NCAA playoff theme helps band coming to Musikfest Cafe 'find their people'

BETHLEHEM, Pa. — If you watched any of the recent NCAA playoff tournaments — "The Big Dance" — you couldn't escape the rousing, spirit-raising theme song played on promos, previews and pauses.

Not that you'd want to escape it. "Dance With Everybody" by Americana band Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors is a great song, even without the excitement of the tournament.

But the tournament's massive audience has given the song a boost it probably couldn't have gotten otherwise, Holcomb conceded in a recent phone call to promote his show at 8 p.m. Sunday at Musikfest Cafe at ArtsQuest Center in Bethlehem.

“My understanding is there’s someone internal to the marketing department there at NCAA or TNT — I’m not sure who all has been involved — who's a fan of the music," Holcomb said in the call from his Nashville home.

"They ran the song last year as a very short, online-only promo, and people responded pretty well to it. So this year they decided to go for the full thing and use it all over the place — TV, online, commercials, et cetera.”

'Seems to work well'

"Dance With Everybody" first was released in 2022, and Holcomb said it actually was born out of the coronavirus lockdowns of 2021.

“It’s a pretty cool story," Holcomb said. "My kids go to school in our neighborhood in East Nashville and I was dropping them off one day" when he ran into friend and neighbor Ketch Secor, lead singer-songwriter for Old Crow Medicine Show, who also was dropping off his child.

"We started talking about how we both sort of had just gotten back to where we were just playing normal post-COVID shows," Holcomb said.

"Being a musician then was pretty strange. I was playing lots of shows to camera screens, live streams and not our actual fans live and in person.

“So really this song is just an ode to the audience. We were just talking about how much we love the magic that happens in the room with a live, with a real roomful of people."

Holcomb said that message "obviously translates really well to the live show. We’ve been closing the show with it, and that’s been really fun.

“And I definitely did not write it about basketball, but it seems to work well in that context.”

'We feel we got our people'

It's perhaps ironic that the attention for "Dance With Everybody" comes when Holcomb is riding the wave of even more attention for the band's most recent album, "Strangers No More."

Released last June, the disc and its single "Find Your People" — another rousing stomp-and-call song that hit No. 1 on Billboard's Americana chart and saw the band play it in the Macy's Parade, on "CBS Saturday Morning" and on "Jimmy Kimmel Live."

Holcomb said that song, too, came out of a shared experience.

"I was writing a song with a friend of mine and just got to talking about how, as you get older, it’s harder and harder to make and maintain friendships," Holcomb said.

"From my perspective, it’s one of the primary building blocks to being a person and feeling like you have your own space in the world.

“And I’ve been incredibly fortunate — and part of this is because of geography; [he and the friend have] stayed in the same neighborhood for almost 20 years.

"And part of it is having been through various tragedies with friends, things as hard as child illnesses and losing a kid to a tornado ripping through a neighborhood. There’s just a lot of bonding that has happened with us and our friends."

Holcomb said he and his wife, top Christian singer Ellie Holcomb, "feel really lucky, we feel we got our people."

"And as soon as I said it, very casually, [the friend] looked at me and he goes, ‘That’s our song! Find your people.'"

Another interesting thing about "Find Your People" is that it originally was written "as a very sort of contemplative, slow ballad," Holcomb said.

"And I liked it that way, but it just wasn’t really — I don’t know, I just kept coming back to it saying, ‘Something’s not quite right.’ And then [the friend] called me and said, ‘What if we made it more of a call, stomp and holler anthem?'

"So we did that and all of a sudden the song just started to take the shape that it needed to take, and became the song that it is."

'Maintained that true north'

The album "Strangers No More" continues Holcomb's long climb in the music business — where he and his band have labored for nearly 20 years after forming in 2005 (with his wife as a singer; she went solo in 2012).

The band released five little-noticed discs until 2011's "Chasing Somebody" made it into the Top 10 on the Folk Albums chart. "Good Light" in 2013 made it into the Billboard Top 100.

“I think before that there was a fair amount of sort of searching in the dark for my own voice, figuratively and literally," Holcomb said.

"I think ‘Good Light’ is where it really started to coagulate and become a creative identity both for me as a writer, for me as a singer and for us as a band.

“I think that really was the first record where we made the record exactly how we wanted to make it, without anybody sort of telling us what it should sound like or what would be commercially successful."

The 2015 album "Medicine" broke Billboard's Top 50, and the band now has placed its past six albums in the Americana chart's Top 5.

"We’ve maintained that true north all these years," Holcomb said. "So pretty much with every record we’ve continued to grow our fan base and grow the loyalty within the fan base that we have."

'Create fences for yourself'

That approach to the music was especially true on "Strangers No More," Holcomb said.

During COVID, he said, “I started writing a ton of songs and had [the band] over once a month for kind of just a low-key — I mean, I hate the phrase — jam session, but that’s essentially what it was.

“So it ended up being about 25, 30 songs that we decided we wanted to record. 

“We had no preset ideas of what record we were making. I just had a pile of songs and a band I love to play with that I’ve been playing with my entire life.

“And we just decided to push ‘record’ and see what happens."

That led to the band making "this sort of multi-faceted, sort of non-genre-specific album.

"I mean, you got a song like ‘All the Money in the World,' which is this soul, kind of nod, all the way to ‘On a Roll,’ which is the sort of big arena rock," he said.

"In the past, as a singer-songwriter, I [thought] ‘Well, I kind of need to do this and be serious and have it always be a certain kind of sound.’ And you kind of create fences for yourself.

"We decided to tear those all down and make the things we wanted to make, put out this record last year and it’s been really well received."

It's been so well received that Holcomb said he and the band saved enough from that batch of songs to make a second album, which will be released as "Strangers No More Part II."

The first single of "That Second Batch" is the just-released "Suffering."

But the band still is enjoying its success from "Dance With Everybody," and will play it at the Musikfest Café show, Holcomb said.

His only regret? His alma mater, the University of Tennessee, lost in the quarter-finals of the NCAA tournament to eventual runners-up Perdue.

“We made a good run, but it was a sad day," Holcomb said.