Richmond has no shortage of bands that arrive and then disappear. Night Idea has taken the opposite approach. They’ve been around for 16 years, and keep getting better.
I sat down with Joey Anderson, Reggie Pace and Reyna Pannell ahead of Night Idea’s appearance at Iron Blossom Music Festival this weekend to catch up on where the band is now and talk about playing the fest.
Night Idea started with Carter Burton, Ethan Johnstone and Reid LaPierre with Joey joining after college. Years later, Reggie and Pannell joined the fold, eventually forming the current six-piece with Burton and Johnstone.
If you remember seeing Night Idea ten or fifteen years ago, Joey thinks it might be time to check back in. “I would say a downfall of being in any longtime band is people. Where they get an impression and it might have been from 15 years ago,” Joey said. “If you have not seen us or listened to us since then, there has been a lot of change.”
Trying to describe exactly what Night Idea sounds like is another matter.
“It’s hard to kind of pin you guys in any one direction,” I said.
“I feel like indie prog rock is a pretty good title for it,” Reggie said. “Because prog rock, I think when you hear that word, it takes your mind straight to Dream Theater and Yes and ‘YYZ’ and all that kind of stuff. But this is less like that.”
Joey agreed that there is plenty of rhythmic experimentation going on, which gives Night Idea some common ground with prog and other technically adventurous music. Reggie thought there was another important point to make.
“I feel like it’s still song-based,” he said. “Lots of times when we start talking genres, we start talking about the vibe of what they do and how complicated something is or isn’t but there’s a song plus stuff to what we do.”
That idea, “songwriters plus stuff,” is something Reggie sees running through a lot of Richmond music, even when the genres are completely different.
Reggie came up playing with a pair of groundbreaking local bands, Fight the Big Bull and Glows in the Dark, that pushed Richmond jazz into stranger territory. But even then, Richmond’s version didn’t always fit neatly into the genre.
“They would say our free jazz wasn’t free enough,” Reggie said. “When we went to Chicago, they were like, ‘This ain’t no free jazz.’ Because there’s a song in the middle of it.”
That same instinct exists in Night Idea. The musicians wander, experiment and pile ideas on top of one another, but they don’t completely abandon the structure underneath.
“I feel like that’s kind of the thing that strings all these bands together in a way,” Reggie said. “It’s this songwriters plus stuff.”
Pannell thinks the biggest change as the band expanded wasn’t necessarily that Night Idea became more complicated. It became fuller.
“It’s the same, but with more orchestration behind it,” she said. “There’s more harmonies. There’s more rhythmic stuff going on between Reggie and Ethan. There’s more moments where Reggie and I have a little moment where everyone comes down and Reggie and I play violins.”
And that makes sense when you look at the people involved. These are musicians who move throughout Richmond’s music scene, playing jazz, brass, rock and whatever else comes their way. I joked with Reggie, who also leads NO BS! Brass, that he has seemingly wandered through half the city’s musical universe, bringing his signature sound to every project he touches.
For Reggie, Night Idea offered somewhere different to stretch out.
“I’d seen the band play and just thought it was awesome,” Pace said. “I didn’t have any sort of outlet like that in my life, especially at the time. I was working with pop artists and then the brass band, and as far as stretching out, I didn’t really have anything like that. So I was grateful that they were interested.”
When he joined, he didn’t come in with a plan for what his role should be or how Night Idea should sound. In fact, Pace tries to avoid doing that whenever he steps into someone else’s project.
“I try to just be myself the whole time, because if I go in with too much of a notion of what I’m about to do, then I’m not flowing with what’s already going on,” he said. “I usually try to just see what I can add.”
From there, his role grew along with the band’s trust in him.
“I kind of start doing more as I realize I have the trust,” Pace said. “I’m not stepping on Ethan. He’s cool with me superimposing a different time signature over here for a little bit because he’s gonna do it later. I feel like I slowly crawl my way into just doing things that are available. I like juggling ideas,” he said. “‘Oh, I can sing for a second here. Oh, I can do this here. Oh, I can do this.’”
For a musician who has spent plenty of time leading his own projects, there is also something appealingly simple about Night Idea.
“It’s probably nice not having to be the band leader,” I said.
“That’s a fact.”
Pannell found something similar in Night Idea. She and Joey initially met while teaching and playing together in a jazz band. Coming from a classical background, she was playing jazz violin and singing with Sweet Potatoes, along with working in a wedding band, when Night Idea gave her an opportunity to step outside of what people had started to expect from her.
“The jazz was nice coming as a classical person, but then it was like, okay, now I’m only doing jazz. People are only asking me to do jazz,” she said. “That’s what I enjoyed about Night Idea. It was just something different.”
Joining the band also changed the way other musicians saw her. “People are like, ‘Oh, you’re down to do something different.’”
“It’s a way of breaking typecasting in a way,” I said.
“Yeah, exactly,” she said. “It’s kind of like my party trick. ‘Hey, did you know I play with a rock band?’ People are like, ‘What?’ And then they’re thinking of rock, and it’s not what they think it is.” [laughs]
For Pannell, that is part of what makes playing with Night Idea fun.
“It’s awesome,” she said. “I enjoy it.”
Reggie sees that versatility as something closer to a necessity for working musicians.
“Freelancing, you kind of have to do that,” he said. “You kind of have to go do it yourself and show people what you can do, or you won’t do nothing. It’s not like the ’70s where there’s so many gigs that if you’re just good enough, you’ll just get called. People have to know what you’re capable of.”
In Night Idea, that range becomes part of the band itself. The musicians aren’t confined to one instrument, one genre or even necessarily the role they walked in expecting to play. The result is a band made up of very good musicians who have figured out how to be technical without making “technical” the entire point. Night Idea can float between complicated and heavy or wander off somewhere for a minute, usually a song waiting underneath it.
Joey calls Night Idea a “band’s band,” and that description might also help explain how a group that isn’t constantly pushing itself into the public eye ended up on this year’s Iron Blossom lineup alongside LCD Soundsystem, Jack White, Portugal. The Man, Phantogram, Dijon, Geese and others.
Night Idea received an email asking if they were interested in playing Iron Blossom and thought it was fake.
“It was like one sentence,” Joey said. “It was just like, ‘You guys down for Iron Blossom?’ I don’t think there was any punctuation. And it was like none of us responded at first.”
Eventually they asked for some more information and realized, yes, they wanted Night Idea to play Iron Blossom. Joey later asked the booker how their name had gotten into the conversation in the first place.
“All the booker said was, like, ‘Your name kept coming up regionally. Like, a lot,’” Joey said.
That goes back to that idea of being a band’s band. “Guess a lot of bands were like, ‘Oh, Night Idea,” he said. “Bands talk to bookers more than just a consumer of music talks to a booker. So that’s my best guess, which I’m grateful for.”
“There’s been a lot of work,” Joey acknowledged. “Recognition is nice, and we’re all eager to play. It can be five people or 5,000 people and we have a good time. I think it translates. I hope it translates.”
Night Idea released Rocky Coast in 2024, the first album featuring all six current members, but they’re already moving toward whatever comes next. The band has four or five new songs completed, and Joey says he’s more excited about them than anything they’ve done before.
“I’m coming on this upswing where I’m really feeling inspired,” he said. “I have this theory where it takes like six years of playing music regularly together to truly find your place. We’re over that mark, and it feels good.”
Sixteen years into Night Idea, they don’t sound like a band looking backward.
You can catch Night Idea Sunday afternoon at Iron Blossom, more information HERE.
Main photo of Reggie Pace, Reyna Pannell and Joey Anderson by R. Anthony Harris
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