BRENDAN LAKE plays “The Work Truck Song” as Katey-Anne Clark, 4, spins around the Rising River Records studio on Front Street while her dad, Brackett Clark, keyboardist for The Work Trucks, dances with big sister Kacey-Jane, 7.
S ome people believe that things just happen, but for Brendan Lake, guitarist and lead singer for The Work Trucks, it’s hard to believe coincidences are just dumb luck. He’d credit a certain law of attraction which seemed to bring his bandmates together.
THE WORK TRUCKS band, from left, Chris Mullins, Chris Lannon, Brendan Lake, Liz Lannon and Brackett Clark.
“I moved home from California in 2010 and I met Chris and Liz Lannon at the music store (Sunburst Guitars in Bath). They just happened to be playing in there when I stopped by one day. I asked them if they needed work and we played together that night at the (Montsweag) Roadhouse,” Lake said as he settled up his bar tab at Front Street Public House last week. With Chris Lannon on mandolin and Liz on fiddle, the threesome was on its way to becoming a band.
Later that year Lake’s friend, bassist Chris Mullins, called looking for a place to stay. The two met during Lake’s sailing days when Mullins was living on a cape dory in North Carolina. “Chris basically moved up here to be in the band,” Lake said.
By the end of 2010 The Work Trucks were born.
The name of the band comes from Lake’s song by the same title, which was inspired by his 1976 Ford F250 with 400,000 miles on it. “I wrote the song to the metronome of my windshield wipers. The words just came into my head. There’s not a local show that we play that I don’t look out and see someone singing along,” Lake said.
Lake describes the Bath-based band as “country grunge,” a lo-fi blend of country ballads and blues, occasionally seared with the social awareness of musical genres like punk rock. Or even folk.
If Lake could be said to be the catalyst for the band, keyboardist Brackett Clark was the final piece that brought everything together. Clark, who spent summers in Maine growing up, had just moved back to Maine from Sonoma, Calif., when his wife, Carey got a teaching job at the University of Maine at Augusta. The couple lives in Arrowsic with their daughters, 7-year-old daughter Kacey- Jane and 4-year-old Katey-Anne.
Back in Sonoma, Clark had a recording studio called Rising River Records that he is in the process of re-establishing in Bath. He sang at former President Richard Nixon’s funeral — both were fellow graduates of Whittier College. His band Transcendental Hayride opened for the Grateful Dead. You could say he knows a good thing when he hears it.
“I heard Brendan playing one night at Boatbuilders (Pub) and it took me about a year to track him down. I said, ‘I really want to play keyboards with you.’ Brendan said, ‘What are you doing tonight?’”
“It’s like we all came together for a reason,” Lake said.
The reason is, clearly, to play some great songs.
The Work Trucks first show of 2013 is planned for tonight from 9 p.m. to midnight at Front Street Public House, 102 Front St. The bar is co-owned by Lake’s father, David; Chris Johnstone, who has supported the band with gigs at Montsweag Roadhouse in Woolwich; and Josh Knight, an occasional electric guitarist with the band, who Lake credits with “teaching him everything he knows.”
“It’ll be good to have music back in downtown Bath,” Lake said. He thinks of himself as something of a middle man in helping re-open a bar at the former site of The Black Barnacle Pub that closed in September. “Playing here is like everything coming together.”
For more information about The Work Trucks, visit www.theworktrucks.com.
rshelly@timesrecord.com
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