The Polyphonic Spree don’t get out of town much. Since forming nearly 25 years ago, the Dallas band has consistently been a hassle to pack up and ship out: Always at least 20 members; Always a kitchen-sink-orchestra approach to instrumentation, from standard rock-band gear to a healthy dollop of brass and strings; and always some kind of matching attire that draws cult-like comparisons.
So it’s a big deal when the 24-member band pulls together its limited resources, pauses its members’ day-job obligations, and piles into a bus—especially since nobody makes tour buses for bands like this one.
“Most of your buses sleep 12; 13 is really pushing it,” Tim DeLaughter, the band’s lead singer and head songwriter, says from his Dallas home. “So we have to go on this bus called the Sportstar, which is a hockey-team bus, and there's no frills there. It's nothing but bunks—it can sleep 27 people. We don't use it that often, but it's the only bus in town that can house the Polyphonic Spree.”
That bus is hauling the band to Bumbershoot this weekend. DeLaughter—who also acts as the band’s preacher, proselytizer, and admitted “hustler”—is eager to sell the Spree’s worthiness amongst the crowded festival schedule. His fervor about the band’s first nationwide tour in a decade borders on religious: “We look forward to converting people into our world, and that's what we do, especially in the live state.”
When pressed on “convert” as his word choice, DeLaughter levels with me using his born-and-raised Texas drawl: “We're different, man. There's nothing like this band. And I know that it's a lot for people to take in, in one dose, but once you get on it… if you let it go and the Spree gets its hooks in you, there's nothing like it.”
That zeal, somewhere between pariah and pusher, is well-earned. The Spree began life as a survival-mode reaction for DeLaughter after his first breakout band, the 1990s grunge-adjacent Tripping Daisy, broke up in the wake of a band member's sudden death. From that band’s ashes came the Polyphonic Spree: a blast of unfiltered, major-key sound amongst lyrics of coping through despair, formed with an ever-evolving collective of Dallas music peers (including, at one time, a guitarist named Annie Clark who eventually reached solo stardom as St. Vincent). There’s always a choir, always some grand explosions of sound, and always a certain connection between performer and audience that works better on stage than on home speakers.
“To watch that happen, you can see people, like, their mouths are wide open,” DeLaughter says about taking the Spree on the road. “They’ve got this huge smile on their face by the end of it, and they're just in it. I've seen it happen, and it's cool—I know that now we've got these guys. They’ll be fans for us forever, man.”
The Spree’s latest album, 2023’s Salvage Enterprise, is the closest the band has come to scaling its sound seamlessly between the stage and the home. Solemnity washes over the signature song “Section 45 (Wishful, Brave, and True)” as a Simon & Garfunkel-worthy strum of acoustic guitar is briefly disturbed by different Spree elements—a flush of violin and horn here, a twinkle of harp there, all while DeLaughter urges the meditation along in near-falsetto: “Laughter is disguising the richest rain we knew.”
In this song and others, the Spree exhibits a level of restraint that DeLaughter describes as “militant”—resisting the band’s signature urge to play every instrument and voice simultaneously. That newfound dynamism got DeLaughter so excited upon the album’s launch in late 2023 that he didn’t wait for the rest of the Spree to take time off from their menagerie of day jobs to “tour” the results. (DeLaughter says the band counts among its ranks professors, music teachers, and “a host for a Pluckers [a chicken wing chain] on Wednesday nights where he calls out trivia questions.” He admits doing “construction stuff on the side” himself, as well.)
After packing his car with generators, a PA, and speakers on tripods, DeLaughter hit the road with a copy of Salvage Enterprise in hand—and nary a formal invite to actually host any of his guerrilla listening parties. Whether playing amidst the open expanse of Joshua Tree, the cliffs of San Diego, Topanga Canyon, or even a church whose members stepped up after cops nearly confiscated the listening parties’ gear, the month-long tour operated exclusively via social media DMs and DeLaughter’s enthusiasm. For the 58-year-old, having as few as three people show up to a particular listening party had a surprising impact.
“It was like the early days—I'd be in a van for three months at a time with Tripping Daisy, and you go and there's two people out there,” DeLaughter says. “Like I was starting all over again, not really knowing who was going to be there and if they're even into it or not. It was like spreading the word all over again, just doing it in a really different way, where I was wanting people to tune out, get away from the phone, and look at the sky and listen to an album that complemented that environment.”
Whether engaging in the gray legal zone of outdoor listening parties or maintaining the Spree’s regular Texas tour dates, including an annual Dallas Christmas concert streak of over 20 years, DeLaughter admits a consistent impulse drives him—the same one that not only egged the Spree into existence but spurred his first band into action.
“If you listen to Tripping Daisy [lyrics], there's an element of overcoming what life dishes out,” DeLaughter says. “Music's become my vessel to express myself and talk myself through this thing called life. With this band, it becomes more technicolor than anything I've ever done before. I've always used these songs, this record to convince myself of things, of being able to move from point A to B. Nothing's changed. It's just how I'm wired and what I need in order to get me where I need to go.”
Whatever you call them—a band, a collective, a cult, or a bunch of professors and trivia hosts—the Spree is still operating as an act of sonic wonder. A “normal” Spree moment might see a full choir scream-singing, “smiling at the goddess of evil, I learned to fly,” over a bed of horns and amplified guitars, maybe with more dynamism or life-weary survival behind them, but otherwise carrying the same spirit that once blasted out of iPod commercials or toured for David Bowie in the early ‘00s. Count yourself lucky that such a sensation is still around today, still being delivered to your city via a rickety old hockey bus.
The Polyphonic Spree play Bumbershoot’s Mural Stage Sunday, September 1, at 6:25 pm.
