“Hell yeah, we really love Philadelphia! Philadelphia’s one of our very favorite cities and we don’t think it gets enough love,” says an exceptionally enthusiastic Joseph Settine, frontman and co-founder of Nashville-based indie rockers The Brook & The Bluff. He mentions a show at Johnny Brenda’s as being one of the band’s favorite memories: “I remember the time we played Johnny Brenda’s just when COVID was starting and I have never been so sick in my life… I remember lying in the green room on my deathbed [laughs], but playing the show, there was so much love and energy in the room. And we had pizza from across the street and it was like the best pizza!”
Joseph and I are chatting over the phone last Friday, the morning of the first date of The Brook & The Bluff’s nationwide headlining tour behind Werewolf, the group’s fourth full-length and first for Dualtone Records, home of our phriends flipturn, The Lone Bellow, and Shovels & Rope, a label Settine says he’s quite the fan of: “God, I love flipturn! It’s honestly been incredible. Sometimes on release day you get anxious about if the album’s getting enough love or something… but I’ve been so stress-free and happy and confident ever since we’ve been with Dualtone.” He also tells me it’s totally an honor to be part of such an amazing roster: “I mean, when I was in high school, I knew that label and I knew The Lumineers! It’s this iconic indie label.”
The Brook & The Bluff’s Dualtone debut dropped on March 6th and The Werewolf Tour has already featured a sold-out stop at the legendary 9:30 Club in Washington DC. The run includes a date at our very own Union Transfer this coming Tuesday, March 31st, where the band will be joined Tennessee singer/songwriter, American Idol alum, and Bleachers collaborator Cassandra Coleman (Her debut single, “Coming of Age,” was recorded with Jack Antonoff’s band at Electric Lady Studios.), who Settine says he totally digs: “We were so stoked that she wanted to open for us! We’re also bringing out Ethan Tasch later and I’m a huge fan of both of them! We’ve been really lucky with the bands that we’ve toured with and I guess this is just continuing that tradition.”
Werewolf had The Brook & The Bluff approach recording in an almost entirely new way. For the first time since the pandemic, the group decided to take a break from fall touring season in 2025 (after some September shows) and hit the studio with the express purpose of capturing the energy of their live show on an album: “I think this one is totally unique… We knew the number one goal is, ‘Is this song going to be one of our favorite songs in the live set?’ or, ‘Are these 10 songs going to be our 10 favorite songs to play in the set?’”
While most of the record’s 10 tracks began with Settine and co-founder Alec Bolton, Joseph tells me that drummer John Canada and keyboardist Kevin Canada were more a part of the collaboration process than ever before, with the band sitting in a circle and recording each song live 10 times. But despite the recording process for Werewolf being something different, The Brook & The Bluff enlisted longtime collaborator Micah Tawlks (Hayley Williams, The Lone Bellow, Liza Anne) once again to produce: “At this point, he’s been like a band member for a long time. He really is family at this point. We actually wrote ‘Super Bowl Sunday’ and ‘I’ll Have It Down’ with him as a trio. He’s very much part of our DNA at this point.”
Although its official tour is just a week in, many Werewolf tracks have been in The Brook & The Bluff’s live repertoire for a while now, including the title track, a tongue-in-cheek tune that’s apparently about Settine failing in a relationship, but considering that what if the failure he was trying to hide was actually that he was a werewolf. “With the song ‘Werewolf,’ we played that on our last run and that song just had this electricity to it. And obviously no one knew the song, but it’s one of those songs that people just move to. And every new song we played, people just wanted to know it, and then by then end, maybe they knew the chorus,” he tells me.
Settine says the band’s thrilled to get to continue playing Werewolf’s songs on this jaunt: “I think we’re gonna bring the most energy we ever have to the live show, because we finally translated it to a record… As a group, we’ve never been so excited to take a record out on the road.” And when I ask what The Brook & The Bluff have planned for the remainder of 2026, Settine tells me that they plan to enjoy Werewolf on the road for a while: “We’re just excited to bring this show to as many people as possible. We’ll do this run, and then maybe we’ll do the thing where you go back and play in secondary cities, or maybe we’ll do a good opening spot. All of those things are possibilities at this point, but we’re honestly just excited for wherever it takes us.”
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