Press
A Band of Brothers from Go Triad, Sept 16th, 2010
Mark Dougherty reaches over the table to pet an 80-pound mutt as the three members of his band, The Lake Isle, sit politely waiting their turn to speak.
Dougherty, a Greensboro-based singer/songwriter has declined a one-on-one interview. He has performed alone too long, finally finding peace and unity in this band of brothers.
After years of playing Greensboro as a solo act, Dougherty yearned to be in a band.
Once his music label fell apart, Dougherty began playing with an acoustic group that saw early success.
So Dougherty moved on with a firmer resolve to take his music more seriously.
That eventually led to Dougherty reinventing himself.
“I gave myself a rebirth under the name The Lake Isle, after Yeats’ poem about a man searching for his inner peace in a world of chaos — the theme of all my music,” Dougherty says.
He had a band name. Now, all he needed was some members. And on a night last spring, he found the first one.
That’s when Dougherty met Shawn Smith, drummer for Filthybird, which was playing its last gig together.
One of the band members mentioned that Dougherty was looking for a group so Smith approached him, and they started playing.
Smith recorded Dougherty’s guitar and vocals and later added drums, bass and keyboards.
“I had no real direction in mind, just trying to let things float out of me, and we kind of created a sound,” Smith says. “We tried a few guitar players, but they weren’t willing to take that leap into that sonic realm.”
Hoping to make the songs more interesting, Smith decided to play guitar himself.
Andy Foster, formerly with the Raving Knaves and Manamid, came on board as a percussionist. Chris Micca, a longtime bass player and backup vocalist to bands such as Crystal Bright, completed the group.
During a recent rehearsal, Foster can’t constrain himself between songs, ripping his drums every chance he gets.
“Andy’s a loud drummer and we will have to base everything behind that,” Smith deadpans.
Foster’s sticks clack as Dougherty steps to the mike to sing the lyrics to the haunting “Steel Rails,” the first track on the band’s new album, “Wake Up.”
“I should know, oh I should
that it’s all about letting go
but these old ways, oh they burn
these lies that come over and over me.”
With Micca’s expansive harmonies and tight thumping bass, the band is creating the “warm, sonic pallet,” that fuels Dougherty.
Micca and Foster exchange smiles as the song ends.
“The songs get better and better all the time, especially the new ones,” Smith says. “It’s working, it’s really working.
“S’working,” Foster says, nodding.
Dougherty says the difference in being in a band like The Lake Isle versus playing solo is that there is no agenda other than to play the music.
“It’s about looking around at every person practicing music in this room and seeing a look in their eyes that says they love this music.
“I call it a brotherhood. It’s something really magical and great.”
Contact Carole Perkins at CPGuilford@aol.com
last month i had the pleasure of listening to one of greensboro’s newer bands The Lake Isle play a set at The Green Bean. at the time my band was loading in, and admittedly my first concern wasn’t paying attention to a set by another band i hadn’t heard of. but i was caught off guard and pleasantly surprised and ended up really enjoying their set. on their blog they give themselves the “dream pop” label but i’m not sure that does them justice, they employ a lot of really beautiful and simultaneously nervous textures in their songs that challenge the “pop” part of that description and push them into alternative territory. additionally, their guitarist was getting some cool atmospheric tones with his POG2 pedal that i haven’t yet to figured out how to achieve. maybe he’ll give me some lessons.
yesterday, the band posted a new entry on their site previewing a new track entitled “Steel Rails.” like the first track “Virginia” (which you can listen to here) on their previous LP Terrible Beauties, “Steel Rails” uses spaced-out guitars to reinforce the nervous energy of the vocals, and when the drums & bass make their tight entrance, they round out the equation for a great listen. i was surprised at the sonic bigness of the sound they were able to achieve at the Green Bean, and that characteristic carries through on their recordings as well. check their myspace for more listening and show dates, including another appearance at the Green Bean in september with a cool band from winston.
I was really excited when a fellow North Carolinian emailed me with music. Normally it’s searching the web, looking all around the US and overseas for music I may like, but it’s nice when someone in your own backyard gets some exposure and even better when they contact me directly.
Mark Dougherty is out of Greensboro, North Carolina and he plays a clever blend of acoustic music. You know that really great soft song on every indie rock album, the one that you wish there was more of, well Dougherty succeeds on creating an album full of them. In the vein of Mark Kozelek and the Red House Painters, the first thing I noticed when listening to Mark’s music was his skills as a songwriter. You can tell from the first few lines that he is a poet at heart as he pours his soul for all to hear. The instrumentation on the album is equally impressive as it provides the perfect backdrop for Dougherty’s vocals to shine.
While his previous lp, Shadows In The Light, plays more to the acoustic folk side, his most recent release, In Dreams, is a perfect blend of an enriched acoustic sound and the subtle touches of a studio atmosphere. Mark wanted to play off the theme of dreams, what’s experienced when we dream and how they clue us into our inner life. In Dreams is a great listen and below is a track from each of his releases with links to purchase.
CD REVIEW: Mark Dougherty – In Dreams
By Chip Withrow
I’ve been carrying this CD around for a few weeks, playing it in those too-few quiet moments before my students arrive, and again in the evening as we clean up before our daughter’s bedtime. This evocative music has started echoing in my head even when I’m not listening to it.
Mark Dougherty’s music is melancholy and spooky. For fans of stark, wistful acoustic music (myself included), this album is worth a listen. My attraction to the guitar playing was immediate. “Funhouse” has a blend of understated acoustic picking and minimalist electric lead. Throughout the disc, guitars blend effectively with washes of synth-like effects.
On “It’s Beautiful,” Dougherty’s vocals poignantly wrap themselves a gem of a lyric, a tale of a girl’s dreams. I like his voice in this higher register. “Make It Last,” which has nice lilt, a catchy chorus, and some sweet acoustic, almost mandolin-like, picking.
“Ocean Song” would be poignant without lyrics – Dougherty’s wordless vocalizing and the reverb heavy arpeggioed guitar would suffice. And “In the Morning” is a great closer – one guitar, country/gospel-ish, inspirational lyrics (“Today I’ll see my world in all its beauty”).
In this CD’s accompanying notes, Dougherty is compared to Grant Lee Phillips, and I can certainly hear that. But I hear other not so obvious similarities as well. “In Moments, Tonight” is intriguing – I think of a mix between Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Only Living Boy in New York” and U2’s “Running to Stand Still.” “Into the Sands” again has that U2 vibe – it’s almost anthemic.
I stated earlier that this disc is worth a listen; actually, it might take several to appreciate the nuances that differentiate one track from another. It’s also worth noting that if you take my advice and check it out, In Dreams is available on Lost Cat Records, a digital-only label. lostcatrecords.com
Grading papers, writing songs, pondering life’s journeys
By Jennie Thompson
At this strange time of year, between winter and spring, between cool stone and renaissance, it is quite easy to lose direction in one’s own skull. Such is the music of Mark Dougherty. A singer-songwriter originally from New Jersey, Dougherty has shaped his songs in Greensboro for the past five years. Recently, he has been long at work on a new release, “Anodyne,” available on iTunes and eMusic.
“Vocally, lyrically, musically, it’s a notch above my other albums,” Dougherty says. The other albums, “In Dreams” and “Shadows in the Light,” are delicate and intricate masterworks already.
Dougherty’s vocals are a mix of Ryan Adams, Ron Sexsmith and Damien Rice, but his attempts to understand people are strikingly direct and empowered. And the arrangements of songs like “Anodyne” and “Maria” create their own worlds, atmospheres of sound. Overall, his sound is more nuanced than Adams or Rice — it swirls and flies out of the stereo.
Sadly, we may have to be patient for a live performance from Dougherty. He works as a seventh-grade teacher by day, which allows for plenty of play in the summer but not so much during the school year. Luckily, this hasn’t put his composing process on hold.
“I’ll have my guitar and start to strum. I’ll start seeing a couple of words. I don’t know what it’s about until it’s over,” he says. “The moment I feel satisfied, it’s done.”
For instance, with “Maria,” a pleading love song that implies in its tone a great deal of disconnect, Dougherty offers that “an ideal relationship found itself in that song.”
Many other ideas and influences find themselves in his music as well. Sure, Radiohead’s soft crying, Wilco’s thick layering, but even the mood and thoughtfulness of one of Dougherty’s favorite authors, Herman Hesse, finds its place.
Last spring, Dougherty found a place at Lost Cat Records, an indie label that supports the British band Additional Moog and American balladeer Lee Tyler Post.
Personally, however, Dougherty’s artistic self-discovery was years in the making.”I was a huge basketball player until I was 14, but once I got that guitar, things were put into place. It was like, ‘Oh, yes,’ (I’m) finding my own sound,” he said.
Essentially, his music makes an effort to locate the self, “to write about the journeys we’re on in life.”
This is a mission much needed and gently, if not straightaway, completed.
Dougherty Makes Introspective DIY Folk
By Jordan Green
Dougherty is decompressing on this Tuesday evening after a full day of teaching seventh graders how to construct sentences at Southeast Middle School and then meeting for more than an hour with his fellow instructors to discuss how to handle a lockdown in the event of something unthinkable, like the Amish school shootings that took place in Pennsylvania the week before.
He’s also a prolific songwriter with a record deal and the goods to show for the promise: two albums released in the space of four months. Shadows In the Light and In Dreams, respectively released on May 9 and Sept. 1 on Atlanta’s Lost Cat Records, came about as a result of label head Jerry Jodice running across Dougherty’ s recordings on the internet and including them in his “Great American Music Hour” podcast.
When he contacted Lost Cat, which specializes in offbeat singer songwriters and Americana artists, Dougherty reports that Jodice didn’t need much persuasion to add him to the roster. The resulting two albums reveal an artist with a vocal range capable of conveying emotional subtlety, a lyricist with keen phrasing abilities and a songwriter deeply immersed in philosophy and literature.
“Because I’m an English teacher I take a lot of inspiration from the classical poets,” Dougherty says. “William Butler Yeats’ ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ is alluded to in ‘Hallelujah.’
That composition was released on Shadows In the Light. The songs that comprise In Dreams were inspired by Sandman, the groundbreaking comic book series created by artist Neil Gaiman in the 1980s and ’90s. At the recommendation of his girlfriend, Dougherty picked up the comics and was soon unwittingly incorporating Gaiman’s mythology in his own work.
“The songs all of a sudden just started relating to it,” he says. “This was a fast process. I’m continually writing. You see a lot of artists where it sometimes takes years to put out a CD, and I’ve never been like that. The music part is the easy part. The challenge is to find a base of listeners.”
Dougherty finds himself alienated from the music scene in Greensboro with its preponderance of cover bands, flamboyant guitar rock outfits and other derivative entertainments. Aesthetically he identifies more with the Chapel Hill scene and the Triangle’s Merge Records, with its pop avant-garde stable of artists such as the Arcade Fire and the Clientele.
Dougherty credits Crosby Stills Nash & Young and Van Morrison with starting him down the singer-songwriter path. Van Morrison, he says, “has the most true-to-life lyrics, but they pull on your heartstrings.”
The introspection and moodiness of Dougherty’s songs, not to mention the technical command he maintains over his vocal instrument, also bring to mind folksingers Tim Hardin and Tim Buckley. However, Dougherty’s positive life outlook contrasts with the self-destructive arc traced by the two Tims who struggled against personal demons during careers launched in the turbulent 1960s, and each ultimately died of heroin overdoses.
Where Hardin and Buckley struggled with rotating casts of talented session musicians to get their vision on record, Dougherty has the 21st century advantage of being able to record his songs on a Macintosh computer in his bedroom, playing every instrument himself.
“If I was a musician thirty years ago, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing right now even though the music I do was a style that was popular then,” he says.
The downside is translating the recorded songs to a live setting. ”I have a setback in that I am a singular musician,” Dougherty says. “In Dreams has a full band sound, and no matter what, it’s going to sound different live with just me and an acoustic guitar.”
