Eric Ryan Anderson
Holcomb fronts “a blue-collar band that works hard.”
When Drew Holcomb was 17 years old, his younger brother, Jay, died suddenly from complications related to spina bifida, just a few days shy of his 14th birthday. “I heard all these platitudes from people that he was in a better place, and I couldn’t relate to that,” Holcomb says, hours before he and the Neighbors took the stage at the Austin City Limits Music Festival in Texas earlier this month. “Music was the medicine that helped me get through that experience.”
Holcomb grew up to become a folk-influenced roots rocker, an Americana singer-songwriter whose tunes sound just as honest and comfortable on critically acclaimed TV shows such as How I Met Your Mother, Criminal Minds and About a Boy as they do onstage and on record. He married his longtime musical partner, Ellie Bannister, and the couple formed a band — with two of their neighbors — and recorded a series of albums, each generating more buzz than the previous one.
In January, Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors released Medicine, a sturdy and reassuring record that is the group’s highest-charting and best-selling album yet. Its title reaches all the way back to 1999, taking inspiration from Jay’s death.
The music of Radiohead, Van Morrison and David Gray was the medicine Holcomb took while grieving. “Listening to those artists was like opening a door for me, leading me down a lot of different paths,” he says. “That’s the great thing about music. It has the power to bond people together. It’s an unexplainable connection that helps people feel like they’re not alone.”
Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors will bring their power-to-heal songs to the Majestic Theatre on Sunday, Oct. 18. By year’s end, the Nashville-based band will have played about 140 shows in support of Medicine.
“We’re not going to wait around for radio to get our music heard,” he says about building a grassroots fan base, album by album. “We’re known as a blue-collar band that goes out and works hard. Our fans are people like us, who believe in the music and want other people to hear it, too.”
On Medicine, recorded live with everyone in the studio over eight productive days, Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors sing about everyday living: loyalty, hardship, marriage, friendship, alienation, faith. Half of the band’s live set comes from the new album, and at least four songs on Medicine have been featured on television shows.
Holcomb says the first series to use his music was Army Wives, which aired on Lifetime from 2007 to 2013, and the band bought its first van after placing a song on Parenthood, which used “Live Forever” during its first season. “Hourglass,” from 2011’s Chasing Someday, is featured in the recent Katherine Heigl film Jenny’s Wedding.
Producers have always chosen previously recorded and released songs, rather than asking for something new for a specific scene, Holcomb adds. “A producer once told me, ‘When you write the right song on the right record, it will do the work for you,’” he says. “That’s one of the truest things I’ve ever heard.”
Now that the Holcombs have started a family, Ellie no longer tours with the group (although her voice is so critical to the band’s sound that she is featured on Medicine, and she also made recent forays into Christian music). Her absence onstage means the rest of the band needs to bring the backing-vocals firepower. Keyboard player Grant Pittman and drummer Jon Womble join the core trio of Holcomb on vocals and guitar, lead guitarist Nathan Dugger and bassist Rick Brinsfield.
“We definitely don’t want to try to replace Ellie,” Holcomb says. “She’s irreplaceable.”
