The Silver Skylarks will take flight Feb. 23 at The Kessler Theater, where they'll drop the debut single, “Power Moves,” from their record The Number One Set and Sound. It's an effort that they describe as “a funky B-Boy anthem meant for breakers.” The track will feature Uncle Roy and Spice! on vocals and Adrian Quesada of the Black Pumas on guitar, just a few of the many artists who collaborated on the Skylarks’ album. Doubling as a celebration for the rebrand of Dallas-based record label Eastwood Music Group into Skylark Soul Co., the Kessler event will include performances from Large Professor, who also appears on the album, Shabazz 3 and house band BranooFunck.
The full-length album, which will be released on May 3, has been nearly three years in the making. Throughout the COVID-19 lockdown period, Balis built a small home studio that he used to get all of his musical ideas down on tape. Most of these Dropboxed ideas — fleshed out with arrangements of strings, horns and other instrumentation — were shared with Wade, who frequently offered his feedback. After several rounds of communication, the two decided the tracks would best meet their full potential from a “musical duo producer entity.”
Their first completed track ended up being “Try A Little Love,” the first single off Bastards of Soul’s last album, Give It Right Back. After their first foray into co-producing, Balis says the pair naturally ventured into a new, separate project with one another. After selecting around a dozen of Balis’ prearranged tracks, the Skylarks got to recording them with players they knew could help them fulfill the ideas, the vibe and the vision of the record.
“Stylistically and taste wise, Jeff and I come from different ends of the universe, with him having a hip-hop upbringing and mine being more rock ’n’ roll,” Balis says. “We had those different influences and would sometimes speak different musical languages, but ended up being very likeminded as far as our tastes and sound design. So it was very simple and easy to work together and get the best out of the players that we use.”
Balis says it took him all of two sessions to be able to give up control and easily adapt to Wade’s suggestions, all of which were essential to making the record. Balis says the pair was able to push original ideas for various sounds and turn their own expectations on their head, like taking a James Brown groove and turning it into a “soundtrack for a modern breakdance video” on “Power Moves.”
“The way they ended ... they’re as I never would have imagined them sounding when I was creating them,” Balis says of the songs. “But when I listen to them now and I compare them to the original raw demo tapes, they're not dissimilar at all, so it's really cool. Jeff and I, when we worked together, we didn't change anything. We just kind of molded them into a completely different space than where I had originally had them in my mind.”
Beyond growth in collaborative and creative terms, Wade believes the Silver Skylarks have also helped him and Balis get themselves through recent heartbreak. After the unexpected death of Murray in 2021, Wade says he found himself feeling a bit lost. Throughout his initial period of grief, he was depressed and lacked creative energy, and was, at times, unsure how he might use that energy next. Once he started on the Skylarks project with Balis in 2022, Wade believes it was able to bring the two back into a new and healing collaborative space.
“I think coming at these songs from a completely different perspective and looking at it from a different angle and doing something collaborative was really kind of good for both of our creative souls to throw ourselves into after such a difficult period,” Wade says. “Once it got going, it just felt really good to be in that space and harness that energy in that way again.”“It's hard to have those ghosts in the room, and that's just kind of always something that is going to linger.” – Danny Balis, Silver Skylarks
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Balis had been generating songs featured on The Number One Set and Sound before and after Murray’s passing, but he says their final renditions, as well as the future of Bastards of Soul, wholly relied on compromise among the band’s surviving members.
“Number one, it was asking the question, ‘Are we willing to even keep this thing together?’” Balis says. “When you lose the focal point of your group, and he's not coming back, you kind of have to ask yourself the question, ‘Do we get another singer and we go through all of this again? At the age [I am] now, do I even want to be in a band? Do any of us want to be in a band? And do we want to kind of just start this back up with the same guys and just always have those thoughts in our mind?’”
Balis later decided that a change of scenery was best for him and believes that was likely for Wade as well. Balis still maintains regular relationships with the guys from Bastards of Soul and says the love he had for them when they were a group is still there. But as far as working together on a music project, it seems to Balis that some time needed to elapse before they consider doing anything as a collective again.
“It's hard to have those ghosts in the room, and that's just kind of always something that is going to linger,” Balis says. “I think that passes as different people process their grief in their individual ways. I’m not saying that’s exactly what it was, but maybe subconsciously that was what attracted me to just doing something alone or with Jeff. Jeff made it incredibly easy.”
Both Balis and Wade have their own history and ties to Bastards of Soul, but both view their current collaboration as a new musical venture entirely. Despite the new group’s differences and separation from Bastards of Soul, Wade said their upcoming record shares strong ties to the local funk and soul sound. The record and its many external collaborators, ranging from Jordache Grant on keys and synths to Lunar RAE on traps, come from many different scenes and sounds. Together, they form an album that is still uniquely Dallas-Fort Worth.
Wade says he also feels a shift in tone on The Number One Set and Sound compared to his last recent collaboration with Balis on Bastards of Soul’s Give It Right Back. The latter embodies some of the band members’ and Wade’s sadness, while Silver Skylarks’ debut shows growth in the amount of energy and positivity it exudes. In its own way, The Number One Set and Sound evolved into Balis and Wade’s own love letter to funk and soul and to those who make the scene and sound what it is today. With the upcoming launch of Silver Skylarks, Wade hopes fans, both new and old, see it as a continuation of stuff that has been happening in Dallas funk and soul.
“We have Dallas R&B legend Gregg A. Smith on this album. He’s the first voice you hear on it, and we did things like that to really show how much soul, how much Dallas soul means to us,” Wade says. “Me, Danny, everyone involved with the record have loved being a part of this, and we just hope that everyone else loves it too. I hope they feel the ties to us, the sound and the city, because it all means a lot.”
Silver Skylarks Release Party featuring Large Professor, Shabazz 3, and BranooFunck takes place at The Kessler Theater, 1230 W. Davis St., on Friday, Feb. 23. Doors open at 7 p.m.; tickets are $24–36.
