Kai Crowe-Getty says Lord Nelson, one of Charlottesville’s most successful party-rock bands over the last 10 years, isn’t breaking up. But the group he fronts isn’t so much together, either.
“Lord Nelson has been hitting the road hard for the last decade, and that’s been a wonderful experience,” Crowe-Getty says. “This is the first time in a decade for me not to know what’s around the next corner.”
Two lords of Nelson, guitarist Calloway Jones and bassist Niko Cvetanovich, have found success with their metal outfit,
Üga Büga, and will start a tour of Japan in mid-August.
Crowe-Getty, going in the opposite amplification direction, released a solo album of contemplative Americana tracks on June 27.
The Wreckage, featuring 10 new songs from Crowe-Getty, takes a more thoughtful approach than the rocker has employed in the past. The record offers a dreamy, wistful take—and an opportunity for Crowe-Getty to tell a more personal story. “Lord Nelson is Saturday night, and this stuff is Sunday morning,” he says.
The singer-songwriter began working on the tracks before the COVID-19 pandemic—at the same time that Lord Nelson was putting together its 2022 LP, Transmission. Crowe-Getty started recording The Wreckage alongside his bandmates, working with multiple crossover studio players, but wasn’t entirely sure what direction the final project would take.
The full band went back on the road after the pandemic subsided, but it “got to a point for Lord Nelson to go in different directions,” Crowe-Getty says.
The balladeer says the album coming out of his solo soul-searching isn’t exactly autobiographical, but it is introspective. The characters dotting The Wreckage’s lyrical universe—many inspired by folks Crowe-Getty’s known around Nelson County—suffer hardship, deal with loss, and trade in nostalgia.
In the end, though, Crowe-Getty intends the album to be hopeful.
“There is much more of me in this project than anything else I have done,” he says. “It’s a heavier album, but there are a lot of high notes. It has an optimistic lean.”
Crowe-Getty says the solo creative process was more difficult than creating the loud rock ‘n’ roll that’s long been Lord Nelson’s calling card. Songwriting took longer, and required him to “trust himself more” than he had in the past.
Crowe-Getty and friends of the Lord Nelson program recorded some of the songs on the album at White Star Sound in Louisa (a veritable mecca for local and regional folk and Americana acts). Others were tracked at Monkeyclaus Recording Studio in Roseland, and still more were laid down in Nashville with Sons of Bill’s Sam Wilson—the idea was to create a “big tent” of support for The Wreckage.
For Crowe-Getty, it will be fun to celebrate a new chapter when he takes these songs live. “It’ll be all my stuff, but I might throw a Lord Nelson song in here or there,” he says. “It’s a blurry line; I’m still trying to see what fits in what context.” And Lord Nelson fans will have a chance to see the softer side of Crowe-Getty—indeed, his goal on The Wreckage is to contrast his “rocking, rowdy history.”
“I’m mining a lot of things from my own life that I think resonate,” he says.
Take “Heavy as Heaven,” a song Crowe-Getty wrote in direct response to his time on the road with Lord Nelson. He says he played a stretch of unfulfilling shows, and was feeling “broken and disconnected from the world.” He sat down at his piano and wrote: “You say you seen the good ones all go first, leaving us shufflin’ around this dirt. / We’re broken and we’re damaged and we’re cursed, but the best of us can push against the worst.”
Still a Nelson County resident after all these years, Crowe-Getty’s been writing songs since he was in middle school. He’s supported artists like Joe Pug, Chuck Regan, Andrew Combs, and Erin Rea over the course of his career. He’s a film editor and producer in his downtime, and directed every video associated with The Wreckage.
That kind of hustle has been a fact of life for each member of Lord Nelson over the past decade, Crowe-Getty says. It’s what it takes to tour exhaustively and pursue your dreams.
“We’ve all made some tough sacrifices,” he says. “It’s really difficult to make a living as a blue collar band playing original music … I don’t know what it will look like [going forward], but I am very much focused on this right now.”
