Welcome back to JamBase’s baker’s dozen to the bright lights of the music world. Last time we heard from Roots of Creation.

Smart, full of different colors, hooky as hell, Chapel Hill, North Carolina’s The Old Ceremony are everything rock should be but usually isn’t. One picks up on the same vibe that infused late period Beatles and early Tom Waits, but tempered with a pleasantly jaundiced eye and a sonic range that touches on tango, folk, sophisticated jazz, Arabic tones, punk and more. What’s more impressive is how they harness this variety into frameworks that get the job done in just a few minutes.

The group has grown from strength to strength on each successive album, with their latest, Tender Age, coalescing their many charms into a series of super catchy cautionary tales for lovers and dreamers. The curveballs come fast on Tender Age, where seemingly dark titles like “Gun To My Head” and “Ruined My Plans” are snappy love songs, one tune is sung in Chinese, and the whole thing simmers down to a gently spiritual hum that sneaks up and leaves one reflective in the best of ways. (Dennis Cook)

The Old Ceremony plays next at the Motorco Music Hall Benefit for Central Park Charter School on Friday, January 28 in Durham, NC, then on Friday, February 4 in Raleigh, NC as part of the Kings WKNC Double Barrel Benefit. After that The Old Ceremony will open a string of dates for Rooney that will hit Philly, D.C. and more Find full tour dates here.

Here’s what TOC singer-songwriter-bandleader Django Haskins had to say to our inquiries.

The Old Ceremony

Instrument of choice: Picasso guitar, barroom piano
Nicknames: “Dave”

1. Great music rarely happens withoutÂ…
Breaking some eggs. The older I get, the more impatient I am with safe choices.

2. The first album I bought wasÂ…
The Cars’ Heartbeat City

3. The last song or album to really flip my wig wasÂ…
The Walkmen album You and I. It’s the aural equivalent of oversaturated 35mm film: rich, almost rotten colors bleeding into each other nostalgically with occasional bursts of sad yellow light. I lived in that album for at least a year.

4. When I was a kid I wanted to grow up to beÂ…
Elvis Presley. Or Humphrey Bogart. Or a Harlem Globetrotter. I was a mixed up kid.

5. My favorite sort of gig isÂ…
The surprising one. We always enjoy playing together, but every so often there’ll be a show that shows all the signs of being a downer before we start, but explodes into overjoydom. On nights like that, I usually can’t stop grinning at everything that happens onstage.

6. One thing I wish people knew about me isÂ…
I still have all my fingers.

7. I love the sound ofÂ…
Rocky beaches. I used to wander beaches in Maine and Nova Scotia in the summers, smashing rocks down on the ground hoping that one would split and reveal a geode. Never found one, but it got out a lot of my childhood angst.

8. One day I hope to make an album as fantastic asÂ…
Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust or Rum, Sodomy and the Lash by The Pogues

9. The best meal I ever had on tour was atÂ…
We’ve have some great ones. Off the top of my head, I’d say Vatan, a prix fixe Indian place on E. 37th St. in NYC.
10. I always find the coolest audiences inÂ…
The frozen foods section. And house concerts.

11. The worst habit I’ve picked up being on the road all the time isÂ…
Staring listlessly at trees flying by for hours on end. And my cowboy mouth.

12. The Beatles or the Stones? Por que?
The Beatles. They actually reinvented themselves over and over. The Stones, though I love them, found one good sound and stuck with it. I prefer variety, if I have to choose only one.

13. The craziest thing I ever saw wasÂ…
A long distance bus ride in China that was so crowded that the only place I could stand was on top of a basket of pig parts heading to market.

The Old Ceremony – Til My Voice Is Gone from Sam Griffith on Vimeo.

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