For a long time, The Revivalists have been embraced as a good-times band, their swirl of indie rock, soul, folk, and even a dash of hip-hop serving a soundtrack to many summer nights. Their story, after all, has been one of youthful triumph, with a chance encounter between singer David Shaw and guitarist Zack Feinberg steadily leading to an octet that rose from the dingiest dives to the grandest American concert halls and amphitheaters. With PJ Howard and Andrew Campanelli, they are a two-drummer powerhouse anchored by bassist George Gekas and buoyed by horn man Rob Ingraham, keyboardist Michael Girardot, and pedal steel guitarist Ed Williams. But all eight members are now firmly into adulthood, with seven of them fathers. Enter Get It Honest, their sixth and most affecting album, a true grown-folks record built on songs about cutting yourself clear of a past that only drags you down and embracing the parts of your present that make you grateful to be here at all, like love and grace and salvation.
Let’s rewind, then, to the title track, the moment when Get It Honest truly began: When Shaw finally woke up for real one morning in early 2023, he barely remembered the words he’d jotted down sometime around 3 a.m. For more than a dozen years, The Revivalists singer had brought a workmanlike tenacity to songwriting, trying to do a little every day so as to keep his proverbial line in the creative waters. But the band was still three months away from releasing its fifth album, Pour It Out Into the Night, while he and his wife, Sam, were still six months away from becoming first-time parents. He was anxious, he admits, and maybe a little depressed.
Though nearly 20 years have now passed since Shaw last had a drink, the thick thread of alcoholism that winds through his family still sometimes tugs on him in moments like these. He’d been thinking about how a dram or a draft might make him feel better, at least temporarily, when he stirred in the middle of the night to write down some lines: “Well, I’m so bored, so bored of being sober/Maybe I’ll go downtown, to some bar down on Decatur.” He finished the song the next day, its verses drawing the battle lines between what he has been and can still become. It was the first time he’d ever had such a pre-dawn epiphany, the first time a song had ever arrived so urgently and simply. That song—“Get It Honest,” of course—became the record’s emotional and musical centerpiece, the point from which everything else on the mature and magnetic Get It Honest radiates.
In the past, lots of songs from The Revivalists began only with an acoustic guitar and voice. But as the band worked those old numbers up, that original germ would often recede or even disappear completely, supplanted by saxophone and percussion, steel guitar and keys. This time, though, The Revivalists quickly understood that the songs Shaw was writing—alone or with friends like Andriu “Yàno” Yanovski and Eric Krasno or with bandmates including Campanelli, Howard, and Feinberg—should retain that core, that the realizations within these words deserved to sit in the spotlight. Even colossal opener “Heart Stop,” about persevering in the face of things you love so much they threaten to tear you apart, keeps its center of tangled guitars, powerful drums, and belt-your-heart-out vocals intact. “I’m not afraid of the future comin’ my way,” Shaw howls en route to the climax, squaring up to whatever is to come. “I’m over wasting my time.”
“This one might hit a little different for everyone, and I love that. But for me, I’d say sometimes you are caught between two loves—one that’s tearing you apart and one that you know is right,” Shaw explains. “This song is the sleepless nights, the wreckage and the moment you finally surrender to what you know is there for you.”
Some songs demanded that these skilled musicians do very little, perhaps only adding a trace of percussion; others required players to try new things altogether, like when Feinberg shifted to drums for the arcing and gorgeous acoustic closer, “Lay It on Me.” Only a few years ago, squeezing eight egos into such patient and subtle songs likely wouldn’t have been possible, but experience and solidarity have at last enabled it for The Revivalists. Being alone together again with producer Rich Costey at Guilford Sound—the stunning studio in the verdant woods of Vermont, where they also recorded Pour It Out Into the Night—helped. Where The Revivalists have embraced multiple musical personalities on previous records, this one has a blessed cohesion, as if the band has finally found how it wants to sound, at least for right now.
“We let the acoustic guitar be the heart of it all the way through, pretty much with every song. So they just ring true to how they were written,” Shaw says. “It goes to the theme and the title—we just let the skeletons dance.”
“Take a deep breath and remember,” Shaw sings late into “Lost and Found,” a folk-pop headrush about reaching escape velocity with your past. “You don’t have to be who you are forever.” He delivers that mantra like a newfound bit of gospel, announcing it as an axiom of collective liberation. Get It Honest follows that lead. “Razorblades And Runways” views the past with bittersweet introspection, Shaw lamenting the days he wasted chasing a thrill or his ego but celebrating the way his family now keeps him moving forward. It is a twinkling bit of soft soul, Ingraham’s flute lighting the way. And “Love’s the Only Thing” is a heartland rock wonder, equal parts plea from an emotional abyss and a paean to the power of love to pull us out of it.
Get It Honest isn’t, though, blithely optimistic about the state of the world. The title track stares directly into the dark and acknowledges what it would mean to give in. Shaw wrote “As of Now” on New Year’s Day 2025, hours after a driver killed 14 people on Bourbon Street. “I want people to know, with our music in general, we’re here with them, down in the trenches,” Shaw says. “I don’t ever want to feel like an artist on a pedestal.” To wit, The Revivalists have long run Rev Causes, a philanthropic fund that funnels portions of ticket sales to crucial causes like mental health care, gun-violence reform, and environmental sustainability. With their words and their actions, The Revivalists simply take the time and energy to remember to look up and look ahead, to keep going.
Now that Get It Honest is done, Shaw is still grappling with what the title phrase means to him. It is, on the surface, about the inheritance we get from our family, the way our genes and our upbringing inevitably shape who we become, for better and worse. Now that he is a father who sees fresh traces of himself in his daughter each day, it’s constantly on his mind. But maybe, he admits, it’s about something more—perhaps the way we move through an increasingly wobbly world, with little control over anything apart from our responses to it? These songs are about those responses, then, about coming out on the other side of self-flagellation and doubt and getting on with the living, as honestly as you can. The Revivalists have found their own unexpected way toward whatever is up ahead. “This album,” Shaw says, “is about understanding this point and learning to work with it like a potter works the clay. Our flaws and imperfections are what ultimately make us human and beautiful.”
