Deer Tick and Colorado Share a Mutual Love for Each Other

As a transplant to Colorado who grew up in Rhode Island, I’ve always been fascinated by the Centennial State’s love of Rhode Island’s greatest export of the past few decades, indie rock band Deer Tick. Shortly after moving to Colorado, a new friend of mine wanted to put together a group trip to catch this band she was really into called Deer Tick, and at the time, I knew the band name was familiar, but I couldn’t quite remember why. It took me a few days of her talking about them to remember that I went to high school with members of the band.

I don’t remember frontman John McCauley’s brief time at my high school, LaSalle Academy in Providence, Rhode Island, before he left for another school, but I distinctly remember bassist Christopher Ryan. The bassist was in the band for the school’s production of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” in which I was part of the cast. We both took AP Music Theory together, my senior (his junior) year of high school, which has the ominous distinction of being the place I was in when I first heard about the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. And, of course, Ryan was the bassist in the best band in the whole school, a little indie rock duo that could never keep a drummer called Ophelia.

“Thank you for saying that,” said Ryan as we recently sat down, partially to reminisce but also to talk about Deer Tick’s upcoming co-headlining tour with Drive-By Truckers that makes stops in four different cities in Colorado, including Boulder at the Boulder Theater on June 21. “I still have a box of [Ophelia] CDs in my closet at my mom’s house. I should send you one.”

That high school is responsible for the first meeting between Ryan and McCauley, but it seemed the two were destined to continue to run into each other afterwards as part of the local music scene. “I kind of knew him there. He was there for a year; he was a year below me. I think you were a year ahead of me, right? Yeah, he was a year below me. He was only there for a year, but I knew him independently from the music scene, from like teenager open mic days at [local music venue] AS220 and stuff like that.”

The first official show for a band that had adapted the name Deer Tick happened in December of 2004, meaning that the band passed their 20-year milestone in December of last year. But to Ryan, it hardly feels like that much time has passed. “No, especially thinking how long it’s been since I’ve seen you, that doesn’t feel two decades,” Ryan said, chuckling. “No, I don’t feel that old. In spite of being about to turn 40, it doesn’t feel like all these things have happened.”

If Colorado has a fascination with Deer Tick, it feels like the fascination is mutual, as the band seems to really enjoy the reaction they get from crowds when playing in Colorado. “We’ve done tours of just Colorado,” Ryan explained, “like we fly into Denver, play a week in Colorado, and then fly out. It’s a big music state.”

As for the pairing of Deer Tick with Drive-By Truckers, that seems to be something that has been a long time coming. “We’ve known of each other forever,” Ryan explained. “One of our earliest tours was with Jason Isbell, who used to be with the Drive-By Truckers. That was in 2009, and then we just did another tour with him last summer. But I’ve known who they are forever. I hope that they’ve known who we are. But it’s something that just makes sense, and grows up organically. Like, ‘Oh, you guys should tour together.’ ‘Okay, let’s do that.’ And it’s something that’s been talked about for years, but this is the first time we can actually make it happen.”

As we were talking, the band was working on the next Deer Tick album, with hopes that they’ll have it out relatively soon. “By the time we’re on tour and we come to Colorado, I’m guessing we’ll either be waiting for the songs to be mastered, if we’ve picked the record. We’re gonna have over an hour’s worth of material, and we’ll have to whittle it down to a record’s worth of songs.” As for a release date, that remains too early to tell, but Colorado will soon have even more material from the Rhode Island band that we can all fall in love with again.