Almost exactly one year ago, Pizza Lupo opened on Frankfort Avenue, not far from where I first saw its owners perform live. I would have never dreamed one of my favorite bands would announce they were moving to my hometown and opening a pizza joint down the road, but it’s the sort of impossible fantasy that is possible in Louisville. Murder by Death’s Adam Turla and Sarah Balliet spent a year restoring the old brick building in order to open a Neapolitan-style pizza place with Max Balliet, locally known for operating the Holy Mole food truck. When I arrived on a Wednesday afternoon for our interview, Turla brought along equipment for the Spinsters’ Union, who would be DJing that evening. He was gracious enough to share a little of his busy evening with me to talk about food, Lupo, the Kickstarter campaign for Murder by Death’s upcoming album, and the interconnectedness of music in Louisville.
Pizza Lupo – which takes its name from Murder by Death’s album In Bocca al Lupo – is a dream many years in the making, built on the band’s love of food and the unpredictability of musical success.“Basically we’d been saving for a long time because we were always afraid there’d be nothing left, that we would suddenly be that band where nobody showed up,” Turla said. “That’s the nightmare that every musician – and now I’ve learned restaurant owner – has, that nobody’s gonna show up but I’m doing this great thing that’s totally true to myself and well executed and nobody gives a fuck. The terror of being a creative person is you put everything on the line emotionally and financially, and time, all of it, your whole life. And sometimes they just don’t care and it’s so brutal.”
That hasn’t seemed to be an issue with either the restaurant or the band, as Pizza Lupo has expanded to lunch hours and won Louisville Magazine’s annual Best New Restaurant award in its first year of operation, and the Kickstarter for The Other Shore, Murder by Death’s new album, was wildly successful. Although Turla grew up eating primarily Italian food made by his mother, an Italian immigrant, it wasn’t necessarily the first choice for the restaurant: “Like five years ago we first started talking seriously about a restaurant – we were gonna do a ramen shop because we couldn’t believe there still wasn’t a ramen shop in Louisville. And then we’re like, ‘we love this stuff,’ and [Max Balliet] had been to Korea and Japan and just super into it. But then basically a couple places started doing ramen, a ramen shop opened and it didn’t work out, and we were just like, ‘Eh.’” On the subject of local ramen shops, Turla did comment that Inochi is good. “I’ve been three times and I think they’re doing a really nice job, the tonkatsu is exactly what I want. I was happy that we finally got to eat it. “
After moving from trying to rent a building to purchasing the one where Pizza Lupo is currently located, they focused on renovating for their new restaurant. It made sense to take time away from the band while work on the restaurant continued and keyboardist David Fountain had a baby, giving the band time to focus on the other parts of their lives. It also gave Turla time to begin the early stages of working on the next album, a laborious process of drafting and composing given Murder by Death’s commitment to going against the grain.
“The challenge that we have is that we’re like attempting to subvert. If we do this song in a country style, we’re actually trying to break the rules just a bit. And also add all these – there’s all these options for instruments with David playing like eight instruments and like we have a cello. You don’t know how it’s gonna turn out,” said Turla. Coming up with new songs means a lot of internal revision. “I write everything – I write a vocal melody, lyrics and basically the key up there and I just run it hundreds and hundreds of times in my head.”
For their third long form narrative album that is “a space western without guns, aliens or battles,” Turla drew on the band’s shared love of science fiction, a fatigue of the dominance of Americana, and a glam rock opera. “I was never really into sci-fi growing up, I read fantasy – I was a nerd – like, Dungeons and Dragons – but I read a lot, just a compulsive reader as a kid, but sci-fi was one of those things I didn’t get into until my 20s, and the current, like the band I’m with right now, everybody’s a sci-fi fan. I knew they’d be into it, so that’s part of it, making music that everybody will wanna perform. But another part of it is I’m so fatigued by Americana right now, it’s just like somebody do something else, anything.” Turla acknowledged the influence of indie and DIY bands who inspired them to make music they wanted to make rather than shooting for the slim chance of a radio hit. “The album is sort of a metaphor because when we started the group, our like Western sound of indie rock, nobody was doing that. It was a brilliant, rare sound and people didn’t even know what to do with it for many years with us. And then now, over the years, we suddenly see more and more bands that have that sound. So the metaphor on the album is, it starts in this Earthy kind of the rootsier side of MBD and it fucking goes to outer space.”
He acknowledged that the term “space western” might give some people different expectations than what the album will deliver, since it doesn’t have any spaghetti western sounds, save a few horn parts. The band has paid tribute to composer Ennio Morricone, whose name appears on some spaghetti western movie posters that hang on Pizza Lupo’s walls, but “as the album progresses, it becomes more new wave, throwing some different references, very like Cure, New Order moments, but still Murder by Death.”
Some of that comes from the glam rock opera Turla started writing in his teens. “I was so into Bowie as a middle schooler and high schooler, and I was like, ‘This is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard.’ It was funny, it’s dark, it’s weird, and I started writing a glam rock opera but I never knew what to do with it.I started writing this record and I was like, I think I can do a Murder by Death one. Like, well, what if I revisited this idea that I started over 20 years ago? What if I revisited it and did it through the channel that’d actually have people that listen? So it’s a little bit of like a personal – it’s for fun, for me.”
“The question is, why would someone buy it when you could just go to a service and listen to all albums from all time? And the answer is because they just want you to make your thing.”
Once the songs had been revised to Turla’s satisfaction, gone through edits from Balliet, and been transmitted to the rest of the band, they recorded The Other Shore at La La Land, one piece of their involvement in multiple aspects of Louisville’s music scene. “You know, [we’re] trying to do some local stuff, like the Spinsters Union setting up here. Because Sarah grew up here, but then she moved away for 15 years, so it is funny being new in town to some extent, because I think so many of the people here like you said have known each other forever.
“Like when I hang out with Kevin Ratterman everybody is so – he was like a cornerstone of Louisville music here… Like I walked into the studio like a week ago to drop off something for him, and he was hanging out with Evan Patterson from the Young Widows and like a million other bands. It was like, ‘Oh, hi Evan. How you doing? I haven’t seen you in like a year, but here you are. You’re near Kevin. Of course you’re here.’ Then Sean Cannon from WFPK walks in, who’s a friend of mine, and he’s got the band Speedy Ortiz with him who’d just played at Zanzabar the night before and he’s giving them a like a little local Louisville tour. And it’s just like – this is the epicenter, La La Land. And Kevin I think today moved to LA, actually. He basically just lived in Louisville his whole life, is gonna try it out there. The studio’s still going, Anne Gautier took over, a good friend of ours, and she’s been an engineer for years there now. But she’s going to be a producer and engineer and she’ll crush it.”
Despite multiple successful Kickstarters for their two previous albums Bitter Drink, Bitter Moon and Big Dark Love, the possibility of failure is never far from Turla’s mind. They’re careful to frame the Kickstarter as “pre-buying” the album, as the album is done before the campaign begins, but when a band strives to do something radically different with each release it’s always possible the fans won’t be on board with the next new thing. “I hope people like it. It could just tank, like people could hate it,” Turla said. “I don’t know what it’s gonna do, you never know. I have my predictions, and I do all this data, like, okay, what’s all this – and there’s still so much stuff we’re gonna reveal that we haven’t even announced yet. And we’re basically like the better it does the more stuff we’re giving the people. The question is, why would someone buy it when you could just go to a service and listen to all albums from all time? And the answer is because they just want you to make your thing.”
‘More stuff’ includes a six song EP of songs Turla sings to his dog Robocop and a documentary of their annual Stanley Hotel shows in addition to the 14 cover songs funded by the Kickstarter pledges to be released over the next year or so. Despite any fears, the Kickstarter raised $327,407, exceeding their previous campaign by nearly $50,000. Their key to success is part meticulous planning and part listening to their fans – their reward tiers are based on previous recurring requests like the covers and other shows they’ve done in unusual places, and there’s considerable overlap between the two. The Kickstarter is clearly an enormous amount of work, from making the album to trying to figure how big of an expense guides, security, and equipment transportation to 333 feet under the ground for their upcoming Cumberland Caverns show will be, but Turla summed all of that prep and effort up with surprising simplicity: “Just listen to people and say, well, what do people want? And it’s like, it’s not that hard to say, I heard you.”
The value (and easiness) of listening to other people is a sentiment Turla echoes when discussing how difficult it was to get the song “Hard World” from Bitter Drink, Bitter Moon right. Inspired by the real-life disappearance of two girls from Bloomington, where the band was initially formed, he struggled with both the technical, musical aspects of the song and the ethical implications of telling the story of someone else’s tragedy. “The idea is to tell the story, because it’s a weird world out there, and by telling the story you help people be more sensitive or something. And so the challenge is, conveying that correctly. And I remember there was certain lyrics where it was just like, is this too much. Then I would go to Sarah – she’s often my like editor – where I say, what do you think about this and is this remotely insulting in any way to the family or, you know just trying to be decent and like not just make it this like, thing. And then I was in agony over like, do you even say what this song is about to people? Because I wouldn’t want to profit off of their misery or deaths and it’s like, that’s a whole other challenge.
“Some people who I do not agree with are always like, ‘PC people are always looking for something to yell at you about,’ it’s like, you know what, if you don’t say stupid shit people don’t usually mess with you. It’s amazing, I’ve got an 18 year career and I’m a free talker as you can see, and I just try not to say stupid shit and guess what, it doesn’t come and bite me in the ass a lot. It’s like, just think about other people and you’ll probably be okay.”
It’s good advice from someone who practices what he preaches when it comes to making music that is often intensely character-driven and sensitive to its audience both in the crafting of its narratives and interaction with fans.
The Other Shore‘s first single “True Dark” delivers on the promise of a “cello-heavy” record with a swinging beat and a tone that feels contiguous with their previous album Big Dark Love while also calling to mind the determined narrator of “Comin’ Home” from Red of Tooth and Claw. It is a song about insisting that hanging in hell with the devil you know is better even with the knowledge ‘that the flames will burn higher’ – but it’s also the first look at an album whose narrative arc hinges on regret over not risking the unknown. Turla describes the new album as partly “a metaphor for playing music for a long time,” and their experience with the nervous lows and triumphant highs of daring risk-taking will surely come through with typical narrative impact. Luckily for the rest of us, with the Kickstarter more than fully funded and Pizza Lupo’s growing success, we already know that Murder by Death and Pizza Lupo’s risks have paid off.
Visit Pizza Lupo at 1540 Frankfort Avenue Tuesday through Saturday from 11am to 2pm or 5pm to 11pm; the Spinsters Union DJs on Wednesday nights. (Author recommendation: the Sting Like a Bee pizza and/or any cocktail.) Murder by Death’s album The Other Shore comes out August 24th from Bloodshot Records. Songs in the Key of Robocop, an EP of songs Turla sings to his dog is available on Bandcamp (along with the rest of MBD’s discography, plus covers and collaborations) and its proceeds go to the Kentucky Humane Society. Catch Murder by Death live on their upcoming tour.
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