By Brent Thompson

More than a decade since its formation, Kendall Street Company remains the ultimate working band. Coupling a healthy album catalog with an extensive touring schedule, the genre-blurring band is motivated and ambitious as ever. On October 23, the quintet – Louis Smith, Bryan Roy, Ryan Wood, Ben Laderberg and Jake Vanaman – released Yodeling Astroman on Gitcha Records. On Friday, December 11, Kendall Street Company will perform at Saturn. Recently, Smith spoke with us by phone from his Virginia home.

Southern Stages: Louis, thanks for your time. Are you at home or on the road?

Louis Smith: I’m home in Richmond, Va. today and getting ready to hit the road tomorrow.

Southern Stages: Do you guys tend to tour in short bursts or extended runs?

Smith: It’s usually short bursts unless we’re going far. On the run to Birmingham, we’ll be coming back from Texas so that’ll be about a two-week run. Sometimes we’ll go to Colorado and make it a three-week run. We’re usually not gone for too much longer than that.

Southern Stages: Sounds like a good quality of life for a touring band.

Smith: It’s nice to get home and decompress. We also do a lot of the administrative aspects of the band and we are running the business, so it’s a lot easier to get home to your desk and do whatever needs to get done.

Southern Stages: Where is the band based these days?

Smith: The band is based in Charlottesville, Va. – that’s where we got started – and three of the members live there. Two of the members are in Richmond. We were all University of Virginia students and the band formed there.

Southern Stages: We are really enjoying Yodeling Astroman. Are these songs newer compositions, older ones or a mixture of both?

Smith: It’s a combo. It’s on the folkier side of the stuff we do. I’ve always had a tendency to write that kind of stuff, so I had a fair number of tunes on the back burner that hadn’t really found a home yet and they found a home here. We were also, simultaneously, writing more music in that vein when were out in Colorado in early 2025. I wrote one of the tunes called “How Can It Be” and I started to debut the first track on the record, “Last Night I Dreamed,” as a solo song when the band would take a break. Our guitar player had written the song “Yodeling Astroman,” which is the title track and it’s kind of a wild song [laughs]. The record just came together with this idea that Yodeling Astroman is this character who’s fascinated with humanity from deep space. A lot of this music is seen through the eyes of Yodeling Astroman.

Southern Stages: How does the band approach songwriting?

Smith: I think I wrote six of the tunes, Ben wrote a number of tunes, Jake wrote a tune and then the whole band got together and wrote a couple of tunes. Two of the tunes were written by Ben’s aunt who lives in Colorado and is a prolific songwriter. We take a lot of avenues in the songwriting process.

Southern Stages: Do songs still get tweaked while you’re in the studio?

Smith: It depends on what we are trying to convey. Usually, when we go in it’s pretty much there and sometimes maybe little sections will get cut out or extended. That kind of stuff is pretty typical. If you’re a cook, you taste the soup and maybe you add spices and that kind of happens throughout the process, too.

Southern Stages: Some artists say the current music industry and its various outlets – Spotify, Youtube, iTunes, satellite radio to name a few – is positive in its ability to easily reach listeners. Others say it’s a difficult time to be found among the crowd. How do you view the current climate?

Smith: I see both sides. The opportunity is there and anything can hit. Even with our own music, sometimes the things I think are going to be popular are not popular and sometimes things I don’t think are going to hit actually hit. I think it is hard, but it’s always been hard to stand out and make it. I think there’s a lot more opportunity to be a working-class musician now. The economics are getting harder – it’s been tricky since COVID  and gas is expensive. We do have a label on this record – Gitcha Records – and they’ve been great. We had Scott Gordon [Ringo Starr, Alanis Morissette] co-produce this record and he’s local to Virginia Beach now.

Southern Stages: Given the large catalog of songs Kendall Street Company has amassed, how does the band create its setlists these days?

Smith: Setlists are done on the fly. Our guitar player, Ben, sends out a general list of what it might look like ahead of time and he calls it as we go. None of us know what’s coming next except for him. Recently, we just broke out a song called “Understands” which is a deep cut and then Ben used “On Call” recently, which is a song I hadn’t thought about in a long time.

On Friday, December 11, Kendall Street Company will perform at Saturn. Squeeze The Squid will open the 8 p.m. show. Advance tickets to the 18+ show can be purchased at www.saturnbirmingham.com.