Michigan Rattlers bringing roots rock sound to Saint Andrew's for biggest Detroit show yet

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15-05-2025

When the Michigan Rattlers embarked on their latest album project, they decided to shake things up a bit.
The Petoskey-bred four-piece was one of the best new Michigan bands of recent years, rightfully lavished with acclaim from critics and devotees of roots music and Americana — heralded for evocative songwriting and an acoustic sound with as much a debt to heartland rock as the '90s alt-country movement.
For 'Waving from a Sea,' released in August, Graham Young and company opted to mine new sonic ground with help from a Wolverine State compatriot: In the production seat was Dominic Davis, longtime bassist with the Lansing band Steppin' In It and a musician long embedded in the world of Jack White, a childhood friend from southwest Detroit.
Impressed with his work on an album by fellow Michigan band Greensky Bluegrass, the Rattlers tapped Davis to help capture a new direction inspired by artists such as the War on Drugs, Kurt Vile and the 1975.
The result was an album that retains the Rattlers' roots-based fundamentals while adventurously incorporating indie-pop textures and classic-rock flourishes, with Young's emotional songwriting pen still at the heart of it all.
After three months traversing North America — where the band's potent live shows have become a calling card — the Michigan Rattlers will wrap up their tour with a Friday show at Saint Andrew's Hall, the group's biggest Detroit date yet.
Young spoke with the Free Press from the road about the new album, live presence and band growth.
QUESTION: You guys have certainly been road dogging it for the last few months and you're winding into the home stretch. How has the tour been?
ANSWER: Largely things have been really great. It's been fun and it's great to have the new material to play. We've pretty much been everywhere in the last three months.
Saint Andrew's just seemed to work out (as tour finale) and it was kind of a fitting end to the journey.
We played there a few years ago, but it was still when COVID was strange. The place we've really played most in the Detroit area is the Magic Bag. This is kind of the next step up, size-wise, so we're excited.
Q: The shows people still mention to me are the dates you did with Bob Seger at Pine Knob (in 2019). I think on those two nights you really left an impression on an audience who maybe wasn't familiar with you then. Did you see those as a critical step in terms of your presence here?
A: We would've had to play for a whole year probably to be in front of as many people as we were those two nights. It's a funny thing to look back at it now because it's coming up on seven years almost. I feel like we thought we knew what we were doing, and we were excited to play the big stage, but looking back, it's like, "Oh my God, those, those guys had no clue what they were doing on that stage." (Laughs)
Q: You've frequently cited Seger as a key influence, and you got to be part of his universe for a couple of nights.
A: It was a dream come true, to put it lightly. It's just one of those things that like — when you're a kid in your bedroom and you're imagining like the coolest, greatest thing that could ever happen. Being from Michigan, it's playing (Pine Knob) in the summertime and opening for Bob Seger.
It was so funny, driving our little van and parking at this big loading dock amongst all these semis, tour buses and everything.
Q: For fans who may not have seen you guys live yet, how would you describe the approach versus the recorded stuff, and how things stretch?
A: We really come from the live side of making music. We grew up learning our instruments live. Some people grow more in their bedrooms maybe, where recording is a big deal, and they learned to play and write that way. For us, it was getting in a basement, playing songs, then trying to find a place to play them live.
And also honoring that rock 'n' roll legacy in some sense with the Seger and the Bruce Springsteen and the Tom Petty — trying to put on a real rock show, just in terms of that energy and fervor, of being excited to be there and see like a gang of four guys on a stage.
I think some of our recordings are definitely a little more contained. So we definitely try to amp 'em up, no pun intended. That's just like a fun thing — to play an electric guitar on songs that we did with acoustic and just really make them bigger.
Q: There's a lot of that '90s Americana in your sound, too.
A: Oh, totally. When I was 13, it was the classic-rock stuff that was mentioned. But as I got more interested in songwriting and finding my voice there — at 18, 19, 20 — the music I was listening to the most was definitely that '90s alt-country stuff with Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt, Wilco, the Jayhawks. Ryan Adams was huge for me. I was really trying to find the north stars of what I liked as songwriting.
Q: Talk about the evolution with the new album. There's something a little more glistening about the sound. Is that something you had already formulated, or did it materialize once you were in the studio with Dominic?
A: This record took a long time before actually getting in the studio and recording stuff for real. A number of these songs really started in the depths of COVID, so they were around for a couple of years in some sense or another. Demo-ing was a huge part of this that we hadn't really done before, which I think contributed to the expanding of the sound: 'I've got a song — what can be fun to try to add? Oh, how about this weird synthesizer thing? How about this weird harp? How about this weird guitar sound?'
At the end of the day, we really care about the song on its most fundamental level. You should be able to strip everything away and still be able to play it with an acoustic guitar. On (our previous) records, we weren't that comfortable in the studio and we didn't really know what we were doing all that much.
So I think the idea of trying to push those sonic boundaries … was already a thing that we wanted to do. And then when Dominic came in — and we had a really great engineer, Josh (Smith) — they were all for it and really helped steer where we wanted to go.
Q: You've been based in L.A. for a few years now, with the rest of the guys still in Michigan. I think it's safe to say there haven't been a ton of name-brand bands to come out of Petoskey (a town of 6,000). What's the reception there for you like?
A: It's great to be from a town that size, a small, tight-knit community to go around and represent where we're from. We all wear that Petoskey and northern Michigan badge with pride.
Yeah, people know who the band is, and the local brewery has a Michigan Rattlers lager that people like. From day one, since we were kids playing the coffee shop down the street and City Park Grill, it has just always been a really supportive place to be. As we've grown and gotten to play bigger shows in the area, people always show up. Some of the most fun shows we ever play are the ones we get to do Up North.
Contact Detroit Free Press music writer Brian McCollum: 313-223-4450 or [e-mail].
With Joe Hertler
7 p.m. Fri.
Saint Andrew's Hall
931 Congress St. E., Detroit
$27-$54
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan Rattlers due at Saint Andrew's for biggest Detroit show yet