By ERIC SCHELKOPF
When indie folk duo Frances Luke Accord performs Thursday at the Golden Dagger, 2447 N. Halsted St. in Chicago, it will mark the first time Nicholas Gunty and Brian Powers have played together since before the start of the pandemic.
Fans who have been waiting for Frances Luke Accord to return to the stage will hear the duo perform songs from its new album, “Safe In Sound,” set for release on Feb. 9 on Two-Dale Records/Tone Tree Music. Also on the bill is Michigan native Chris DuPont.
The show starts at 8 p.m. and tickets are $15, available at ticketweb.com.
I had the chance to talk to Powers about the upcoming show.
Q – Great talking to you. I imagine that you will be performing songs from your upcoming album “Safe In Sound” during the show.
Yeah, we are, and we are really looking forward to it. It will be our first time performing a lot of the songs live.
It’s also our first show since pre-COVID. So that’s notable.
Q – Oh, seriously?
Yeah. Nick, my bandmate, lives out on the East Coast and I live in Chicago. We don’t get to see each other nearly as much, particularly since COVID.
We’re really looking forward to being back together and sharing new and old music with our Chicago fan base.
We played at a friend’s wedding about a year ago. It was just kind of background music, so I don’t really count that as a show. Thursday night at the Golden Dagger will be the first show we’ve played since Feb. 1, 2020, in Asheville, North Carolina.
We both work other jobs to make ends meet and it’s just frankly kind of the reality post COVID about how really brutal it is for musicians. It was really hard pre-COVID and it is just like immeasurably harder now, post-COVID, just to make your ends meet.
I think it’s important to talk about. I think it’s really important for musicians to kind of be transparent about how difficult it is to make ends meet.
You know, we have roughly 120,000 streams of our music every month, but we make about $300 a month off of that.
Q – You must have a pretty close relationship to be able to survive like you are at a distance.
Yeah, you know, Nick is like a brother at this point. So we make it work.
We spent a lot of time together pre-COVID. We were touring nationally and doing anywhere from 50 to 100 shows a year.
We’re just grateful to be able to play at all post-COVID.
Q – Your music has been described as “the definition of lean-in music.” Do you think that’s an apt description of your music?
Yeah, we do. We like that description a lot, actually.
Our music is very quiet. It’s very soft and calming and we put a lot of effort into lyric writing and arranging.
We hope listeners lean in and listen really closely.
Q – Of course your new album is coming out in February and the title of the new album is “Safe In Sound.” It seems like that’s a play on words, but there also seems to be a meaning behind the name.
Yeah, definitely. We were making a lot of the music on this album during COVID, when the pandemic was raging outside of our respective apartment. And so we both kind of felt that we were safe inside with our music.
And so that’s kind of where it came from.
Q – Musically, what were you trying to do on this album?
Musically, we were trying to open things up. We wanted to make a folk record that also had an ambience. We’re both big suckers for ambient music.
We try to write folk music that is musically interesting. That kind of means chord progressions that aren’t super straight forward.
We wanted to make music as interesting as possible, but also open it up to collaborators. So for the first time on this album, we got other folks involved, like Don Mitchell of Darlingside, who co-produced a lot of this music.
It was really helpful in kind of “unstucking” us whenever we were stuck on certain songs. Like The Beatles’ mantra, “I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends,” that was very true in the making of this album. We had a lot of great help from a lot of great friends.
Q – Also, I see the song “This Morning” features Chicago artist Liz Chidester.
Yeah, she’s great. She has an amazing voice.
Q – Do you think it also gets your music out to more people by collaborating with different artists?
Definitely. It’s partially a strategic business decision, but also, it’s enjoyable to work with folks whose music you really enjoy.
Q – Now you and Nick were both raised in South Bend, Indiana and started performing together while you were at the University of Notre Dame. What made you click? Why did it feel right playing together?
It was a mutual love of songwriting, particularly folk based songwriting.
There aren’t that many people out there who are writing folk music. And so when we met each other as 18-year-olds, we were just I think really, really drawn to each other and also inspired by each other’s love of the craft.
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