Souled American
Johnny Brenda’s
1201 Frankford Ave.
Philadelphia
June 28, 2026
Settling into my seat on the floor at JB’s last night, I was distracted, elsewhere, on my phone, thinking about other places and other people – watching clips of Wilco’s Solid Sound festival at MassMOCA, which at one point I thought I’d be in attendance for, and feeling a touch of FOMO – when Wilco’s “Handshake Drugs” came on over the PA. Few things center me in the moment like a captivating song, and it was the sound of Jeff Tweedy’s restless, aggravated, shifty song that grounded me into a state of contented purpose that against all odds – always against all odds – I was exactly where I was supposed to be. It was impossible to do anything but agree with how good the song sounded in that exact moment. I was about to get that feeling plenty more times; before “Handshake Drugs” was done, Souled American ascended the steps to take the stage for their first of two sets.
Loose, woozy, ramshackle, teetering, swaying folk-country: these are all words that sprinkled into mind while watching the trio of Chris Grigoroff (guitar, vocals), Joe Adducci (bass, guitar, vocals) – Souled American’s remaining founding members and songwriters – and Brian Smith (guitar). The band is back, resurfacing, for the first time in three decades, with a new album, Sanctions, in tow; their opening set featured it heavily (“These are all from the new record,” Grigoroff remarked off-handedly while tuning). All three musicians played guitar together at first – doubling and tripling voicings, chord for chord and note for note, so they throbbed with an odd, foggy resonance; Grigoroff’s steel-string acoustic, with taped-in-place muting foam, was all pick-strummed attack, hardly a whimper of sustain (a janky, almost washboard-like quality) — while the electrics slow-motion bloomed and rebounded around the room. “We’re Souled American; I’m assuming you know that,” Grigoroff said after two songs, swiveling in his pinstripe pants on a drum stool, his singing voice akin to Vic Chesnutt at his most weathered and pained, with a similar register and style of vibrato (high praise). “Have any of y’all ever seen us before?” he asked. “Many times!” someone hollered.
The music wasn’t merely laconic: this was slowcore country at its most desolate, with the humming energy of wide-open spaces so quiet and empty in their vastness that even in the daylight you think of the surface of the moon. When Adducci would switch to fretless bass the songs got even queasier, his cello-like sliding, quirky intonation and belch-y tone meeting the lazy strumming of Grigoroff’s acoustic and the clean sheen of Smith’s Daniel Lanois-esque wanderings. You'd think of barrooms long after closing time. “We’ll do something from Frozen,” they said, prefacing an achingly gorgeous rendition of “Downblossom,” one I fully fell and/or sunk into. They played “Before Tonight,” one of their best-known tunes, in a manner that reminded me of David Bromberg’s joke about years of playing “Mr. Bojangles” with Jerry Jeff Walker (“after hours at the clubs we’d do horrible things to it”), which they could get away with because it’s just a perfect song, like Shel Silverstein dripping with pathos: “A spool before a wind / A found after a find / A youth before a past / At least before at last.” The ceiling was lightly, sporadically dripping near Adducci – he joked he felt like Prince at the Super Bowl – and it was fitting, a falling mirror of Souled American’s irreproducible form of crooning, slow-drip, gauzy, blurry and blunted country.
