Ben Morrison is at his Oakland home making sure he is ready for the tour.
“It’s the calm before the storm,” he says. “I’m doing all the laundry and getting loose ends tied up, making sure I have extra strings and my pedal board is working. I’m also going to get snacks. Snacks are very important on the road, especially for me, so I don’t get hangry.”
Aug. 27 | 4 p.m. | Free
Commons Beach | Tahoe City
Sept. 21-24
Lost Sierra Hoedown | Quincy
After nearly a decade as the lead singer and guitarist for The Brothers Comatose, Morrison still finds himself hungry for the road.
“I get kind of bored when I’m at home for too long,” he says. “It’s especially great in the summertime when it’s festival season and you can jump in rivers wherever you go. It’s just that much more adventurous.”
“All we’ve ever wanted to do was play music and have people come out to our shows. We couldn’t be more thankful for having people join us to participate and everything.”
– Ben Morrison
Morrison and his banjo playing brother, Alex, were first introduced to folk and bluegrass by their parents who hosted music parties at their Petaluma home every Sunday when the boys were young.
Watch the “Stickshifts and Safetybelts” performance from the “The Elevator Sessions”
“Everybody would pass songs around and jam on each other’s tunes,” Morrison says. “We had a couple of acoustic guitars laying around the house and I remember at some point picking one up and going to take a lesson at the community center with a bunch of people strumming the chords to ‘Proud Mary’ in slow motion.”
By the time Morrison moved to San Francisco to attend college, his music had begun to pick up speed. At 1781 Haight St. in an apartment above a tattoo parlor, the proto-band worked on originals, as well as classic bluegrass, country and rock tunes. A few years later around the time Alex moved into the house, the band solidified and started to hit the road in earnest.
“I loved those early days when we didn’t care about money or anything like that,” Morrison says. “We’d drink hard, party hard and play our guts out night after night. It was the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. We still give it our best, but we probably don’t party as hard as we used to. When you play shows six nights a week, you can’t get drunk every night or you’re going to die.”
The band recently completed a series of music-video cover songs known as “The Elevator Sessions,” which were filmed in a downtown San Francisco mall.
“Seeing the reaction on people’s faces was the whole purpose,” says Morrison. “Some were pissed off because it was Christmas time and they were shopping and we were taking up space in the elevator.”
While their popularity has grown with regionally acclaimed albums and festival headlining spots, the band was eventually priced out of their Haight Street apartment, which led them to dub their latest album “City Painted Gold.” But as the times keep a-changing, The Brothers Comatose continues to gain momentum within the national bluegrass and folk scene.
“All we’ve ever wanted to do was play music and have people come out to our shows,” says Morrison. “We couldn’t be more thankful for having people join us to participate and everything. Things developed more slowly at first, but now we are gung-ho to get into the studio and keep putting out new music. At this point, we’re just going to keep on doing it for as long as possible.”
For more information, visit thebrotherscomatose.com.
