The Broken Letters

Story & Photo By Jan King

Why would two members of a successful hard driving alternative band want to go it alone with a much softer, introspective sound? For former Plate Six members David Hickox and Brad Davis, moving into their new incarnation as The Broken Letters was a natural progression into vocal-based music and song writing.

“I had held an interest in vocal-based music for quite a while,” says Hickox. “Once I developed some lyrical confidence, I became more and more interested in making that the focus of my musical efforts; hard to do with three half-stacks in the band. So I started making these new songs on my own instead of fleshing them out with a band. I showed them to Brad and he was interested in being a part, so we formed a band. It’s really more of writing and recording team. He shoots down some of my lesser ideas and expands the better ones. Live, we mix it up, playing as a two-piece to a five-piece band. Sometimes it’s just me, depending on the availability of other members.

“Plate Six was a rigid, mechanical form of music. Our focus was on creating these structures that worked together to make this super thing. But there was a certain part of my brain that was confined by those structures. It felt safe and easy to hide within the structure and behind a wall of amps. I challenged myself to be very bare and The Broken Letters is what happened. I wanted to explore this deep thing that was going on in my brain that had been crowded out in Plate Six.”

The Broken Letters has also allowed Hickox and Davis to spend time exploring the space within the music and to allow their listeners more ability to interpret the sounds.

“People lack restraint,” Hickox explains. “People often play in the interest of themselves rather than the interest of the song. Brad and I were fortunate that the concept of our last band was pretty much play everything all the time so overplaying worked in that context. We had our fun with it and we’re over it. I did about a year of touring and recording with Dan Sartain around the time The Broken Letters was getting started. I thought I really had it down, but he whipped me into shape and made me see how to play in support of a singer. He was always, ‘less, less, play less.’ And I saw that the less I played, the better it sounded. Good music with the exception of metal or other purposefully outward

music, invites you in and leaves space for you within the sound.”

The Broken Letters Sing the Burning Alphabet, the band’s first full length CD, is out this summer. With all the changes in the music world, it is easy to find and take a listen. “Everything’s changing very rapidly now.” Hickox says. “People have bought our records directly from us from all over the U.S., places we’ve never played, with no press agent or promos sent out or ads anywhere. It’s an

organic thing, a user-controlled society rather than a corporatecontrolled society. There are so many bands I’ve discovered from a blog or file sharing from a friend that I would have never even had the opportunity to hear in the old model. People are hearing our band the same way. It’s like the world is one giant mix tape with more people being more excited about music.”

Followers of Plate Six will find a much different style with The Broken Letters and Hickox hopes they come along for the ride, but says, “I’ve found that you don’t need a band to do what we do. You only need three things: vocals, a musical bed of some sort, and mood. If you get much more than these three things going on at any time, then everything starts meaning less.”

www.myspace.com/thebrokenletters