The Anachronistic Whelks: How Craigslist, Jack’s Bar, and Reverse Mermaids Came Together for a Debut Album!

Peri DeLorenzo (fiddle), Mark Dobbyn (guitar), and Erin Lobb Mason (upright bass) are Rhode Island-based acoustic trio “The Whelks”, whose three-part harmony is inspired by classic American harmony groups and whose approachability and goofiness are all their own. They don’t take themselves too seriously and yet … they describe their trio as one that shares an unspoken language, creates melodies and harmonies by holding space for each other, and strives to perform songs that sound well-rehearsed and sharp. Their focus is coming up with a musical recipe that makes them as players, and us as audience members – feel good. a worthy objective! How do they accomplish this? By playing 3-hour gigs(!!), – having post-show rehash sessions to continuously improve, and writing lyrics that reflect the humor and heart of being human. Being whimsical is important to them, and at the same time- this band of classically trained musicians and a luthier (a maker of stringed instruments), treat their craft and its execution with the utmost seriousness – all of which is apparent in their 10-track debut record, “Reverse Mermaid”. After listening to their music and chatting about their origin story, all I wanted to do was sing, dance to a waltz, and have Derby pie with them (I’ll likely do many of these things at their record release show on Sept. 14th). Fort Foreclosure, founded by an artist the band considers a Warren treasure William Schaff, was the backdrop to our conversation. 

Mayté Antelo-Ovando (Motif): Let’s start with a get-to-know-you question, how’d you meet?  

Erin Mason: We met on Craigslist! I’m from Kentucky originally and growing up my family was very musical. My grandma taught me to play piano. When I was a kid, I wanted to get away from the traditional music I was listening to all the time, so I just played and studied classical music. I went to a conservatory and as soon as I left Kentucky, I was super homesick. Everywhere I went I would find other people playing music and writing songs that sounded like what I grew up with (she even got an opera singer to sing a bunch of country songs about sex and drinking). So, I put out an ad when I was moving to Rhode Island that just said what kind of music I wanted to play and asked if anyone wanted to jam. We struck out the first few times we tried to get together because it was right around my Kentucky Derby party. I really wish I had just invited you guys.

Mark Dobbyn: But we were strangers…

EM: Yeah, I just didn’t want to be turned into a lamp!

MO: Ooh that got dark. Haha! 

EM: Then you guys trusted me and invited me to your yard!

MD: Erin listed a bunch of music that was all stuff that we liked, and we thought okay – this person seems cool. We were looking for an upright bassist, and also –  she said that she’d bring whiskey and pie when she came. She brought whiskey, not pie, the first time. But pies came later.

Peri DeLorenzo: Oh yeah, pies have been brought. 

MO: What kind of pie?

EM: Derby Pie.

MO: What is Derby pie?

EM: Oh, it’s like pecan pie, but with bourbon and chocolate. The chocolate stays melty, but it still gets that sugar crust on top.

MO: That sounds delicious! And after your jam session how did you connect creatively? 

EM: I feel like the songs that I want to write are already in Mark and Peri’s ear in a way. We have a similar vocabulary for songwriting. So, it’s very smooth to bring songs to them. They help me make them more interesting and less like trite. 

MO:  When you say you have a similar ear while playing music like this, what is ‘this’ music? 

MD: I think it’s roots of American music, blue grass, country, folk, western swing. I feel like our music kind of swings more than we had maybe even anticipated. Harmonies are a big part of it. The harmonies come from the traditions of the folk music world. I remember Erin’s original posting had influences like the Delmore Brothers, Andrews Sisters, and the Carter Family. 

MO: Since you touched on the posting, what’s the story of reading the ad on your end? 

MD: I feel like you can tell just who people are when people say what they listen to…

PD: Wait! You should preface … you read a lot of Craigslist ads – not in a weird way. It was like window shopping for you.

MO: Wait. You said this happened in 2021? That’s so interesting. I didn’t know people still used Criagslist!

PD: We’re old, old souls. Haha. 

MD: My profession is vintage musical instruments. Keeping an eye on Craigslist is something I do out of habit. Things turn up. It’s like looking at the backpage of the classifieds. I’ll occasionally look for musicians. I also play pedal steel, so I’ll look for people looking for players. I don’t know how else you find people …  It’s so anachronistic, but there’s nothing more current that’s reliable. I would always keep an eye out for an upright bassist, because we talked about how this would be a lot easier as a trio.

PD: Although I didn’t think we were looking for a third musical person. He was like “Hey, check out this ad … I’ve already reached out to them.” 

MO: Haha. Surprise! So it was just the two of you at first? 

PD: Yeah. I’m from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I grew up playing the violin. I started when I was four, and similar to Erin, it was all classical. It wasn’t in response to anything in the culture of Milwaukee. There was just a strong string program, and my mom was like, “She seems to like this.” I got my Bachelor of Music in Indiana, which is close to Louisville. I was glad to go a couple of times. 

EM: We probably overlapped at string camp.

MO: There’s a string camp?

PD: Oh yeah! It’s serious. And after music school I was like, I never wanna play my violin again, because the program took everything out of me. It was exhausting. Then I moved to New York and fell in with this guy (Mark) and his friends. They were just jamming – playing country music. I had never heard classic country before. We would sit around and play. I’d also never taken a solo before or played something that wasn’t on a page. Really scary! There were beers, so that was good, and they were so open and welcoming. There were no judgments. It was just a totally different scene from the classical space. 

MD: Peri and I have been friends for 15 years. We lived in New York (though he is a native son of Warren, RI) and played in bands. Then we eventually started dating and played as a duo called the Bank of Ireland (a band they still play in). 

PD: Initially, we were doing a lot of Irish stuff. Then it just kind of became the vehicle for whatever we were playing together. When we met Erin, we wanted to be a whole new project. We needed to figure out what we wanted to call ourselves. We wanted it to be something native to Rhode Island. 

MD: The whelk is a carnivorous sea snail that is native to Rhode Island. It’s the one you find on the beach that you put up your ear and you can hear the ocean. People also call them conch (they could’ve been The Conchs!) but the Rhode Island one is called the whelk (probably a term used all over New England). So, it was a Rhode Islandy name, and we all like being out and about near and on the water. 

PD: I feel like the three of us are pretty whimsical. We don’t take ourselves too seriously. We take practicing, performing, and all aspects of the band seriously, but we’re not taking ourselves too seriously. I mean, the carnivorous sea snail – just even thinking about that is funny. Our website is https://www.whelkswhelkswhelks.com/ – we’re trying to be kind of goofy about all this, but hopefully, in our mind, putting out a good product that sounds sharp and well-rehearsed.

MD: The craft is taken seriously. 

MO: It sounds like you’re wanting to be approachable too.

MD: Yeah. We figured out our sound from playing a ton of long gigs. We still do three-hour gigs. Sometimes – two, three, even four times a week. We’re there while other things are happening, and we spend a lot of time paying attention to what works. We pay attention to the situation. Are we winning the crowd over? What situations does the crowd ignore us?

EM: Yeah, what feels good in the room?

MD: What helps people have fun … can we steal their attention for a couple minutes with a certain song? Things that are fun for us tend to be fun for other people. We keep things light, bouncy, and swinging. That tends to be a good recipe.

MO: You’re taking the feedback from the crowd. 

PD: I keep a little note tab for us (for their rehash sessions). I’m an organized person.

EM: One of the important things I feel really gelled from those longer gigs is hearing it in my head. I was starting to figure out what kind of solos you guys like to take, and how to best bring those out as a bass player. How can I respond in the spaces you leave? How can I leave space to give you a chance to shine? Sometimes you’ll do certain rhythmic motifs over again and I’ll notice. 

PD: Did you say motifs because of this conversation?

EM: Oh! Haha! No. You know what I mean. Now that I have their styles in my ear, I can kind of bring it out on the bass. I’ll do a run that Mark does. If he plays a weird note in a chord, I’ll do something that kind of jangles against it, to bring it out a little more. 

PD: I feel like we’re at a point where the three of us are speaking the same language. Sometimes, if someone isn’t paying attention in the moment something might slip away, which is normal, but overall, we’re all kind of communicating in this kind of cool, unspoken way. 

EM: And that’s when it feels best anyway. Which is all I care about.

MD: Also, there are times where you’re thinking … What do you play when you’ve played your whole bag of tricks? 

PD: You play the melody or go fuckin’ crazy! Throw shit at the wall. 

EM: Which ends up being the best!

MO: Let’s move onto your debut record. What are some songs you want to highlight? 

MD: One of our songs is an ode to a Warren institution – Jack’s Bar. It’s a dying breed of a place where there is no entertainment. There’s no music. There’s nothing happening. You just sit and you get a beer. You chat with whoever’s on the stool next to you. 

PD: Whether you like it or not. Haha! 

MD: Sometimes, the whole bar is chatting together. It’s an ode to an unfortunately dying style of going somewhere to socialize. There’s a joke in the song about how it has to end because there’s no music allowed there. “Melody might be the one thing it lacks cause don’t you know they don’t play music at Jack’s.”

MO: What’s another song you can’t wait to play for people? 

PD: Do you wanna talk about some of the witchery in Wooly Worms? 

MO: Witchery in whatty what? 

EM: There’s a song called Wooly Worms, which is the caterpillar form of the Isabella Tiger Moth. Growing up, my grandma would tell me you could tell what kind of winter you were going to have by how wide the black stripe is on it. It’s an homage to Kentucky and loving a place that doesn’t always love you back. It’s about holding all the things from that place and letting them go too. The chorus of that song is based on a superstition. If someone dies in your family, you’re supposed to tell the bees if you’re a beekeeper, or else they’ll swarm, “Who will tell the bees? If I want it to be you, is that coming on too strong?” Also, each verse has a different bug featured in it, so there are cicadas too.

PD: By the way, Erin is a badass artist. And a lot of the art she does is bugs. 

EM: I’m working on a print series of woodcut prints that has themes from that song. We’re using it for the download codes at the release show. If people don’t want to buy a CD or a vinyl record, they can buy the print that comes with a code. There is one that is a child’s hand being held by an old, weathered hand with a wooly worm across it. Jacques Bidon is printing them at his community studio. The t-shirts and tote bags and posters depict reverse mermaids, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s fish on top and naked humans on the bottom – sometimes covered tastefully with shells. They were all printed at AS220. 

MO: And it’s the name of the record!

EM: Yeah. We picked it because we wanted something kind of whimsical that we didn’t take too seriously but was still nautical-themed. I drew a bunch of them on ceramics just for fun. I was selling mugs with reverse mermaids on them. I think I gave you guys some and you were like, wait – this is the record.

MD: Erin made the posters for the show. We took them to our local print shop and the guy was completely scandalized. He was just like, “Oh, I really don’t know what these are. I haven’t seen this before. Some of those are men!” 

PD: One last thing to share … The Whelks are a first date band, okay? We’re a golden anniversary band. Why? Because we play in the afternoon. Maybe you’re older and you’re celebrating your golden anniversary, and you go to bed earlier. Maybe you’re on a first date, and you might not know if you’re gonna end up wanting dinner… 

MD: And there’s gonna be at least one good moment where we’re holding out a harmony for that extra second and a half, and it’s gonna be a great smooching moment. There are waltzes too. It’s modern dating. (They also have a song titled, “If This Were a Date” so this all makes sense). 

EM: People can take it however they want. In the end, I hope that y’all have a good time, but I’m definitely having a good time!

Want to experience The Whelks? Come to their record release show on September 14th with the Papermoon Jazz Band (Nick-a-Nees, 5pm to 8pm – an afternoon show, as promised). For more music, reverse mermaids, and wooly worms, follow them on Instagram at @TheWhelks or go to their website: whelkswhelkswhelks.com