Quick Take
With a new studio in Boulder Creek, where their old one and drummer Jon Payne's home burned in 2020's CZU fire, Wolf Jett is celebrating the milestone and its new album, "Time Will Finally Come," with a release show at Kuumbwa.
Jon Payne and Chris Jones christened their new Santa Cruz Mountains recording studio last weekend. The two musicians finally got a chance to move in and set up their new equipment for the first time. And why is that a big deal?
The two members of the popular Santa Cruz band Wolf Jett — buddies since childhood — once had a recording studio they loved in Boulder Creek. Then came 2020, and the catastrophic CZU Lightning Complex fires. Jones was living with Payne and Payne’s wife, Elizabeth, at the time, and the fire not only consumed their studio, it destroyed the Paynes’ home as well, leaving the three of them homeless.
More than 3½ years later, Payne and Jones finally have their recording studio back, in the same spot in Boulder Creek. The Paynes’ new house isn’t finished yet, but it’s pointed in the right direction. On Saturday, March 16, Wolf Jett will perform live at a record release show at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center, to celebrate the release of their new recording, knowingly titled “Time Will Finally Come.” As they prepare this week for that show, and the tour that follows it, the members of Wolf Jett will congregate for their first rehearsals in their new studio.
A circle has been closed.
“It just gives us a place to be creative and start to work on new material in a comfortable way,” said Payne, Wolf Jett’s drummer. “Before, we were kinda jumping around, from our buddy’s garage, and then to his grandma’s house to — Chris just got a new place, and we were playing in his living room, and we always had to build up and tear down. Just having a dedicated space for creativity in any hour of the day is going to be super-valuable for us.”
For as long as Wolf Jett is a working band, “Time Will Finally Come” will always be remembered as the album released in the liminal space between the fires and the rebuild. The band — singer and songwriter Jones, drummer Payne, bassist Duncan Shipton, lap steel guitarist Will Fourt and vocalist Laura T. Lewis — released its debut album at the beginning of the pandemic. With “Time,” the group’s second album, they worked with Bay Area musician and producer Jonathan Kirchner. Where the debut record reflected more of a folk/Americana vibe, the new recording leans into a soul/funk direction.
“[Kirchner] really brought that out in us,” said Jones, “because we’ve always had that side. And we began noticing that people from jam-band circles were really responding well to our electric stuff. So that was the biggest change from the first record, which was more of an acoustic sound. Now, we’re more of a soul revival band.”
Jones said that as a musician he was brought up in the kind of psychedelic West Coast soul of the Chambers Brothers and Big Brother & the Holding Company. Since CZU, the band’s musicians have been exploring their broader interests in order to find their voice. Now that they have a home base again, they’re ready to refine that new sound.
“There’s a backlog of four years of stuff that we meant to work on,” said Jones. “We had an album to mix and finish, and that never got done. So we have so much catching up to do, and so many things we want to do, it’s hard to know where to start.”
Wolf Jett performs live at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center on Saturday, March 16, at 7:30 p.m.