How it's going
It started at the Portland Burlesque Fest back in 2003
Have you loved anything your whole adult life?
For me and Todd, in addition to our three amazing kids, our two beloved Shih Tzus alive and dead, our mortgage, debts, a passel of incredible friends and family, alive and dead — and of course each other, thankfully still very much alive — we are connected by a band. Not a wedding band, though we have those, too.
I’m talking about the indie rock/folk/punk band we fell in love with fresh out of college when we were also wildly, madly, stupidly in love with each other.
For the last two decades, we have had the immense privilege of growing older with this beloved band that’s still together two decades later, just like us, this band we begged to play our wedding in a barely-lit Eugene bar, this band we dragged a great rowdy crowd of friends to see in Boise, this band who gave us the rare opportunity for a night out at the Showbox and the symphony in Seattle when our kids were tiny.
This band we spent this Valentine’s Day with, whose resonant gothic anthems clobbered us right in the middle of the chest just like they did that very first night.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, and this is a story worth drawing out — even for those of you have already heard it 100 times.
Hopefully especially for our dearly beloveds who’ve joined us on this journey.
Back in June of 2003, Todd and I were just back from a post-grad year in Russia. I was applying to journalism school while working as a manager for the test prep company I’d tutored with all through college, and Todd was running his own graphic design business out of our soundproofed basement bedroom.
We were renting this sage green three-bedroom Craftsman in Portland’s Alberta Arts district for $1150 a month including utilities, affordable with our starter paychecks and abject lack of dependents. Sigh.
We had been together since the summer before junior year, and for a fourth anniversary present, Todd bought me tickets to the Burlesquefest at Portland’s Crystal Ballroom, which felt like a very actualized, adult gift to 22-year-old me.
The burlesque performers were incredible, so lithe and limber, and very adult and actualized indeed, but they’re a bit of a blur in my mind. I remember a giant plexiglass champagne flute big enough to hold Catherine D'Lish and her strategically-positioned bubbles, a rope knifing down from the ceiling, a nearly-naked gymnast gripping it with her thighs.
But the music was the thing that grabbed me. The searing, plaintive, vital music is the thing I still remember with complete clarity these two decades later.
The band was DeVotchKa, which, thanks to our year in Saint Petersburg, we knew meant little girl in Russian. After a few years playing their multi-hyphenate indie folk/slavic punk/gothic country songs at hometown Denver/Boulder shows, they joined the burlesque circuit just in time to change the course of our lives.
Frontman Nick Urata was a mad ball of passion and yearning and he played the trumpet, the guitar and — most unexpectedly — the theramine, which complemented his beseeching, haunting croon. His plaintive, roiling energy was beautifully matched by Jeanie Schroder, intermittently on the bass, flute or the tuba’s quirky cousin, the sousaphone. Tom Hagerman jumped between the violin, accordion, piano and Melodica, and Shawn King offered a surprising stream of drums, percussion, trumpet and accordion.
(Like seriously, how did they budget for transport of all of those instruments in the early years? According to Wikipedia, they actually play even more instruments than I remember.)
DeVotchKa had put out only one full album, Supermelodrama, which we bought about 20 minutes into the Burlesquefest from a merch-seller at a red velvet-clad card table near the bathroom and played until the CD rutted and skipped great swathes of the best songs, and even after that.
Supermelodrama spoke to everything we’d experienced in our short adult lives: the explosive power of love, the exuberant agony of existence, the way your heart shoved up against your ribs when you ran down the street at 2 in the morning with your lover’s hand clasped in your own.
Their sound was standout in the U.S. scene, though it had some echoes of the street slavic music we knew from our obsession with Serbian director/musician Emir Kusterica and his stunning 1995 movie Underground.
When Todd accepted my proposal of marriage two months later on my 24th birthday, he had only two wishes: that we have a bright orange, pink and green wedding cake, and that we at least try to convince DeVotchKa to play at our wedding.
A few months later, we piled into the car with some friends bound for a small show in Eugene with a flask full of vodka and our work cut out for us.
I was nervous on my wedding day, but not because of any doubts I had about marriage. Todd was also a wreck, despite being sure about me. He and his friends had stayed up half the night popping CDs into his giant computer and making a playlist we could run at our reception in case DeVotchKa didn’t make it to the altar.
Back in a dark Eugene bar six months earlier, Shawn had told us they would play our wedding if they could get more Portland shows to make it worth the cost of travel, hardly covered by the $2k we promised to pay them.
We hadn’t heard from them since, but we checked their slim website’s concert list constantly. They had Colorado shows scheduled the week before and after our wedding, and it seemed unlikely that they’d squeeze in a trip to Portland.
Todd had just started work on his playlist about 10 days before our wedding when a random refresh of their website revealed two entries that had us jumping up and down in our living room until we were gasping for breath:
Dante’s, Portland, Oregon, May 7, 2004
Private Event May 8, 2004
Oh. My. God!!!!
Still, I figured there was maybe a 50-50 chance of them coming.
An hour before our ceremony, I watched from the entry arch of the Portland Chinese garden as my soon-to-be-husband sprinted across Everett Street in his trim tux, a grin splitting his cute face.
Everybody thought we were screaming and crying because we were excited to embark on this next adventure together, but really Todd had swung by the reception site to set up his computer and caught DeVotchKa’s crew bringing their instruments in.
They played from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m., until everyone at the wedding was soaked in sweat and love and gratitude. Our band earned 110 new lifetime fans that day.
After that, we drove a moving truck from Portland to Chicago, I went to grad school, my dear daddy who opened for DeVotchKa at my wedding was diagnosed with and treated for late-stage head and neck cancer — and lived! — and I got my first journalism job covering the Idaho Statehouse.
We saw DeVotchka play at the Neurolux in Boise two years after our wedding, joined by the boisterous group of 20 newsroom friends who were our constant companions in those days. The band was more well-known by then, up for a ton of awards for their work on the Little Miss Sunshine soundtrack, and we cheered them on.
We moved to Seattle and started making babies, and raising them took over our lives. There wasn’t a free moment for more than a decade but we still listened to DeVotchKa enough that all of our babies could sing along.
When our youngest was 18 months old in 2016, my parents took our three preschool-aged kids so we could get a rare night out — DeVotchKa was playing a symphony show that promised to have us home early enough to catch the baby on her first waking.
It had been a decade since we’d seen them play in Boise, back when we thought we were grown-ups. Nothing had changed and everything had changed and the wonder of it coursed through me until I was dizzy with it. I closed my eyes and the violin and bass and trumpet and Nick’s howl and my giddiness vibrated in me and Todd clutched my cold hand in his warm one and hummed along under his breath.
When that baby was four, I brought her to see DeVotchKa play at a free KEXP studio show, and took her dad to the Showbox to see DeVotchKa in the fancy big kid seats a year later and we jumped up and down until we gasped for breath and we stayed out all night and understood that we were still young and madly, wildly in love. Our bodies just hurt a lot more the next day.
Then the pandemic came and everything that was easy got hard and everything that was hard got impossible and I got sick and I was so tired every second and my world seemed like it would just keep folding in on itself until there was nothing left.
When we found out DeVotchKa was playing the Showbox this Valentine’s Day in a special 20th anniversary celebration for their 2004 breakout album, How It Ends — shoutout to the dozens of friends across the world who texted us to make sure we knew about the gig! — I’d been struggling to adjust to bolus insulin, a regular newspaper job for the first time in 14 years and a family life sometimes too full for my tired body. I could barely keep my eyes open until 8 p.m., much less go to a show, even one that might remind me of the beauty of my one wild and precious life.
We went to KEXP’s midday studio show for the How It Ends 20th anniversary instead, joining a crowd of hundreds who were just as happy as we were to be there on a Wednesday afternoon.
This special 20th anniversary concert hit extra poignant, just like everything has as I roll into my mid-40s: a little sweeter, a little more precious, and more than a touch melancholy, just like me and my favorite band.
Band members teared up. Audience members teared up. I hugged the people around us, listening to their stories of how they fell in love with DeVotchKa, and shared my own, which is quite the humblebrag, I realize.
But what can I say? Besides the great love of my life and the beautiful children we’ve made and raised together, besides all of the dear friends and family who loved us when we were young and beautiful and love us at this bittersweet midpoint of our lives, my history with DeVotchKa is my most special thing.
At one point during the KEXP show, played to a crowded lobby full of mostly 30-50 somethings jumping until we couldn’t breathe any more, Nick seemed particularly overcome. He took a moment to express his wonder and gratitude that all four of the original band members were still alive and playing together.
An another point, Nick thanked KEXP for being the first radio station to play their music back in 2004, for supporting the band when no one else cared about them.
“We cared!” The audience shouted back.
We always will.
XOXO, Shawna
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