Justin’s mutual friend’s weddings) and the Mathematicians, and they hooked up early on with a number of other local bands through the Glens Falls-based indie label, Sub-Bombin Records. But just a handful of artists, such as The Figgs and Jocelyn & Chris Arndt, have been able to break through the ultra-thick, opaque, plexiglass ceiling of the national music scene that has rarely allowed Capital Region bands get beyond the point of local radio play. Carter says he and Barthel consider themselves lucky. “We’re grateful for the scene that we emerged from,” says Carter.

It turns out that the aforementioned Uncommon Grounds plays a role, however small, in the formation of the band. Carter, who worked at the popular Downtown Saratoga coffeehouse for three years, says that back when he was an Uncommon-er, a lot of his coworkers were artists, Skidmore students and local musicians, and they had the ability to control what was playing in the café during the day. “At any given moment, I was exposed to music that I wasn’t familiar with,” says Carter. “We were always turning each other onto different bands, especially indie bands, while we were working.” In other words, Uncommon Grounds’ soundtrack may have helped sculpt the nascent band’s sound.

Phantogram eventually rose above the noise floor in 2010, with the release of their 11-song debut, Eyelid Movies, on well-respected Seattle indie label Barsuk Records (labelmates include Death Cab for Cutie and Nada Surf), and within the year, there was major buzz behind the band. The album garnered a respectable 7.5 out of 10 from the be-all-and-end-all of indie music tastemakers at the time, Pitchfork—the indie rock equivalent of a first-time author getting a favorable review in The New York Times‘ Book Review. Fans responded in kind, with the album cracking the Top 40 on Billboard‘s indie rock chart. That was followed up by 2014’s Voices, which bested their debut’s output considerably, peaking at No.11 on the Billboard 200 and No.3 on the Top Rock Albums and Top Alternative Albums charts, respectively. It also moved more than 100,000 units, which in the post-CD era, is pretty remarkable. Although the band’s third album, Three, hasn’t pushed as much product as its predecessor, it still charted higher, landing in the Top 10 on the Billboard 200, an unheard of feat for a band from our part of Upstate New York. (That was helped, in part, by single “You Don’t Get Me High Anymore.”) Needless to say, Carter quit his day job a long time ago, and both he and Barthel now live in the Los Angeles area. They’ve since recorded with everyone from Outkast’s Big Boi and the pride of Oklahoma, The Flaming Lips, to pop princess Miley Cyrus.

In between albums in 2018, the band released a two-sided single, featuring one original (“Someday”) and one cover (“Saturday”). The latter was penned by one of the band’s favorite artists, Sparklehorse, whose creative force and lead singer, Mark Linkous, took his own life in 2010, the year Phantogram made their big splash. All proceeds from the single’s sales ended up going to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Of course, none of this was done at random; the suicide epidemic had hit close to home for the band. “Sarah’s sister and one of my best friends, Becky, committed suicide a few years ago now, and that really affected our lives in a major way,” says Carter. “[We wanted] to spread awareness and let people know that it’s OK to not be OK, and that everybody’s a little fucked up and goes through stuff, [and that it’s OK to] reach out and talk to somebody. [Addressing everybody] Please don’t make a permanent decision based on a short-term feeling. Feelings come and go, [and] it’s best to reach out to people and talk.” When I offer that, maybe, one way toward happiness is to listen to more Phantogram, Carter responds that “we mostly write sad music.” (Not entirely true, in my opinion.) Most important, says Carter, is people figuring out how to process their feelings. (And if that means doing it by listening to or playing music, sad or happy, all the better, I say.)

As of August, Phantogram has released a pair of strong new singles, “Into Happiness” and “Mister Impossible,” and Carter tells me that, yes, the band will be releasing a new album soon, though he wasn’t able to confirm a specific street date. He also says that the majority of the album was recorded at one of the band’s studios, Harmony West, located on Barthel’s property in Laurel Canyon, a neighborhood just outside of Los Angeles, long connected to the music industry. (Everyone from Neil Young and Joni Mitchell to The Doors and The Byrds called Laurel Canyon home at one time or another.) “We wrote some music with some major icons in the music world,” teases Carter, though with whom, he wouldn’t say. “The fun thing about making our newest [album] was that it reminded me of being back home in Greenwich, recording in the [Harmony Lodge] barn,” where the band cut their earliest demos and EPs.

On August 31, Phantogram is set to play a hometown show at Clifton Park’s Upstate Concert Hall, one of a string of tour dates that finds Phantogram playing an array of songs from their catalog and appearing all over the US, Canada and Mexico. Carter’s excited about the band’s big homecoming show. “What’s fun about playing in [the Capital Region] is the energy,” he says. “The fact that we’re back home in invigorating. I think a lot of people that come are proud of us for our success.” (Yeah, Josh, we’re definitely proud.)

Phantogram have now been together for more than a decade—if you’re wondering, Carter and Barthel have always been just friends, not an item; Barthel has been dating multiple-gold-medal-winning Olympic snowboarder Shaun White since around 2013—and the duo have known each other since pre-school. “We’ve been best friends for a long, long time, and of course, there are times when we want to strangle each other, but for 99 percent of the time, we just get along really well,” says Carter. (I prompted Carter’s “strangle each other” comment with my question, “Have you always been friends or have there been periods where you’ve wanted to strangle each other?,” by the way.) Carter ends the thought by saying, “We love each other, and what fuels making music is the relationship that we have.” So says I: Keep that friendly love flowing, Phantogram. Because as long as the spigot’s open, us fans will continue enjoying your great music. What could be a happier thought than that?