“Don’t Settle Down” is so much more than the title of a song.
The chorus of the first single from “Aloe,” rock duo Illiterate Light’s new EP, doubles as a rallying cry, inspired by and written during the summer of 2020 protests that called for the removal of Confederate statues along Monument Avenue. Though guitarist and lead vocalist Jeff Gorman and drummer Jake Cochran had been living elsewhere — Harrisonburg and Nashville, respectively — they happened to book two weeks at a Richmond recording studio at the same time that friends and kindred spirited artists demonstrated in the name of racial justice. “The response was to write about it,” Gorman says, “and to capture that energy and try to say, ‘Here’s a little bit of the way I’m feeling about this.’”
You might say “Don’t Settle Down” is also the approach Gorman and Cochran take to touring, given the success they’ve found on the road. Recent 2023 stops have included the Bristol Rhythm and Roots Reunion and the Newport Folk Festival — their third appearance at the latter and their second straight year bringing along their bicycle-powered stage setup. Closer to home, they have a New Year’s Eve set coming up at the Jefferson Theater in Charlottesville, and a sold-out show just around the corner at Get Tight Lounge on Saturday, Sept. 16.
In another sense, “Don’t Settle Down” could describe their drive to share their music. While their early successes led to backing from Atlantic Records for their 2019 self-titled debut full-length, the slow pace of the major label release schedule proved frustrating. They decided to go their own way by forming a new, more collaborative partnership between the label they formed themselves, Red Book Records, and label services company, Thirty Tigers, ushering in an era of greater creative freedom. That partnership started with the acclaimed “Sunburned” LP, which came out in January, and continues with “Aloe,” a varied and revelatory set of four songs that got their start during the “Sunburned” sessions.
One member who is settling in his own way — as a new Richmond resident — is Jake Cochran. After spending four formative years living in Nashville and operating a home studio, Cochran, a native of Northern Virginia who visited family in Richmond frequently in his youth, has a fresh opportunity to reconnect with his roots. The move, like the show at Get Tight Lounge, also sets the stage for the members of Illiterate Light to immerse themselves in a music scene in which they’ve already made extensive inroads.
Style Weekly: You’ve been playing some big venues and festivals. How did the show at Get Tight Lounge come about?
Jake Cochran: The show is super-exciting … We’ve been playing Charlottesville a lot. We have a show coming up [at the Jefferson] on New Year’s Eve, and we really wanted to do something in Richmond proper.
Jeff Gorman: We’ve known Drew Schlegel, who owns Get Tight. We played with his band Tinnarose in 2019 in Richmond and in Baltimore, so we became buddies with him … Drew and I were texting, and he was like, “Let me give you a tour of the place.” It had a great energy, a great vibe. It reminded me immediately of Austin, Texas — where we’ve done great shows for South by Southwest — because of the outdoor element. It was like, “Oh man. Let’s see if we can do something [on] short notice…”
Jake’s moving back to Richmond, and we really want to let everybody in the state of Virginia, but also in Richmond, know that we’ve missed everybody, [and] that we’re happy to put a flag in the ground here and say Virginia is home for us and the community here is what makes our band possible.
Place and displacement both figure prominently in your music, and that’s certainly true of “Don’t Settle Down.” Where did you each grow up?
JG: I grew up in Towson, Maryland, which is a suburb of Baltimore, 15 minutes north of Baltimore City, until I was 18. Then I came to college here in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, which is where I still currently live with my wife … Growing up in Baltimore, there wasn’t as much access to the outdoors and nature, and when I came down for school in this little mountain valley college town, there was this sense right away like, “I really love it here. I really want to be here.” In addition to that, there’s a killer — at least when Jake and I met and formed bands together and became buddies — a really cool DIY punk house show scene. It wasn’t really just coming down for nature. It was mainly because my sophomore [and] junior year at JMU, every Thursday, Friday, Saturday there were six house shows that all had different bands playing. It was really cool to experience that in a small town.
JC: My parents both grew up right around Richmond and both went to VCU, so I’ve always had ties to this area. I would come to Richmond to visit grandparents my whole life. But I grew up in Northern Virginia. My father’s a painter and had a studio, a pretty historic art space called the Torpedo Factory in Old Town Alexandria, so I grew up around a ton of artists and a really cool community there. Somewhat similar to Jeff, I was really just living in the suburbs. Drove everywhere. Strip malls. So coming to JMU in 2008, [to] Harrisonburg, the small-town feel was very new to me and really cool. It was the first time that I found myself [thinking], “This feels like my decision to be here. This is what I like…”
My wife and I got married after college and lived in Harrisonburg up until about four years ago. [Her] family’s all from Louisiana and Mississippi and we were feeling the distance between us and them, and we made the decision that Nashville was a fun and exciting music scene, but more importantly to us, it was a good split between Virginia and Mississippi … It was an awesome four years. For about two of those years, I ended up owning a house and a studio as part of that house. It was a big growing moment for me musically, because it was the pandemic, and as much touring as we wanted to be doing, that wasn’t happening, and I started to find some bands to record and produce out there. That was when we wrote our album “Sunburned,” between Jeff coming out to that studio and Jeff building a studio at his property in Virginia and me going there.
When and where did you record “Don’t Settle Down”?
JG: Jake and I were living in two different cities … We wanted to get together and work on stuff, but we didn’t know what it was going to be. We rented out Montrose [Recording] for two weeks in June of 2020 with Adrian [Olsen] and Alex [Spalding] — Adrian kind of engineering-slash-producing. It was part-writing session, part-recording session… [“Don’t Settle Down”] was one of the first songs that we did [and] we really wanted to lean against the advice of everybody that was in our world at that time who was saying [that] hard rock, and rock ’n’ roll and aggressive rock is not cool, and “It’s out.” We were just like, “F–k it, we like heavy music. We like big riffs.”
That song got written watching everything unfold, and we turned it in to the folks we were working with at the time — label folks — and [got] just crickets. It wasn’t like they were afraid of anything politically. I think they just didn’t really dig the tune, so we got into a holding pattern there for a while. If we’d had our way, that song would have come out in July of 2020. We just contractually couldn’t do that.
Were all the songs on “Aloe” captured during the “Sunburned” sessions?
JC: A lot of it was fully recorded in that same time frame, and then some of it was finished [later]… We recorded a lot more than we ended up using for “Sunburned,” then we spent a lot of time editing ourselves and trying to look through all of the output that was there and find the storyline, find the through point, and what we selected as “Sunburned” was a really special grouping of songs for us that shared a specific mood and atmosphere.
Then there was this other group of songs — what has become “Aloe.” We loved each one of these songs, and they are four very different songs from each other, and from “Sunburned.” Another clear outsider [is] called “Always Always,” and it’s the first song of ours that I sing lead on … It’s a pretty joyful, nostalgic and happy love song. Compared to a lot of “Sunburned,” [it] just felt a little too cheery, and it was a moment for me where I was a little discouraged, to be like, “Man, I’ve really pushed myself to get this song out and to finish it and to sing it and I’m really excited about it.” But I was the one that cut it from the record, because I was like, “I love this song, but it’s the wrong color here. It’s not working.” We both said at that time, “Well, maybe there’s another life for it.”
A couple months ago, we were sitting around and talking about upcoming plans and moving to Richmond, and I was like, “Man, I think we just grab those other songs and let’s make them into something …” We both got behind it and breathed new life into each one of the songs — a new mix, rerecording some parts — just enough to get us excited on the project again.
How does it feel having more control over when and how you share new music?
JG: It’s the bomb… [Thirty Tigers] put out “Sunburned,” [and] they put out “Aloe.” They could have passed on either, but we create what we want to create and we go to them and say, “Here’s our plan for how we’d like to release this, here’s the timeline that we think would be best,” and we hash it out and figure out whether that’s going to be the right move…
The reason that is so great is because it’s a really stifling feeling to be creating something, to be writing a song, and have it in the back of your head [that] it could be two-and-a-half years before that song actually gets out to the world because of the amount of B.S. that comes with being with a bigger label. I’m not really here to cast shade, because there’s plenty of artists that do a great job with that, but it really weighed on Jake and I. It’s probably more on our end. We didn’t really know how to navigate that water…
Jake and I hit a point a couple of years ago where we were like “I want to write a song, I want to record it, I want it to be out X amount of months later.” If it’s a year because vinyl production is what it is, then we figure that out, but we’ve got to start having a way to track something and put it out more quickly, because that really fuels us creatively. “Aloe” is the first time we’ve really done that … It really jazzes me to write something and be like, “How can we record this right away and where’s it going to go?” and get those gears in motion. It really fuels my creative fire. So I’m happy with where we’re at.
Illiterate Light’s “Aloe” EP is out Friday, Sept. 15. For more information, visit illiteratelight.com. The band will perform at Get Tight Lounge on Saturday, Sept. 16. Palmyra will also perform. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. and music starts at 8:00 p.m. For more information, visit gettightrva.com.
