Americana Music Magazine – Bluegrass, Roots, Folk, Blues, and Old-Time
The Quixote Project, while steeped in traditional genres, looks to blur the lines of modern music from a roots music foundation. The New Jersey based collaboration was started by Jeff Selby and fueled by a revolving cast of musicians. “They have distilled multi-genre sounds of a beachfront music festival into a remarkably cohesive live set,” said Dave Fox of Music Without Labels. “It’s filled with hints of bluegrass, folk, and rock in a style that would be pigeonholed as jam if the songwriting wasn’t so explicitly pop-oriented.”
“The band had a very organic start with a few buddies just getting together to pick and share tunes,” front man Jeff Selby said. ”More people started to join our jams and eventually The Quixote Project was born. There have been many members in the band as I have an open door policy in the band, but once you’re in you’re in for life.”
The band plays a lot of traditional genres like Americana, roots, rockabilly and bluegrass, “which I feel are some of the country’s greatest achievements in the arts,” Jeff added. “I feel it’s our duty to continue on these genres in a traditional sense and pushing them forward by intertwining modern instrumentation and recording processes”
The Quixote Project leans heavy on it’s songwriting for much of their performed and recorded music. “Typically, I tend to wait for the ever elusive muse to descend and fill my heart and head with the perfect song,” Jeff said. “I think honest writing is the best and connects with the listeners. I’ve taken this approach with most of our previous albums. However, with Namesake, our upcoming album, which is more of a concept album, I took a more mechanical approach in the songwriting process.”
Namesake was born out of the band’s previous album, Land of Plenty, kick starter project. ”One of the reward levels was, “give us a name and we’ll write a jingle to it,” Jeff explained. ”We ended up selling six “name songs” which left me with a lot of writing to get down in only two months. I actually had to force myself to sit down and write a song which was something I rarely did, but in the end I have to admit, it was a fantastic and liberating process.”
“We were very fortunate to have that extremely successful kick stater. It allowed us to take the band into Cambridge Sound Studio, a top notch studio in Philadelphia, and really delve into different sounds and instrumentation’s on the songs.”
After a sold out album release show at World Cafe Live in Philadelphia, the album earned the band, “top band of the year,” and “top album of the year,” at the 2018 WSTW 93.7FM Homey awards, as well as, “top Americana act,” “top musicians,” and “top instrumentalist,” at the 2018 Elephant Indie music awards.
When asked if he could recall a defining moment in the band, Jeff said this; “As much as I want to tell you my defining moment was when we got to open for the country band Little Big Town, meeting the band, feeling the energy of a packed house and getting the notoriety of it all; it wasn’t. To be honest, it wasn’t a moment at all, it was a process. I’ve known since I was a kid that music was the only thing that made me feel like I had a sense of purpose. I’m proud and grateful that I chose a path less traveled.”
Jeff says he has a philosophy with music. “Use it or lose it. We as a band, or myself, have multiple shows a week, we’ve been at 200+ shows a year for a few years now. And while we normally tour regionally, we will usually pack up the van and hit the road once or twice a year, mainly focusing on the eastern seaboard. We’ve toured from GA to VT. When I die, I want my great grandkids to have a time line and an understanding of my life and generation via my music. People often ask us if we’re trying to “make it.” While making it might mean different things to many different people, my reply usually is, “I play music for a living, I’ve already made it.”
For the six jingle songs the band created for there Namesake album’s kick starter program, Jeff said, “I quickly found out the songs were not going to be little jingles.”
“Some were about their writer’s wife, who saved their life, others were about their daughter, all of which made me quickly realize I needed to put some serious time and effort into these songs as these people have entrusted me to write a song about a loved one. After putting a lot of time and TLC into the songs, we decided they were good enough to release as an album. We re-cut some of the songs in the studio and added a single called “Namesake,” which we released recently, along with a video and free download for our fans.”