Earlham Echo

July 18, 2023

Unless you’re the Rolling Stones or Taylor Swift or some other wildly popular live act, being on the road in a travelling band isn’t necessarily glamorous. Take Magnolia Boulevard, for example. The Lexington, Kentucky-based band was couped up in their van on a long drive when we caught up with them last week.

“It’s almost like a job. It’s weird,” said keyboardist Ryan Allen with a laugh. “It seems like any time you get paid for something, it will turn into work. It’s work that we love though. There are some inconveniences to it, I guess, and that’s why they pay you. Like right now. We’re driving through Kansas. It’s not the funnest thing to do. But I wouldn’t trade it.”

The band is out in support of their excellent new five-song EP, Things Are Gonna Change. The record is an engaging amalgam of southern rock, blues, and soul, with blistering guitar solos, rock steady rhythms, and sultry vocals. PRS Guitars Founder and CEO Paul Reed Smith, a long-time friend of the band, helped mix and master the record, and also takes a marvelous solo on Say It Like You Mean It.

Magnolia Boulevard’s unique sound came about through an organic process.

“I don’t think we’ve ever really had any intention to sound any certain way,” said Allen. “We get in the room and play together and that’s how it comes out. Me and (vocalist) Maggie (Noelle) grew up playing bluegrass. This is the first electric band Maggie’s ever been in. We all come from different backgrounds, and that lends itself to a nice product. You can hear those influences of bluegrass and folk. But also, blues, jam, and psychedelic. We’d all been in a bunch of bands, and the first time we ever got together, we all just kind of looked around and knew that this project was going to be different—there was something special about it. I don’t know what it is and how you quantify it.”

Even with the exceptional musicianship of the band, Noelle grabs your attention with her strong voice, a mix of bluesy muscle and down-home sweetness. Allen and his future bandmates ‘discovered’ her without even trying.

“We were just some of those hippie kids at a festival, at night jamming acoustic stuff around the fire somewhere,” said Allen. “Our old drummer, it was kind of his idea. He was like, ‘Man, we gotta get this girl in front of a real band.’ She wasn’t being used to her full extent in the bluegrass world.”

That original drummer, Todd Gordon, passed away in 2021. Back in the early days of the band, Gordon quit a good ‘day job’ when his employer wouldn’t give him the time off he needed when the band got an offer the open for Blues Traveler for a few weeks. That spirit is still alive with the band today. A friend of Gordon’s replaced him as the drummer—and the band got a new bass player last summer.

“It’ll never be the same. That’s one thing we accepted right off the bat,” said Allen. “When Todd died, we decided we were going to keep playing. We knew we were going to have to accept that whatever happens in the future, it’s not going to be like it was. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be better. Our new rhythm section is a lot more ‘rock-n-roll.’ It’s like a new challenge—playing the old songs in kind of a different way.”

Many of the band’s songs come out of rehearsal jams without much planning. They’ll find a groove they like and develop the tune from there. Allen records those structures via phone memos and then gets to work on lyrics.

“Maggie and I will try to work it out at home with lyrics,” he said. “It’s been a challenge for me to write melodies for Maggie because I can’t sing like that at all. I grew up trying to write like John Prine songs. Trying to write for a singer like Maggie is a totally different challenge. Something I haven’t done before.”