Back to Basics with The Lone Bellow

When Zach Williams—lead vocalist for the Americana trio The Lone Bellow—told a friend that his band was booked to play a show at Interlochen Center for the Arts this summer, he got a response he didn’t expect.

“She said, ‘Oh, you’re playing at a place where I went to summer camp!’” Williams says. “She was so excited.”

Williams is excited now too, knowing a bit more about the natural beauty of northern Michigan and about the arts and culture legacy that Interlochen holds for generations of students and campers alike. He’s also just excited, in general, at the prospect of getting out on the road with his two bandmates—multiinstrumentalist Kanene Pipkin and guitarist Brian Elmquist—for a summer tour that he describes as “back to basics.”

The Lone Bellow burst onto the scene in 2013 with their self-titled debut album, an impassioned and melodic set of indie-folk songs filled with stomping acoustic arrangements and three-part vocal harmonies. 10 years later and touring in support of their fifth album—last year’s self-produced Love Songs for Losers—The Lone Bellow are looking back at their beginnings and trying to recapture some of that magic.

“We’re putting together a celebration tour for this fall,” Williams says when asked about marking the 10-year anniversary of the first album. “We’re actually going to go back and play a bunch of the small rooms that we played way back in the day when that record first came out.”

This summer’s tour, meanwhile—including the Interlochen date—will see a different kind of celebration. Often, Williams says, the group will tour with a full backing band that allows them to flesh out their sound more fully. For this tour, though, it’s just the trio of Williams, Pipkin, and Elmquist—another callback to the band’s early days.

“It helps us get back to basics [when we tour as a trio],” Williams tells Northern Express. “Especially in the show, because there’s nowhere to hide when it’s just the three of us and we’re all just singing around one mic. There’s no snare drum that you can hide behind. And I think that’s one of the reasons we like to do [a trio tour] every now and then.”

Williams acknowledges that it takes a lot of trust for a band to perform in such a sparse and intimate fashion. The Lone Bellow have spent years building that trust, though, and not just when they tour or head into the studio to make a new album.

“We all live about a mile away from each other,” Williams says with a laugh. “Back in the part of COVID where you would ‘pick your pod,’ they were my pod. That’s what’s so great, is that we’re actual friends. And I don’t say that lightly, because I think that’s a hard line for a band to toe. When you’re doing this for years, your friendship can get lost in the work. But we’re still growing, and we love each other, and we love what we do.”

The Lone Bellow will take the stage at Interlochen’s Corson Auditorium on August 17. Tickets prices range from $31 to $49 and can be purchased on Interlochen’s website.