Through the Roots: slowed pace, increased production

Evan Hawkins’ first exposure to reggae music came courtesy of his mom, who listened to Bob Marley and UB40. Then, when he was a teenager in the mid-2000s, a friend started bringing him to see groups like Slightly Stoopid. “Taking a look around at these shows — the kind of vibes that are going on and just the good energy that the music puts out — was something that drew us to want to play this kind of music and create this environment for people,” he says. “That was the original catalyst for us as a band.” “Us” refers to the group that eventually became Through The Roots, and Hawkins is still the lead singer and guitarist. When they formed, circa 2007, he was 19 years old. Their manager would book gigs at local bars, but the musicians were still too young to hang out, let alone enjoy adult refreshments, prior, during, or post-performance. “We would get kicked out after we played.”

Early on, the band played local venues such as SOMA, SoundWave, and the Jumping Turtle in San Marcos. They also started traveling for one-off weekend gigs. “It was driving up to Chico for like ten hours,” Hawkins explains. “We bought a short school bus. We won it in an auction for like $1200. We converted it and would pile all of our friends and all of our gear in it, and we would go up to Chico and it would just be like this drunken rager. We had friends that were going to school up there, and we would sleep on their floors. It was just the real grind of getting our feet wet and learning what it’s like to play shows and tour.” A few years later, in 2010, Through The Roots played the inaugural California Roots Music and Arts Festival (aka Cali Roots), which has grown to become one of the largest reggae festivals in the country. They would go on to play the festival a couple more times in the early 2010s, and to join Cali Roots bands such as Iration and Rebelution on national tours. “Bear With Me,” a collaboration with the latter’s singer, Eric Rachmany, would become their most successful song. Released in 2015, it currently has 5.7 million listens on Spotify.

The band was doing well after the success of “Bear With Me,” but the last large tour they did was in the fall of 2019. “The crazy thing about us was that we had all this popularity, and we were playing all these amphitheater tours with this very under-developed, really ‘early stage of the band’ catalog,” says Hawkins. “The music didn’t really even align with what we were doing live, because we were playing so many shows. We were constantly touring and playing, over 200 shows a year. We never got a chance to figure out how to put music together. So covid was a blessing, because it slowed us down and helped us evaluate, like, ‘Where are we? What are we as a band? What music are we wanting to make right now?’”

In 2020, they teamed up with the Jamaican producer J.L.L. for the collab-heavy album Departure, and followed that with their latest, TTR, released last summer. Recorded in Nashville, TTR was knocked out in seven days by a combination of the band and various outside songwriters enlisted to help with lyrics.

“It would be one or two songwriters in one session per day,” Hawkins explains. “So over the course of seven days, we would have written with ten different songwriters. For one session, it would be me, plus one or two songwriters and the producer, while the guys were in the other room building ideas onto the beat that we had. Once the song was written and it came time for me to record my vocals, I would go with this scratch arrangement that we had. At the end of the day, we would come in and the producer would put together my vocals with the music the guys had been working on all day in the other room, and then re-arrange this thing until it was the final draft of the song. By 10 pm, we would have a full song. We got really good at doing that, and that has basically been our formula to expedite the process. It has allowed us to put out music faster, and not have these eight year hiatuses in between our productions.”

Through the Roots appear at the Belly Up on May 6, on a bill that includes Cydeways and DevvLov.