Header image credit: @chancevphotos
Heavy Denim have been at this long enough to know what they’re doing. From playing out at Local 506, Kings, and Neptune’s to Carolina Indie Fest, it’s clear they’ve put in the work. Last year they put out Young Hearts Die Hard, recorded at Stadium Heights Sound in Durham with Ryan Pickett, the front-of-house engineer for My Morning Jacket.
Then their singer stepped away. Fortunately, Travis Creed moved down from western North Carolina about a year ago, carrying a background in traditional music and bluegrass, a love of rock and roll, and a natural lyrical instinct. It was the perfect fit. The sound that’s come out of bringing Travis on board brought them right back to the studio for
The members of Heavy Denim also play in The Sheeps and Astrocat, and that cross-pollination shows. This band thinks carefully about what belongs to which project, which means what ends up as a Heavy Denim song is intentional. Right now, by their own account, they’re in a creative stretch where everything feels like it belongs.
What’s something y’all have been listening to lately?
Daniel (guitar): This is not going to be a cool answer, but The 1975. I absolutely love them, and I’ve been on a really intense pop music streak recently. The other one I’ll give you that’s a little cooler is the new Cut Worms album [Transmitter]. I’ve been listening to that a lot.
Travis (vocals): Fresh off seeing Pat Sansone at Cat’s Cradle this week, the new Autumn Defense album [Here and Nowhere] is pretty fantastic. It’s been out for a little while, but I’ve really worn it out. All kinds of soundscape stuff going on there, and it’s flute-centric, which is kind of fun. I’ve just been a fan of his for quite some time.
Blake (guitar): On Travis’s recommendation, I’ve listened to a lot of Sun Volt recently, which has led me back to Uncle Tupelo, because every time I hear [Jay Farrar’s] voice, I think, “Oh, I need to go back to Uncle Tupelo.”
My uncool thing is that my daughter loves “Opality” by Sabrina Carpenter and Taylor Swift, so I’ve been listening to that a billion times a day. And “Manchild” too. Those lyrics are not for four-year-olds, man. [laughs]
Steve (drums): I’ve been forcibly listening to “All Your’n” by Tyler Childers, because my three-and-a-half-year-old is obsessed with it. We just listen to it on repeat right now.
Who is the first musician that you remember discovering on your own and obsessing over?
Travis: I’m 100% confident mine will be different than anybody else’s. I grew up in the mountains of North Carolina, and all my family was traditional music folks, so I’d probably say Doc Watson was the core center of it. With that said, I also rejected it pretty quickly in my teenage years. I was out in the tobacco barn, break dancing, listening to Run-D.M.C., and practicing popping and locking. I abandoned it relatively quickly and then came back to it later in life.
Blake: When I was 13 and got my first guitar, the things that really got me to play were Nirvana, Green Day, and Metallica. In terms of actually writing songs, my biggest influences are the Silver Jews, David Berman as a songwriter, and Bill Callahan. Those are my two biggest songwriting influences. But I still go back and listen to Metallica, Nirvana, and Green Day and realize, “Oh yeah, these guys are actually great.” It wasn’t just 13-year-old me. These are good songs, and they hold up.
Daniel: From 2005 to 2006, My Morning Jacket and Wilco both put out live albums. 2005 was Kicking Television by Wilco, and 2006 was My Morning Jacket‘s Okonokos. They both released live DVDs with these and I had a CRT television in my room and just wore those out. That was the summer that changed my direction.
Steve: I started playing drums when I was nine, and the first bands I got into were primarily because my older brothers were into them. The number one was Tool; they were also the first show I went to at 12. I always loved Danny Carey’s style; it’s kind of aspirational in a lot of ways. I’ve grown to like a lot of other things along the way, sometimes geared more toward heavier technical stuff, but I can also listen to Tyler Childers on repeat.
What’s the history of the band?
Daniel: Blake and I started playing music together when we were still living in New York, around 2014. Blake moved to Durham when his wife went to grad school, and eventually, I moved down to North Carolina to start a band. I gave Blake a call, and he said, “I know a great drummer and a great bass player, let’s make it happen.”
That’s when Heavy Denim first started. Friendships came first, and the band came second. We have a real brotherly instinct toward each other, both positively and bickeringly.
Blake: Steve and I met around 2016 or 2017 and would jam here and there, but nothing serious. When Danny came down and wanted to start a band, that’s when Steve and I really started playing together seriously. Matt and I had been in a million bands together before that, so it all just came together.
Travis, how did you get connected with the guys?
Travis: I’ve always been in bands organically, and this was a new endeavor: jumping into an existing group and navigating not just the musical side, but the personal side. They were all old friends, and I was focused on making sure first impressions went well. But as Blake said, it was just super easy. Their twisted sense of humor went right along with mine.
Musically, I thought in the beginning we might be coming from different places a little bit. I just moved down from Western North Carolina to Durham about a year ago. I have a roots and bluegrass background, but I always loved rock and roll. I figured it’d be a fun experiment, and there’s been zero effort. It’s happened naturally. It’s been a lot of fun to join a group of writers. Every person in this band brings material forward and brings ideas, and we all walk out of rehearsal going, yeah, that’s working.
How did adding Travis and the new Americana direction affect the songwriting dynamic?
Daniel: We all have solo projects and other bands. Blake has his solo project; Travis has maybe two at this point; Matt’s in The Sheeps; I have a solo project; and Steve plays in most of these. So there are a lot of songs flying around, and we mostly have to decide what’s right for each project. We were very fortunate to have that problem, so to speak.
A group I really admire for doing this well is Kit McKay, Matt Southern, Fake Jr., and the Honeyguide Collective stuff. They do it probably as well as anyone around here.
Blake: It’s just fun to have different songwriters in the band. We all have similar styles in some ways, but we each bring our own idiosyncratic things. And the best thing is when you put a song in front of the other guys and see what it becomes. You place your trust in these folks and they take the song somewhere you never even thought, and it ends up sounding way better. Some songs get stashed away for our solo projects. Some songs are meant to be Heavy Denim songs, and we bring them to the guys. It’s good to have both outlets.
Travis: I’ve got to give these guys a lot of credit. I do the heavy lifting lyrically for this group, and they’ve allowed me to alter lyrics on existing songs to fit my voice a little better, both my physical voice and lyrically where I’d naturally come from. That’s a big leap of faith that I’ve really appreciated. And so far, I don’t think we’ve had a lot of lyric rejections coming back. A lot of trust has been given, which has felt good.
Having just put out a full-length, are you hitting the ground running with new music or focused on getting shows going first?
Daniel: Our first show with Travis was on April 25 at Pine State Coffee, where they’re just starting to throw shows in the backyard. That was our first show in this iteration of the band. We have played a few shows since then and have recorded 4 songs with Max Gowan in Raleigh. He has been really amazing to work with, and everything sounds amazing. We are planning on putting this new material out starting in October. We have been very fortunate to work with some great engineers around town. In addition to Max, we worked with Ryan Pickett at Stadium Heights in Durham, and Matt has engineered some of our first releases out of his home studio.
Steve: Yeah, I think that’s accurate. Everything we’re doing is sounding really good. Adding Travis and piecing all of our different interests together makes the sound really cool and unique. I’m excited to eventually get into the studio on it and get the shows going.
Travis: We’re still in the sweet honeymoon phase. We’re happy with what we’re coming up with and riding a creative wave. We all just had a very deliberate conversation about how these things ebb and flow, and right now we’re in a really beautiful, creative moment where everybody’s contributing and we like what we’re coming up with. Being present and riding that wave until it breaks, which it inevitably does.
Right now, at least in my experience, we’re in a unique and fun period of getting the group together. A Heavy Denim 2.0, perhaps. I’m very happy to be present and part of this moment where we’re being creative together.
Image credit: chancevphotos
From each of your perspectives, having been in the local scene for a while, how have you seen it evolve?
Blake: I think this is a great local scene. The bands are really good, and a big difference from the Brooklyn scene where Danny and I came from is that they’re actually all great people too, in addition to being really good bands. In New York, you could have some really great bands, but some folks had some major egos. Here, it’s just a place where there’s a great scene, and some bands do make it big, but a lot of people do it because they love playing music.
There are also a lot of great venues like King’s in Raleigh and Local 506 in Chapel Hill. There are some places we haven’t played yet that we’d love to, like Cat’s Cradle. It’s not like this everywhere, so we really need to step back and appreciate how awesome this is. It has been for a very long time.
Travis: I haven’t gigged down here in quite some time. I’m excited to hear that this scene is a little more collegial, everybody supporting each other. I did live in Raleigh in the early 2000s and was in an alt-country band, and there was a fun scene riding the coattails of the Whiskeytown-type stuff, where alt-country was cool. It’s coming back around again, which is exciting.
The depth of the scene here is pretty amazing. Just the number of bands and singer-songwriters and how consistently good they are. It’s not a small area, but it’s not a major metro either. Really remarkable.
Daniel: The depth of the scene is pretty amazing. And now every band has either a lap steel or a pedal steel guitar; no matter what genre you’re in, you’ve got one. I don’t know if that’s a change or a return to something, like Travis said. There was kind of a cool Durham sound a while back, and it’s fun to see how we’ve got the roots of Megafaun still here, spread out and grown new branches off of it.
Who are some of your favorite local or North Carolina artists you’d want to shout out?
Daniel: I mean, we love all the bands that have blown up recently, like MJ Lenderman, Wednesday, Fust. Those are all really great. But locally, a band that hasn’t blown up that I really love is called Bottom Shelf. We’ve played with them a bunch of times, and they’re great songwriters and guitar players. Riley, who’s in Bottom Shelf, used to be in our band, too, so there’s another nice crossover.
I’ve also been going to more singer-songwriter shows recently. I love Max Lane and Lonnie Rott. And then on the band side, there’s Joe Westerlund, who released an album on Psychic Hotline. Really, really cool, almost like Tortoise and kind of kraut-rocky.
Travis: I also love MC Taylor. Hiss Golden Messenger has been a favorite of mine for quite some time. I know Phil Cook pretty well, and I really enjoy pretty much everything he does. And it’s kind of fun to see that next generation of alt-country really kicking ass and getting national attention.
You’re listed as founding artists on Subvert, the cooperatively-owned music platform. I feel like I haven’t seen many local bands pick up on that.
Daniel: I signed us up for that. I was looking at the digital music landscape and there are just not a lot of good options. I think we all appreciate Bandcamp and what they try to do, but even Bandcamp has its limits. Something radically different, that’s what we’re looking for. What’s the most innovative, artist-centric, cooperative option out there? And Subvert seems to be it.
I signed us up a couple of months ago and I’m starting to create profiles for Heavy Denim and my solo projects. I actually have our certificate of membership right here. The date of issuance was October 28, 2025. As we get our sea legs with new material, I think it’ll be a place to make our own.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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