10 Years of Welshly Arms: Blues-Rock Band Headlines Brite Winter This Weekend

If Welshly Arms has anything to say about it, Brite Winter will be legendary.

Brite Winter features about 20 bands on three stages, starting at 3 p.m on Saturday. Tickets, $10-plus, are available at britewinter.com.

Capping the day is Welshly Arms, a band set to return to the fest as its headliner. Other performers include Signals Midwest, Fox Royale, Grumpy Plum, Skuff Micksun and Detention. It all goes down on the West Bank of the Flats, underneath the Main Ave. bridge in Cleveland, with Welshly taking the West Bank Stage at 10 p.m. 

The group last played Brite Winter in 2015 before releasing its debut, self-titled album. The festival, at that point taking place in Ohio City, had not grown into the massive wintertime music festival it is today.

Now, with two (soon to be three) albums under its belt, the blues-rock band is looking forward to making its big return, and hoping for some good weather. We talked with singer-guitarist Sam Getz to hear about the show and what else the band is up to this year.

Cleveland Magazine: You guys just did the Rock Boat. How was that?
Sam Getz: It’ll be kind of a switch going from Miami and the Dominican Republic to Cleveland, outside, in the winter. It was a lot of fun. We played three shows over the course of the five-day cruise, and we made them all different so it’s a different set each night. It's a lot of fun though. You're out there with 20 or 30 other bands and then tons of fans and you're just on this cruise so it's a floating music festival. It runs just like any other music festival except that you're stuck. 

CM: It sounds like the exact opposite of Brite Winter. What’s it like returning to the festival eight years after headlining in 2015?
SG: Being back is really exciting. We’ve been waiting to do it again ever since eight years ago, and I've had the privilege to go and watch a couple of times when I've been in town during Brite, and a lot of our friends have played and it's always a great time. It's so funny because I would get jealous when I would go down there and the weather was 50 degrees, and everybody's wearing normal clothes. When we played it was 12 degrees. We were worried about our fingers freezing up. We made it through, but it was crazy. It was a full-on blizzard, too, so, like, trying to carry equipment up to the stage, you're stepping through heavy snow and the stage is really slippery, icy. I doubt it's gonna be like that again, but we're ready for anything. 

My memories of Brite Winter; they’re fond memories even though it was freezing cold. I’ve been excited about this since we found out we’re going to be able to play. I love playing in Cleveland; I love seeing everybody.

CM: That’s back when it was in Ohio City. The festival has grown a lot and you guys have, too. I saw your first EP came out in 2013, meaning this is sort of your 10-year anniversary of the band, right?
SG: Yes, it's funny. I was just talking about that; that I was kind of sad that I didn't see it coming when we had our very first show. I have to look and find the exact date, but it was in January of 2013 at the Beachland Tavern. I wish that I had had some foresight and saw that day coming again, where it would be the 10th anniversary and we could throw a little show at the Beachland Tavern or something because I think that would have been so fun. But maybe we can still do it. 

I can't believe that we started this band 10 years ago. We started it really casually, and so back then we had no idea that we would still be playing now, that we would have gone to as many countries as we've gone to and accomplished a lot of the things that we've gotten to accomplish. I had no idea that was something that was in our future. A lot has happened in 10 years but it also has flown by.

CM: In that 10 years, too, the Cleveland music scene has shifted. You guys have become one of the bigger acts to come out of Cleveland’s music scene. Could you reflect on that a little bit more, what that means to you?
SG: One thing that we've really tried to do is stay grounded, stay humble — but stay Cleveland. I think everybody in our band still is in Cleveland, still calls Cleveland home. We work out of here, we have a studio here and I think that that still plays into how we sound, how we play, how we present ourselves. We are very much a Cleveland band and I'm really thankful that those opportunities came to us while we were here and we didn't have to go [outside the city to] chase them. 

I know that that's what happens to a lot of bands. I think they feel like they have to go chase it a little bit and we've just been really fortunate and really happy with the opportunities we've been presented from here. To be able to still stay here and go do these things — I am really thankful for that. I'm really happy that it has worked that way for us, but I do understand why a lot of artists and bands have to go explore some other places.

To really answer that question — I really want to see Cleveland grow and see more young artists get a glimpse of what you can do, what is available to you. I think, as a musician who grew up in Northeast Ohio, I didn't really think that this stuff was possible. Even if I wrote the best music that I could and kept working on my craft, the best that I could see would be playing some regional gigs and having some fans around town. It was through my journey as a guitar player playing for other artists that I got to see what was on the other side and what was available. When we started this band, most of us had already been a part of some other things that gave us a glimpse of what was out there. But I do really feel like there are so many artists that don't get that view, they don't get that glimpse. 

That’s the important part of staying around: being able to share that, just slow down a little bit and actually be around a little more. I really hope to use our resources and our studio and connections to help the scene here because there are just as many talented folks here as there are in other cities. I've seen so many great songwriters and singers and musicians and other artists of all mediums. 

CM: Can you share any details on that studio?
SG: We’ve recorded in farmhouses and stuff like that; we’ve always kind of just made the best we could in whatever scenario we had available. We just bought a building in the area and have been building out our dream studio. That’s the big project right now, finishing the studio. I hope to be able to use that to provide a platform for more Northeast Ohio artists.

We call it Blakwall Studios, and we've always sort of called our studio that. As far as location, we're still keeping it under wraps while we finish things up and really get it all ready.

CM: This is going to be a big year for Welshly Arms; you’re putting out an album in March. What can fans expect?
SG: This album's pretty exciting because it's the first one in a little while where we just did what we wanted to do. We just kind of made a band record, and we've been playing a lot of the songs over the last actually. We finished this record a year ago and so we've been playing all these songs for a long time. It almost feels like we don't even have a new record coming out; like, we did that. It's done. But I'm really excited about this collection of songs. I think they're really authentic to how our band plays and sounds live. The songs have been really fun to play, but we've written so many more songs since and we're already working on the next record and a bunch of singles, and there's definitely going to be other activity around that. In March the album comes out and we finish the tour over in Europe. That's all very exciting.