Gasoline Lollipops’ New Years Eve show is taking a hard turn this year.
The rough-and-tumble Boulder quintet, which suffuses rootsy Americana with cold-steel precision and wild-eyed energy, won’t perform its Fox Theatre set on Dec. 31 under the guise of another band. Instead of covering Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers,” for example, it’s presenting its own music after a year of intense vulnerability that included a world premiere ballet score and expansion of its sound.
The band is also collaborating like never before, with Nashville-based songwriter and fiddle player Phoebe Hunt flying in, and Boulder openers Bonnie and Taylor Sims sitting in on-stage with the band. The “family” arrangement, as Gas Pops singer Clay Rose called it, will be laid over a batch of new songs that the band will debut before recording them in-studio next year.
“We’re going to be doing originals this year, so we’ll all be jamming together,” Rose said during a video interview with the full band. “Sometimes we do balloon drops, but there was one year when River Arkansas was opening for us and their fiddle player — I’d never heard of this, but the actual name for it was globophobia — was just staring up at the net of balloons all night and freaking out. So … we won’t be doing that.”
Eschewing traditions is easy for the alt-rock band, which channels a Tom Waits-meets-Dylan grit during its guitar-driven songs and heavy stomps, the latter courtesy of drummer Kevin Matthews. The band has adapted to live-performed ballet scores for contemporary company Wonderbound, and taken political approaches that Rose knows will divide some fans.
“We played a show in Dallas in drag, and noticed a sharp drop in our listeners there,” he said. “Whatever. That’s fine!”
But as Rose veers from snarling murder ballads to melodic swing and tender folk, so does the mood in the rooms that the band plays. And this year’s New Year’s Eve show promises an expert route through those shifts, despite the utter abandon they’re performed with.
“For me, it’s not so much adrenaline as it is insanity,” Rose said. “I get crazier and crazier and I’m worked up and I’m tightly wound, so I need music as a release for that. The longer I go without, the more I need it.”
Rose’s voice gets easily blown out, with its unusual range swinging from howled grizzle to sweet crooning and whispered croak. He decided to start taking voice lessons through the pandemic and now does warm-ups before shows.
“I sing from a different place than I used to, and it seems to be semi-sustainable,” he said. “Of course, I need to quit smoking cigarettes.”
Gas Pops, which has toured the world and played roughly 3,000 shows since forming in 2010, likes its venues intimate — see the Fox’s 625-person capacity — and its shows rowdy. Rose names Boulder’s legendary, tightly packed Gold Hill Inn as a favorite venue, with “the mic swinging back and forth and hitting me in the teeth while we play,” he said.
“One night, the audience was dancing so hard they broke a floor joist once and we had to jack it up to finish the show,” Rose remembered. “They were jumping up and down during ‘Going Home to Georgia’ and the whole floor began sagging.”
Despite lyrics of alienation and intense self-reflection, Gas Pops projects are anything but arms-length. The band feels a particular fever these days, having evolved from shuffles and cowpunk to ethereal and psychedelic tones and bracing folk melodies. Its music is being split through creative prisms, Rose said, which the band hopes to capture during new-album recording sessions in 2024.
“The songs he’s been writing lately are hitting in a whole new way,” said keyboardist and organ player Scott Coulter. “There’s a refinement in Clay’s songwriting that’s pretty profound, and people in the audience respond to it.”
Despite his years-long tenure with Rose, bassist “Bad” Brad Morse feels increasingly inspired by the band’s potent blend of storytelling and layered themes. Gasoline Lollipops’ lockstep, wordless communication is a joy even when audiences are thin, he said.
“Every single person in the group is a good listener,” he said. “We’ve played sold-out shows but also shows in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico to literally two people, and I still had a blast because we thoroughly enjoy creating music together.”
With a newly exploratory spirit, and diverse projects on the horizon — Rose is already working on a new score for a spring Wonderbound production — the band is ready to close out 2023.
“We’re going to release the new record like the kids do,” guitarist Donny Ambory said with a laugh. “We’re doing it one single at a time, which means it’s coming out sooner than the full album.”
The band has already notched some legendary experiences, having played a surreal show at Red Rocks Amphitheatre during the pandemic to an audience that was restricted to a few dozen, highly distanced fans. Now Rose is hand-delivering tickets for the New Year’s Eve show to purchasers, and branching out the band’s social media presence on TikTok.
“None of us want to touch that account. I said I was going to post daily content, and then I found out that I suck at twerking, and then my makeup tutorial was no good,” Rose joked. “I ended up just looking like a freak. So if we don’t make it on TikTok we’re going to get an OnlyFans and sell pictures of our feet, maybe putting lollipops between our toes.”
It’s worth trying, anyway.
If you go
Gasoline Lollipops: With Phoebe Hunt, and Bonnie and Taylor Sims. All-ages NYE concert., at 8 p.m. Dec. 31 at the Fox Theatre, Tickets: $30-$35. All proceeds from limited-edition poster sales benefit Conscious Alliance, a hunger relief nonprofit. 1135 13th St. in Boulder. z2ent.com
