When Tony- and Grammy Award-winning actor and Broadway icon Michael Cerveris grew up in West Virginia, he did not find himself steeped in the music of the region. Like many teens of the time, he rebelled against his surroundings and dove into the world of rock. With a father who was a classical musician and educator, and because he worked at a music shop, Cerveris’ tastes were pretty broad. Attempts to impress his father in the 1970s with classical covers of Emerson, Lake & Palmer and the fiddle-laced work of Kansas fell short, but he could hear the connections between different styles of music.
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Cerveris’ rock and roll and musical theater passions led him to a life in the Northeastern U.S., where he has thrived on stage and screen. He later took an odyssey to New Orleans that brought him back to the childhood roots he hadn’t really bonded with, and that led to the formation of the Americana group Loose Cattle in 2007. Their new album is Someone’s Monster, and they play record release parties in New York City on November 18 and New Orleans on December 2.
Bridging the Genre Gap
“As a kid, I loved rock and roll, and I was playing it from the time I was really young,” Cerveris recalls. “But I was also fascinated by theater. I would go to plays and feel like, ‘why can’t rock and roll do this complicated, layered storytelling thing?’ Then I would go to rock concerts and think, ‘why can’t theater be as exciting as a rock concert?’ Obviously, there have been people who thought that before me, like The Who. When I saw Hedwig the first time, I felt like finally somebody solved the problem of how to do this. Part of it is [writer, director, and star John Cameron Mitchell] made it about somebody fronting a rock band, so you didn’t have to explain why there was a band on stage. You didn’t really have to explain why they were singing because it’s a band, you came to see a show. So those two currents have always run parallel in my mind, and I didn’t understand why you couldn’t just do both.”
When the actor and musician was lured to New Orleans on a project in 2007, he drove down so he could bring his dog. It was his first time in the South in a long time. He notes most Southerners consider West Virginia part of the North, partly because they fought on that side in the Civil War. Yet many Northerners think of it as the South, while East Coasters feel it’s vaguely Midwest-ish.
“It’s like the state that nobody wants to claim, but I loved growing up there,” Cerveris recalls. “I hadn’t really thought about how much of my identity had been forged there, and it wasn’t until I got below the Mason-Dixon [Line] and was living down in Louisiana and took that road trip that I reclaimed a lot of my early formative years. I started recognizing how comfortable I felt and how familiar it felt. I felt very at home, and I started immersing myself in the music I’d been surrounded by, but not really participated in when I was younger.”
Humble Beginnings Lead to Bigger Things
Loose Cattle started strictly as a country covers band, something different for Cerveris and Kimberly Kaye, his co-bandleader, singer, and collaborator. They came from different musical backgrounds and chose to find “weird, left-of-the-dial country covers, or reinterpret pop songs or rock songs in a country way.” Once good opportunities emerged, like appearing on a West Virginian public radio show called Mountain Stage and an American song night at Lincoln Center, they decided to be more serious about their endeavor.
The group’s third and newest album Someone’s Monster serves up a mixture of Americana influences and a set of song characters that also echo the conflicted, flawed people Cerveris has played, although here he and Kaye take turns exploring them. The twangy country track “Here’s That Attention You Ordered” finds a woman trying to comprehend how a local man can be an abusive father and cheater. The ballad “Big Night Out” is about drunken remorse rather than weekend ebullience. The group interprets Lady Gaga’s poignant ballad “Joanne,” inspired by the death of her aunt as a teen, as a fuller band number with fiddle (an instrument that appears throughout the album). They include iconic singer Lucinda Williams in their rendition. The album’s angst-ridden country-rock opener moves along at a good clip too.
“I wrote ‘Further On’ coming out of the lockdowns, and at that time I really thought we were going to, as a society, take the lesson of this global threat to our very existence,” Cerveris explains. “That it would be something like World War II where we all realized we’ve got to stop being the way we are with each other, and this tragic event is an opportunity to really advance as a society together. We just decided not to. That was the initial impulse for the chorus, which I thought we’d be further on than this.”
Progessive Ties
Another connection between Cerveris’ Broadway and Americana sides are the progressive politics prevalent in musical theater and traditional American folk songs. But the tunes Loose Cattle plays and writes are not so much political as they are exploring the human condition amid the different types of people who dot the American landscape.
“People are not black and white,” Cerveris says. “People are much more nuanced and complicated than then we like to think they are because it’s just easier to put people in boxes or define people in a single way. Then you don’t have to think about them so much, and you don’t have to consider their humanity and how much they’re just like you with pieces rearranged. Kimberly has a similar feeling about what we want to talk about, and that’s humans that we live among.”
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Photo by Walter McBride/Corbis via Getty Images
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