Barefoot growth
St. Michaels alumni band tours the Northeast

Cameron Dexter| staff editor
cdexter@smcvt.edu

Barefoot Truth (BFT), an independent music group, released its latest album, Walk Softly, for free on the online social network Facebook, beginning Sept. 28, making it the fifth-largest free-distributing band on Facebook.

Barefoot solo

Bassist Andy Wrba plucks the right chords. Photo courtesy of Drew Vetere.

The band has four members: vocalist and guitarist Jay Driscoll; lead vocalist Will Benoit 06'; bassist Andy Wrba; and Garrett Duffy 06', who plays the harmonica.

It’s been a big year for BFT, Duffy says.  For the last year-and-a-half, the members were balancing college work and keeping the band together.

“Our plan was to play around the Northeast at different colleges until we were done with school,” Driscoll says.

BFT’s Web site lists a large number of scheduled events throughout the Northeast, ranging from Maine to the Midwest, Duffy says.

School has been a burden to the group,  Driscoll says.

“We were planning to go full-force once we graduated,” he says.

The band says that it was a group decision to have a specific day that kicked off the free download.

As an independent band, it didn’t need anyone else’s approval to release the album online, Driscoll says.

“The way the music industry is going, you don’t need to have a record label to make money and it’s not to your benefit to have one, because of the other ways you can get your music out to the masses,” Duffy says.

Record labels don’t know what to do right now because independent bands are taking over, Duffy says, leaving only three major record labels left.

“The record labels are scrambling to pick up the mess and a lot of them are dropping out of the business because they are loosing so many artists,” he says.

Facebook is a useful tool to help promote the band, Benoit says, and right now the main concern is finding listeners.

The music scene on Facebook is fairly new, but the band is just trying to find newer undiscovered ways to increase the number of its listeners, Duffy says.

Most bands use the social network MySpace to distribute their music over the Internet, but BFT prefers Facebook, he says.

“It’s more personable and you can talk to fans one-on-one, and we haven’t seen people push the Facebook music profile,” Driscoll says.

BFT has always supported people burning its music and sharing it with their friends.

“We just want to get it in peoples' ears,” Driscoll says.

Guitarist Jay Driscoll plays at Higher Ground, Sept. 27. Photo courtesy of Drew Vetere.

With less people buying CDs, the band freely encourages fans to copy and share their music.

“If you’ve got our CD on a disk, rather than just on your iPod or computer, people are going to see that and hopefully get interested in our music,” Benoit says.

Beniot would rather have people download the music for free, “get jazzed on the music,” and come see them play live, he says.

BFT appreciates it when dedicated fans buy its album, but the free download is helping to promote the band and its music.

“These social networks are the next new thing,” Garrett says.

Currently, MySpace has a large fan-base built on the music. Barefoot says that it wants to expand its presence on the Internet music scene by using Facebook. The band makes more money off of iTunes downloads of its music.

“Typically there’s only a couple full CD downloads and the other downloads, sometimes in the hundreds are from fans each downloading a few songs from different albums," Benoit says. 

Bare-back ground

Driscoll and Duffy started BFT in 2004, calling the group “Barefoot” after they were introduced by mutual friends who thought they would make good roommates in college.

Driscoll didn’t end up going to St. Michael’s, but Benoit and Driscoll continued to play during the summers in Connecticut and to play at nearby bars, Benoit says.

Will Benoit sing and plays drums. Photo courtesy of Drew Vetere.

Garrett says he noticed Benoit during their junior year at St. Michael’s.

“He was always playing his guitar,” Duffy says, “so I just started playing harmonica with him.”

As fans of the acoustic/rock band Dispatch, based out of Boston, Ma. BFT talked with the band and as a result opened for the band a few times.

Pete Francis, lead singer of Dispatch, told them to talk to his producer Jack Gauthier, who ended up producing BFT's album.

“He encouraged us to stick to our organic roots and helped us create a CD true to what we wanted to produce,” Benoit says.

The band thinks of Gauthier as a father figure, Benoit says.  He helped the band stay positive in the studio during its recording period.

“A lot of times when you’re in the studio for a long time, you start thinking your music isn’t good enough, but Gauthier brings good energy to the band,“ he says.

The band describes its music as organic, real and true.  This means there’s no “fancy glossy production," Wrba says.

Benoit says that the music is different from the music you hear on the radio.

The fans

Longtime fan and UVM student Caitlin Galligan says she’s  very excited about the group releasing its album online for free.

“I’ve been listening to them for a while,” Galligan says, “and I’ve always respected that they have such a natural sound. They really know how to get a crowd going.”