Q&A with Dark Water Rising

UNC

Staff writer Tyler Confoy talked to vocalist Charly Lowry about Dark Water Rising’s roots, sound and beginnings.

DIVERSIONS: The cover art for Dark Water Rising shows you and your five band mates almost submerged in a body of water. Is there any connection between this photo and the band name?

CHARLY LOWRY: A lot of people think it’s Photoshopped, but it’s not. It was taken on the Lumber River. That’s in Pembroke. That’s our hometown or kind of our base where the majority of the members is from. The members of the Lumbee tribe are also referred to as the people of the dark water.

That’s where we take the “dark water” part of our name from. We wanted to base it around the river. It’s a very central part to our tribe because of how resourceful it is. Our tribe pretty much lives along that river.

If you look at the demographics, you’ll see that our county and the surrounding counties, which is where the majority of the tribe lives, are along that river. We just added the Rising. But it took us a little while to come up with the Rising part.

DIVE: You seem to have really strong ties to your Native American background. Do you try to reflect the culture in your music?

CL: You can hear some of the influence, but we don’t want to be categorized as a Native American band and pigeonholed to a lot of the places that a lot of Native Americans play, like casinos. We just happen to be Native Americans who play music instead of trying to fit into a Native American genre.

The influence is in some of the songs, like “Brownskin” for example. Brittany, who’s in the band, is another vocalist and percussionist. She and I — when we were students in undergrad at UNC — wrote “Brownskin.” We had the young girls from our tribe in mind, and then it just branched out to girls in general. It kept the name “Brownskin.” It just talks about young girls and how we don’t have to fit into the pressures of society to act a certain way and think a certain way.

There’s a part of the song where all three of us chant in unison, which is characteristic of our culture. So you can hear different elements that we take from our culture, but the majority of our music is not based around that. We try to incorporate it but our music is a blend of rock, folk, country influence and gospel influence.

DIVE: Did some of the members really just learn instruments for the first time for Dark Water Rising?

CL: Yeah, we all did. I was a vocalist for years but never played anything. Aaron is the drummer. He played in marching band but he’d never really played a formal drum kit.

Eric played the bass for a year or so for church when he was younger but then he went for years and didn’t play at all. So we all basically picked up the instruments and learned them so that we could play in the band.

DIVE: Have you had a good experience that sticks out for the band?

CL: The first song that we tried to perform together was “Same Old Thing.” It’s one that we still play at our live show; it’s usually our show opener. We played that song and we played it so many times before we played it that one time and knew that everything was dead on.

The sound was perfect. It sounded like Dark Water Rising. We were tight, and it wasn’t recently. This might have been during our first year of being together.

Even though we weren’t doing anything special musically, it was just the fact that we had all come together and we hit at the right time.

Everybody’s tones were just so beautiful and it just came out nicely, and this was at a regular practice so it was unexpected. But when we did it, we all looked up at each other and each one of us felt the same thing and realized we might be on to something.