It’s not the greatest idea to live with your co-workers. Spending up to eight hours a day with certain personalities while on the clock can be challenging, but then to be by that person’s side in your downtime is certainly a way to wreck a friendship.
Or, if that working relationship is based on the creation of music, close living quarters can aid the imaginative process, a way to put heads together to influence and inspire certain ideas. It works for local band Elder Grown, the funk, reggae, rock jam band featuring brothers Josh, John and Paul Hoffman, who are also joined by Brandon Clark and Sam Kelly. The siblings have for the most part lived together forever, from the early days of the band when they all occupied a group house on Durango’s south side to now, as Josh and John still live together in a house that also serves as the band’s practice space and recording studio, with youngest sibling Paul living with Clark close by. Kelly remains close by as well. It’s how they’ve kept the ideas flowing and the songwriting prolific.
Elder Grown will take the stage for the first time in more than a year with two socially distanced shows tonight, and another two Saturday at Animas City Theatre.
If you go
What: Rock and jam with Elder Grown.
When: 6:30 and 9:30 p.m. today and Saturday.
Where: Animas City Theatre, 128 E. College Drive.
Tickets: Friday sold out, Saturday show $20
More information: Visit or call 799-2281.
“I can think of a melody in my head, I’ll write a song with that melody and I’ll go and hum it to Brandon or show him and he’ll get on the keyboards and make keys to it,” Paul said. “We’re actually whipping them out; the speed of which we can take a song from my notebook to performing it is way faster than it used to be. I can write, and the next day, we’ll be saying, ‘we should play this on the show.’ It’s kind of cool.”
“You always have someone you can bounce an idea off of,” John said. “Or, you hear someone playing in another room and that will motivate you to play along, too.”
“Funkalicious rocking roots,” “Personal Pandora Station” – those are a few of the terms coined for Elder Grown’s sound, apt descriptors for a band that walks a line of sonic exploration playing funk or reggae, rock or jam.
They spent their downtime of the last year and some change writing. The result is a bank of new tunes, so many new songs written, in fact, that Paul admits to writing more than he’s capable of remembering. For middle brother John, these new songs will make their way into the live show, and likely appear on their forthcoming record, which will be funded by a Kickstarter campaign just announced by the band.
“I’ve been doing a ton of songwriting, almost too much,” John said. “We’re really having to figure out where we want to go with a lot of our songs, picking between 20 different songs of which ones we want to be the flagship going forward.”
As much as they put into the writing and recording of tunes for their permanent catalog, playing live is their bread and butter. They’re an exciting band to watch: a quintet with numerous vocalists and multi-instrumentalists who will swap out instruments, often at times mid-song. Its part of the thrill of their live sets that remain spontaneous and often unpredictable.
“We’re always trying to build things and have a shaped contour to where we build it; come out hot, mellow it out and groove for a little while, and then we end it big,” Kelly said. “That’s our flow, but in the moment, even our most meticulously planned setlist, in the middle of our show we totally throw it out the window and we’re just winging it.”
Bryant Liggett is a freelance writer and KDUR station manager. Reach him at liggett_b@fortlewis.edu.
