Features

Group At Work: Good Old War

Photo by Andy Patch

In early 2008, Keith Goodwin found himself at a crossroads. Days Away—the successful pop-punk band that he co-founded in Langhorne, Pa. as a teenager—decided to call it quits after a decade when their keyboardist left for law school. He’d also started working with Dan Schwartz, a Philadelphia musician with some serious acoustic guitar skills.

So when alternative/emo singer Anthony Green offered to take them on tour, Goodwin, Schwartz and Days Away drummer Tim Arnold decided to try something completely different—in front of a rather large crowd.

“We were playing for 500 people a night, opening up and backing Anthony,” Goodwin says of the early outings. “We wrote songs on the way to the shows and played acoustic versions of our old band’s songs—we figured we were onto something so we kept going with it.”

Taking the name Good Old War—a combination of letters from their last names—the three musicians quickly honed in on an acoustic-driven, Americana-leaning sound that owed more to Crosby, Stills & Nash’s lush, folk-rock harmonies than Days Away’s alternative energy.

“I didn’t want to play loud rock music for the rest of my life,” the Good Old War frontman continues. “I’ve always been into good pop music and I wanted to sing softer instead of playing over six people.”

Despite averaging about 150 shows a year, Good Old War churns out songs at a rapid pace: The trio already had two full-length releases and several EPs by mid-2010.

Last spring, the band shook things up once again and spent time in Omaha, Neb. at Mike Mogis’ Another Recording Company with producer Jason Cupp. The band stayed on the premises and captured the energy and spontaneity of their live show.

“In the past, our songs changed as we played them live and we wanted to get to that point before we recorded them this time,” Goodwin says of the roughly 30 songs they brought to Omaha.

Though they are scheduled to release the resulting record, Come Back as Rain, in early March, Goodwin already has some thoughts about his next studio project: “I feel like we can use some of our leftover songs—start there and see what else we can pop out.”