To make a long story short-

Silverhands is the latest project from singer/songwriter Mike McDermott. After having kept close to a contemporary folk sound for five years in Seattle duo Pelusa Silverhands pushes a bit closer to the country -with Nashville melodies and their accompanying twang being given to stories told in the familiar folk narrative style.

Going back to his roots, both musically and literally, McDermott trekked back to the Mississippi river valley to revisit places like Teeds Grove, Lainsville and Green Island- places that no longer exist according to the state of Iowa and most maps.

After gathering inspiration and a few inspired performances from some of the finest musicians still inhabiting these ghost towns, a concept was born and hastily driven back to Washington, where it was dressed up with more fine performances by a few notable Seattle musicians and long-time cohorts.

Silverhands is a collection of songs that came straight out of the country, and made its way to the West coast, with lots of help along the way.

Mike McDermott can also be found singing with The Pennylifters, or playing Bass with Zoe Muth and the Lost High Rollers- or The Starlings, and on their 2008 release "Marveling the While"

 
The long story-

 
 The music that became the Silverhands debut album began as a side project by Mike McDermott in the fall of 2006. With no immediate plans for a new release by Pelusa, and finding himself writing new material that didn’t exactly fit in with the current direction of the band at the time, a plan was made to return home to eastern Iowa, set up a makeshift studio, and return with a completed album- hopefully within a month’s time.

  This plan was almost immediately aborted due to a few setbacks and surprises early on in the recording process. At this point the musical direction of the record was still pretty vague, and the songs were languishing in rough demo form while McDermott debated whether to find a new location to set up the studio, or simply pack up the van and head back to Washington. It was at this time that an invitation was extended by Steve Haferbier, an old friend and former bandmate, to set up in his cabin outside of Green Island, Iowa, spend a few evenings with a few tunes, and see what might materialize.

  Steve grew up on his parents’ farm just a few miles down the road from where his cabin now sits. He came of age in the late sixties, and spent much of his early adult life traveling, learning the world, and playing guitar. He has many stories of things that he’s seen, and it’s quite hard to put any of them on a timeline. He prefers old Fender Stratocasters and small-bodied flat-top Martins. A conversation with Steve Haferbier is equal parts cynicism and comedy, and sometimes both simultaneously, a quality of duality that also infects his musical stylings.

  It took a guitar player with roots deep in swinging traditional American country music, who has had many a night to stretch his favorite aspects of Nashville twang into straight blues tunes, and vice versa, to get to the soul of what the record needed to be and find the center of the entire album. With Steve’s signature licks now gracing the demos, the shape and direction of the future recording began to show itself.

  However, a lack of time, and practical recording space would force the project back west to regroup, rewrite, and begin to re-record the songs.

 In the Spring of 2007, the project was once again paused while Pelusa set out on their final nationwide tour. Upon returning to Seattle in early summer, McDermott shifted his primary focus to completing the unfinished tracks and finding a name for the project.

  The name proved to be the easy part- by translating a nickname his great uncle often called him as a child (“manitos de plata”) he came up with Silverhands. The record would have a name, but the recording process was to make several more trips across the country before coming to a satisfactory conclusion.

  The next step was to address a few tracks that needed to swing a little harder than they were- for this job there was but one candidate: BJ Kilburg.

  BJ has been playing drums in bands literally since he was a child. Starting with honky-tonk and making his way all over the musical map and back again. Most importantly, he has been Steve Haferbier’s primary musical cohort for the better part of twenty years in the legendary Jackson county band Stoneheart. BJ’s inherent sense of timing and placement has made him one of the most sought-after drummers in the upper Mississippi valley, and he proved his worth by laying down some highly appropriate drums on the album’s swingingest numbers.

 Back in Seattle, vocals were added to several tracks by the Starlings’ Joy Mills & Tom Parker- with Joy sharing the lead on “Stray bullet”- the addition of two of the best harmony singers in the Seattle folk scene pushed the quality of vocals on the record up a notch, filling out the sonic spectrum with a glossy sheen of backing voices. 

 Fellow Pelusa founding member Julian Martlew provided additional lead guitar and steel, with a beautiful lead melody on “California” and an extended back and forth solo with Tom Parker’s harmonica on “Cornbread”- Laying down drums like clockwork underneath both these tunes is the incredible Shelley Schmelzer of Seattle trip-hop band Detective Honey.

 With one last trip back to the Mississippi in August of 2007, one final guest vocal was supplied by Esmé Kelly, and a live field recording of the album’s final track at the McDermott homestead put a fitting end to the process- in an empty house just a few hills north of Steve’s cabin where the project got off the ground almost a year before.

 
     Esmé Kelly, BJ Kilburg, Mike McDermott & Steve Haferbier - Moline, IL

In April of 2008, after several solo shows between Seattle and Iowa, Silverhands performed live as a band for the first time. With BJ Kilburg on drums, Steve Haferbier on electric guitar, and Esmé Kelly on Bass, the Midwest version of Silverhands plays dates in Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

On the West coast, Mike McDermott is often accompanied by Julian Martlew, or Scott Simón on steel & electric guitar.