A pair of train-traveling troubadours made a stop in Charleston on their way home to South Florida as part of an East Coast tour.
Named DDRB after each member’s initials, the folk duo’s Sept. 16 performance at Sugey’s Bar followed a warm-up act at Tommy Condon’s Irish Pub for open mic night the evening before.
“All of us hacks really enjoyed their stuff,” Mark Schleis, a bass player and open-mic regular, said. “Their lyrics are telling stories with every song. It was a breath of fresh air.”
DDBR features Dominic DeLaney and Ricky Bolute, who travel to tour destinations exclusively by Amtrak rails.
The pair met during an online livestream social-distancing festival founded by Bolute. DeLaney previously traveled solo, documenting stories from the rails in a soon-to-be self-published book titled “Playing to Nobody.” After a couple of solo Amtrak tours, he found a drummer to join his project. It helped that Bolute was also a Frank Turner fan and an easy travel companion.
Delaney and Bolute both play acoustic guitar, are five-years sober and are married. But if they met five years earlier, the drummer said, they would not be friends. Now, their songwriting styles complement each other and they see a lot more tours in the future.
The East Coast Tour, with stops in Brooklyn, N.Y., Philadelphia, Pa., Alexandria, Va., and others, marks DDBR’s first tour as a duo who writes together.
“We’re storytellers, we’re musicians, we’re troubadours, we’re jesters,” Bolute said.
The tour was fully funded through their “buy a mile” initiative, where fans and friends can pay for the travel expenses.
Traveling via Amtrak is a longer journey. Their longest train ride was a 30-hour stretch from Seattle to North Dakota, but it’s cost-effective and efficient, giving them time to write.
Their catalog contains songs written uniquely for the city they last visited, like “Lost in Connecticut,” “Another Night is Janesville” or “Beale Street Blues.”
Their overnight stop to Charleston proved eventful with two shows and a stop at the Dock Street Theater. They plan to return in the future to hopefully play a show at the Music Farm.
“We are the right amount of delusional that this is what we could do for the rest of our lives,” Bolute said.
DDRB’s music can be found on Bandcamp.