#centralIllinoisMusicScene duo Bill Poss and JJ Passalacqua share their project LoveSeat and their new album, Our Way. Bill also organizes the Moccasin Creek Festival at Lake Sara in Effingham, this year June 19-22, and he shares this year's lineup.
Randy Eccles: This is Community Voices on NPR Illinois. I'm co-host Randy Eccles. We are very fortunate today to have another local artist in the studio, Bill Poss and JJ Passalacqua. They have come together to form the band LoveSeat. Tell us a little bit about it. What's the big thing people should know right now about LoveSeat?
Bill Poss: We started playing together after we started dating. I've been a performer for decades, JJ has been a nurse all this time and she didn't know she could sing.
JJ Passalacqua: Oh, I knew. I knew in my car I was fantastic.
Bill Poss: I heard her singing and I was just like, "You gotta sing with me." We learned a few songs and started playing together, then we started writing songs together, and that's when the magic really happened for us.
Randy Eccles: Did you use the music as therapy when you were nursing? Did you sing to anybody at the hospital?
JJ Passalacqua: No, I worked in ER most of my career. There wasn't a lot of time for singing.
Randy Eccles: Therapy for yourself, then.
JJ Passalacqua: For myself for sure.
Randy Eccles: Originally you met where in Illinois?
Bill Poss: Originally we met at a wedding. She was getting married and I was I was one of the DJs. That was a long time ago.
JJ Passalacqua: It was decades ago, almost 30 years ago.
Bill Poss: 20 years of not talking to each other and then suddenly.
Randy Eccles: If I heard that right, you met her as the wedding bride?
Bill Poss: At the wedding. She was the bride. I was the DJ. We had met just barely before that. She was marrying a friend of mine.
Randy Eccles: How did that evolve?
Bill Poss: That marriage didn't last, obviously. I moved away. I was living in Texas at that time and I lived on the road for a couple of decades. I moved back to Effingham in 2013 to start the Moccasin Creek Festival. That's when we were reintroduced by a mutual friend.
Randy Eccles: Now, like many artists, you've found that working together brings you even closer. Music's a pretty intimate thing.
Bill Poss: Writing especially has been that way for us beause now we own this thing together. It's not exactly like having a child, but it's something that we own together that we created together, and that we both love, very much.
Randy Eccles: LoveSeat is the name of your collaboration. Your first album is coming out on what date?
Bill Poss: April 25th. The old me started streaming on April 4. The title track, Our Way Instead starts streaming April 18. Write these dates down. You can get these on any streaming platform.
Randy Eccles: Do also have CDs available if people are looking for them?
Bill Poss: We have CDs and vinyl. CDs are available now. Vinyl won't be available till April 25.
Randy Eccles: And at your shows?
Bill Poss: Yes, that's correct.
Randy Eccles: You will play Moccasin Creek Festival in June?
Bill Poss: That'll be a big show for us.
Randy Eccles: Where is the Moccasin Creek Festival at?
Bill Poss: It's in Effingham, Illinois. There's a lake just outside of Effingham called Lake Sara. It's a beautiful lake. We're right between a free beach, beautiful with all kinds of playgrounds and pickleball courts, disc golf course. All this stuff is free there. Right next to our festival, there's a campground, there's a golf course, there's a marina, there's a restaurant. We're right in the middle of all that. It's a tiny little festival, like 500 people.
Randy Eccles: Sounds like fun.
Bill Poss: Flush toilets.
Randy Eccles: That's even better.
JJ Passalacqua: That's what usually sells.
Bill Poss: People hear festival, I think they get this impression of,
JJ Passalacqua: Port-A-Potties.
Bill Poss: Big, long lines. We want them to know that it's a very comfortable festival.
Randy Eccles: Do you also play around Decatur or Springfield and places?
Bill Poss: We actually have a show coming up in Springfield in June 8, at It's All About Wine. We'll be playing there on Sunday afternoon. We invite folks to come out. That'll be our Springfield CD release party.
Randy Eccles: I would ask you to describe what you sound like, but you have a guitar and JJ, you have your voice. Do you want to give us a sample?
Bill Poss: Our hit, so far, has been The Old Me and it's the first song on the album. It came out it's out April 4 on streaming services. You can go straight away and get it.
(LoveSeat performs The Old Me live in NPR Illinois Studio A)
Randy Eccles: That is amazing. Tell us about the song.
Bill Poss: The song kind of tells its own story. I was literally walking across our bedroom and I saw my picture from the 1990s on her dresser. I thought, "Where did she get that from?" I thought, "Wow, that's like really old. Oh no, she's in love with the old me because I had a full head of hair and I was young and it was a haughty tan," and all that. She just liked the picture so I started writing that. Then she came home and I told her and she laughed and then she wrote her side of the story.
JJ Passalacqua: It works both ways. Not a size three anymore. Haven't been in a long time.
Bill Poss: We like the way the song turned around. I am in love with the old you, the you now.
Randy Eccles: That is part of the new album, which is called Our Way. I saw that you were doing a Kickstarter campaign for it.
Bill Poss: Thanks for mentioning that, Randy. It ends on April 23. You can go on my Facebook page is Bill Passalacqua, JJ's is JJ Passalacqua.
JJ Passalacqua: The common spelling.
Randy Eccles: Sort of like Smith, right?
Bill Poss: You can go and see on our LoveSeat Facebook page how to donate if you want to support the project.
Randy Eccles: I respect a lot that you have the confidence move forward without waiting for the funding to materialize. You're letting that happen as you go.
Bill Poss: That's maybe foolhardy, but we paid for a lot of it going along. It's taken a year and a half to make this record. The promotional campaign is around $10,000 for a project like this that we want to do. Now, the big dogs spend three or four times that, sometimes way more than that even. But for a project like ours, if you want to get up to the next level, we don't really want to be playing in bars and restaurants. We wanna be playing in listening rooms. Some bars can be listening rooms and are, but, that's our goal is to be playing at the listening rooms around the Midwest, and festivals, of course.
Randy Eccles: You shared about $10,000 for a marketing campaign to try to get to that next level. For other bands and artists who are thinking about it, what does that look like — a marketing campaign to try to make that happen?
Bill Poss: The first thing I did was I shipped 400 of our CDs to the director of the marketing campaign in Ohio. We filled out a lot of information. We told our story and he created a press release. Then we had to go online and create digital files so that he could send us out to people like you, Randy. DJs and people who write reviews of music. He sent it out to podcast hosts and to playlist directors. The hope is that those things are going to yield results. They're very incremental, very small at first, but we need some reviews and some airplay. There's a folk DJ chart that we're trying to get on. He'll send out those 400 CDs to all those different kinds of people.
Randy Eccles: I wish you the best with that. We'll be playing it on The X from NPR Illinois, our HD3 channel and streaming service. You've been performing some of this music out? What gets the best response?
JJ Passalacqua: The one we just sang, The Old Me. That's probably the most popular. Our Way Instead is the first song we wrote together and that became our kind of our wedding song. It's a very playful and loving. It's a nice song and anybody that knows us really knows, "Wow, that's really spot on."
Bill Poss: The Ugliest House in Town, that's another one. It's one that people really have latched onto. It's meant to be a silly song, but it is a full song and it's become kind of an anthem.
Randy Eccles: It stood out when I listened to it.
Bill Poss: And who doesn't love a round?
JJ Passalacqua: We sing a round.
Randy Eccles: You have not only the band going on Bill, but you also are a promoter. You mentioned earlier the Moccasin Creek Festival. Tell us a little bit more about how that part of life works.
Bill Poss: I will invite people to check out MoccasinCreekFestival.com so you can get any kind of information you need there. When I got off the road, I didn't have a life. I had my music and that was it. I had decided to put some roots down in Effingham, Illinois. I'd always wanted to start a festival, so I thought, "How could I do that without any money or a job or anything to back it up." I made a deal with a friend of mine who had this property, and then I started calling my music friends. People like Fred Eagle Smith, Robbie Fulks, people like that... Mary Gauthier. I said, "Listen, I wanna have this festival and I want you to play at the festival, but I can't guarantee that I can pay you on the day of the festival. I may take me a month or two or three to pay you. Is that okay?" And they all agreed that was okay. I got the Bottle Rockets and Lucas Nelson and we had a great festival and it turned out that people really wanted to hear that music. People came from all over the country and Canada
JJ Passalacqua: And they still do.
Bill Poss: More of them come from this area. Actually now, it's more like Springfield, Bloomington, Champaign, St. Louis is a big market for us, but people come from these small towns, they see what a little festival it is and they think, "Wow!" It's really comfortable and intimate. The music is so intimate.
Randy Eccles: You have some great performers. A lot of them, we play on The X. We also we used to do the Bedrock concert series with Robbie and the Bottle Rockets, a lot of those bands played for us. Lucas Nelson would be excellent.
JJ Passalacqua: Billy Strings two years in a row we had Billy Strings.
Bill Poss: Yeah. That was before. We got lucky.
JJ Passalacqua: We couldn't get Billy Strings now.
Randy Eccles: Have to find some serious cash.
Bill Poss: Our top five or six people that we have this year have been nominated for Grammys or received Grammys. Suzy Bogguss has been many nominations and actually won Grammys. She was one of my heroes. One of the reasons I started playing music. Listening to her music was so great in the early nineties, but she's turned into a really amazing songwriter and performer. People think of her as this nineties pop star. She's really great. Check her out. Her new record is so good and she's writing her own material. Then Sister Sadie was up for a Grammy this year. They didn't get it, but they did made a great record. This six piece all women bluegrass band. I think some of them live in Colorado and some in Nashville.
Robbie Fulks is coming back with his band. John Moreland will be there. We have Chain Station, Rod Picott, Peter Keane, lots of great songwriters and lots of great pickers.
Randy Eccles: If somebody's interested in going, when is it and how do they get tickets?
Bill Poss: It's the Solstice weekend, so it's June 19-22. It's in Effingham, Illinois. Go to www.moccasincreekfestival.com and we'll have all the information there that you can need. Tickets are available. It's four days of music. If you go to the website, you can get your tickets there and you get four days of music for 120 bucks. Pretty great.
Randy Eccles: What's amazing too is , it sounds so intimate, 500 people or so. That's an incredible way to see music.
Bill Poss: Randy. You literally, you park your car, you walk across the street and it's 150 yards maybe to the entrance. Bring your lawn chair. The whole festival is maybe 200 yards by 300 yards. The whole festival. Two stages and the late night stage down by the lake, but it's still right there. You just walk down a little ramp and you're there.
Randy Eccles: So are there hotels nearby or are people just driving back and forth?
Bill Poss: Effingham is five miles from the grounds, and they have about 16 hotels. Tons of camping. People camp in the Lake Sarah Campground. You can also camp in the parking lot if you want to.
JJ Passalacqua: And Anthony's Acres Resort is right there.
Bill Poss: Anthony Acres is sold out. There's a fishing lodge right there. It's actually quite affordable. We tried to get a room the day after the festival ended last year for this year. It was already sold out.
Randy Eccles: Wow. It sounds like a lot of fun and it's great to have this type of stuff to do around. You bring in so many great artists here. It's one of the things I loved about our Bedrock series, how small and intimate it was. The best way to see music is where you can see the facial expressions and the hand movements and different things like that. This is a festival, is not like the Jazz & Heriage Festival in New Orleans or any of these monster ones they have where you're fighting to get around. You're actually gonna be able to enjoy the music
JJ Passalacqua: A lot of times you can not just see them on stage. Most of the artists will stand around and talk and stay for the rest of the fest.
Randy Eccles: Sell some merch.
JJ Passalacqua: Yeah, sell some merch and talk to people in the audience
Bill Poss: Nobody mobs 'em and they just chat.It's great. Really
JJ Passalacqua: It's a great vibe.
Bill Poss: The worst seat in the house at Moccasin Creek Festival is better than the best seat in the house at Lollapalooza. Truly. The beer prices are like $4 to $6. It's not like going to those things where they give you a wristband. Pay 'em cash.
Randy Eccles: Thank you so much for putting this together and also for coming together to do LoveSeat, your collaboration, and the new album Our Way.
Bill Poss: Thanks to you all here at, WUIS and NPR we sure appreciate all that you bring us. I listen to it every day, all the time. Listening to it in the car when I drove up.
Randy Eccles: We appreciate that. I'm glad Effingham is just a little southeast of Decatur and at the edge of our listening area, Is there one other song you wanna recommend?
Bill Poss: The record is varied in styles. The guys at the music store this morning were asking me what style of music we play and I say, "It's like there's a lot of folk music on there, and Americana music, some of it's a little country sounding, some of it's more rock and roll sounding. The last song on the record is really rock and roll sounding. There's a couple that are pretty full rock productions, but it's widely varied, something for everybody.
One of my favorites is Kiss Me. I think it's a really sweet song. It's a very short song, but it's a duet...
JJ Passalacqua: It's about making out.
Bill Poss: It's about hitting on your wife.
Randy Eccles: Sounds like a good thing to do.
JJ Passalacqua: You should always keep hitting on your wife.
Randy Eccles: You wrote everything on the album except for the last song. What's that one?
JJ Passalacqua: That is called In These Shoes.
Randy Eccles: Are you on that, Bill, or is it just you, JJ?
JJ Passalacqua: That one's just me.
Randy Eccles: That was more of an archival piece you had done and you decided to include?
Bill Poss: There's some really great creatives in Effingham. One of them is Sammy Roan. He and his friend George Ozier made this recording of an old song and they asked JJ to sing it and they made a whole video for it. It was a great project, and we thought it would go nicely on the CD, and we needed another song.
Randy Eccles: We look forward to hearing it. Thank you so much for joining us, Bill Poss. I should ask Bill, because Passalacqua is long for some folks, you shortened it to Poss?
Bill Poss: I released my first three albums under the name Bill Passalacqua. Some of my music is still streaming under that name and can't easily be found, much to my chagrin. So, Bill Poss is it. I shortened it because I watched my brother do that and he had a lot of success. That makes it easier for people to find.
Randy Eccles: And JJ Pa... JJ Passalacqua. Thank you. I was gonna shorten yours too, but I don't think you do that.
JJ Passalacqua: I don't do that. It took me a long time to learn to spell that last name.
Randy Eccles: Earlier, you said you were on the road touring for a while. Who were you touring with?
Bill Poss: I just started out driving around the country looking for places to play. Just me and my guitar living in my truck for a long time. I had some success and I made three records. Then I toured with the Gin Sisters. Eventually they became the Fabulous Gin Sisters, and we toured together for three or four years, and then the Gin Sisters joined up with the Fred Eagle Smith Traveling Steam Show. I was with them for four years. I played with Fred Eagle Smith for four years, opening 200 plus shows a year, and I got 18 minutes a night. Wow!
Randy Eccles: It's a lot of nights — 200 nights a year is.
Bill Poss: That leads up to 2013 when I moved back to Effingham.
Randy Eccles: We're so happy to have you here in the area. Thank you for what you're doing, and we look forward to playing more of LoveSeat.
Bill Poss: Poss Music Works does consider Springfield to be in our range. Poss Music Works is the organization that puts on Moccasin Creek Festival. If your listeners would like to reach out to Poss Music Works, we are looking for opportunities to put on shows, festivals, community concerts, youth open mics — that's a big one we do, songwriting workshops, songwriting retreats, that kind of thing.
Randy Eccles: How do they get a hold of Poss Music Works?
Bill Poss: www.possmusicworks.com.
Randy Eccles: Again, thank you so much for joining us.
Bill Poss: Thanks for making us welcome here, Randy.
JJ Passalacqua: Yes, thank you.
