Instinct, Influence, and The Brook & The Bluff’s Lookout Pond

Ask Joseph Settine what life on the road looks like after nearly a decade of touring with The Brook & The Bluff, and he’ll tell you.

“A bunch of Pilot gas stations.”

It may be less romantic than it looks from the stage, but Joseph still talks about touring with the enthusiasm of someone who hasn’t gotten used to it. The band will spend much of the fall back on the road, continuing something they started nearly ten years ago, when Joseph, Alec Bolton, and brothers John and Kevin Canada crammed themselves into a Ford and played for anyone who would have them.

But before all the long drives and the late nights, Joseph was a seventh grader standing in the rain watching Willie Nelson.

He was at City Stages in Birmingham with his best friend when the weather turned. Rain came down. Lightning struck. And Willie and the band kept playing.

“It was one of my first moments seeing live music and being really moved and affected by it,” Joseph says. “God, I love Willie.”

At home, music was in the walls. Joseph’s parents played together in an acoustic duo around Birmingham, and the family basement doubled as something of a rehearsal room. His mom had old records glued to the walls. There was a little PA, a television, and enough space for Joseph and his friends to hang out while his parents played.

John Prine and Nanci Griffith were part of the soundtrack of the house. Al Green played in his mom’s car. When The Beatles 1 came out, Joseph latched onto it. When his dad showed him Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Joseph was a goner. And, as a child of the ‘90s, there were the Backstreet Boys. He and his sister fell hard for boy bands and Britney Spears. Later came John Mayer, Bon Iver, and Frank Ocean. 

His parents tried to teach him guitar when he was ten, but the strings hurt his fingers, and the teachers were his parents.

“I just had this thing, like, I don’t wanna learn from you,” he says.

Five years later, he picked up the guitar himself. This time, it took. Joseph was deep in a John Mayer phase, and that influence stayed with him, even as Joseph’s writing and eventually The Brook & The Bluff’s sound evolved. The Beatles never left, either.

Joseph was listening to them heavily when he wrote “It Can’t Be,” one of six songs on The Brook & The Bluff’s Lookout Pond EP.

“It was probably the first just straight-down-the-pipe love song that I’d ever written,” Joseph says. “Nobody does a whimsical love song like Paul McCartney.”

“It Can’t Be” sounded Beatles-y to Joseph as soon as it took shape, so when the band started recording, they followed that instinct. Alec Bolton’s guitar pushed it further. The song grew brighter and more joyful, toward the early-60s rock Joseph had been hearing in his head.

They recorded the songs that became Lookout Pond during the same period that produced Werewolf, the band’s fourth album released in March. It was the first time the band finished a recording process with more songs than they needed. Around twenty ideas turned into fifteen tracked songs, and then came the sequencing.

There were lists. There were arguments. There were whiteboards, too.

As the band built Werewolf’s final track list, a handful of songs didn’t fit – “Close to Midnight,” “Under Control,” and “Lookout Pond,” the eventual title track, among them. Rather than force those songs onto the record, the band held them back, and they became Lookout Pond. Across its six tracks, the EP draws on different strains of rock and roll, but what inspired them came from the same complicated stretch of Joseph’s life, one that included the end of his marriage and the beginning of a new love.

Both experiences found their way into Werewolf and Lookout Pond. But Lookout Pond leans further into the latter: Joseph’s falling in love again and his fascination with that feeling. 

“What is this feeling?” he remembers asking himself. “What is this thing that feels so human and so present and big?”

Joseph kept writing toward it: the excitement of it, the size of it, and the strangeness of being so changed by something that also felt completely natural.

“So natural that it was a little scary,” he says.

But for all his introspection, Joseph doesn’t hold especially tightly to a song once it leaves him. He examines himself on the page without insisting that everyone else arrive at the same conclusion. And sometimes, years later, a song teaches him something he didn’t understand when he wrote it.

For a long time, he told people that “Rush,” one of the band’s earlier songs, was inspired by Mad Men… and that’s not entirely untrue. There really is a line inspired by the show. But twelve years later, Joseph hears something else.

“I’ve realized that it’s more about my relationship with my dad than anything else,” he says.

Joseph goes deep, but he isn’t self-serious. He’s open about crying and feeling emotional onstage, and just as quick to laugh at himself.

“I’m like, you know what? I can’t say the word oil, and it’s fine.”

Maybe that acceptance comes with getting older.

For a while, Joseph wanted distance from Alabama. The Brook & The Bluff’s name was tied to home from the beginning: Joseph grew up in Bluff Park, and the rest of the band came from Mountain Brook. But in his twenties, he didn’t want Alabama to matter so much to who he was or what the band sounded like. He feels differently now. 

“Yeah, I do have a fucking accent, and I’m okay with that.”

His thirties have returned other things to him, too. Dave Matthews Band, for one.

“I feel like you get into your thirties and you’re like, actually, everything that I thought was cool at 16 is what’s cool,” Joseph says. “I’m not afraid to love Dave Matthews Band anymore.”

There is something painfully familiar in the way he describes your twenties, all that energy spent trying to smooth yourself into someone more refined. You put distance between yourself and your hometown. Your family. Your accent. The music you loved as a kid.

Then you get a little older and start collecting those pieces again, or maybe you start shedding the masks that covered them.

For Joseph, that has meant reclaiming Alabama and his accent, but also returning to music he loved before he thought much about influence. Prine. Nanci Griffith. Little Feat. Creedence. 

“You get older and you get more comfortable with yourself and the things that made you,” Joseph says. “I think that has been true in our journey as a band, too.”

It is easy, ten years later, to make the beginning of The Brook & The Bluff sound more deliberate than it was.

Joseph, Alec, and drummer John spent a summer playing three-hour sets at Good People Brewing in Birmingham – sometimes for twenty people in heat that Joseph remembers as roughly nine million degrees. They got free beer, food, and around a hundred dollars.

Then, in 2016, they asked the brewery if they could play their own songs one night. They picked a day that the Birmingham Barons were playing across the street and figured a few people might wander over after the game. Instead, four or five hundred showed up.

Joseph remembers walking onto the stage terrified. But underneath the fear was something else.

“Whoa,” he remembers thinking. “This is a possibility.”

For the first time, the people in front of them had come to hear songs that they had written.

“It’s not just playing ‘Beast of Burden’ at weddings anymore,” he says.

The wedding gigs didn't disappear overnight, but John turned that night's possibility into a plan 

“Honestly,” Joseph says. “All the credit goes to John Canada.”

John cold-emailed venues, found opening slots, called friends in other cities, and figured out how to get the band to the next show. Joseph describes himself and Alec at the time as two Type B guys 'just kind of floating around.' John gave them direction – and maybe his greatest gift to the band: his brother. Kevin Canada on the keys. 

The van was always crammed. The rooms, not so much. They played wherever they could. Atlanta. Charleston. Jackson, Mississippi. Friends traded shows with friends. They held on to one idea: if they could get in front of people, the show would win them over.

“There’s this thing that happens when we play together,” Joseph says.

That became the band’s strongest argument. They built an audience one room at a time, trusting the songs, the harmonies, and the strength of their live performance.

In the studio, they were doing something different. After several albums testing how far they could push production, 2023’s Bluebeard was the peak: layered, ambitious, and sometimes difficult to reproduce live. For a band built onstage, it raised an obvious question: Why not make a record that sounded like they do in a room?

That question led to Werewolf. 

Instead of chasing what Joseph calls studio perfection, the band spent months rehearsing together at Alec’s house, finally recording the songs live in the studio. To Joseph, it felt like 2016 again, when they practiced day after day at Alec’s parents’ house in Birmingham. 

“The joy of it all,” he recalls.

That joy doesn’t come without nerves. Joseph still worries about missing notes or his voice cracking. He thinks about people in the room who are seeing the band for the first time, wanting to give them a good show. Over the years, he has learned ways to get out of his own head. Movement helps. Dancing. Keeping his hands busy. 

When he needs something more, there is a lesson he has carried since college.

During his classical training, one of his teachers told him to stop worrying so much about technique and become the character instead. So when anxiety pulls his attention inward, Joseph closes his eyes and tries to inhabit the character inside of the song rather than worry about the notes. 

Of course, becoming the character is more complicated when the character is you.

“Sometimes it can be hard,” he says. “Sometimes it can be like opening an old wound.”

But Joseph has something now that he didn’t have in college.

“I can look over at my best friends in the band and just be like, I’m okay.”

Joseph calls the life they’ve built “a total dream come true,” getting to spend his days making music with his friends. 

Luck asks what fifteen-year-old Joseph would make of the life he’s living now.

“He would be really shocked that I pulled the performer out of me,” Joseph says. “We’re not in the NBA, but this is a good second.” 

He laughs. 

“If I know myself, he’d probably cry a little bit.” 

Years before Joseph would find himself on stages of his own, he was in seventh grade, standing beside his friend at City Stages, watching Willie Nelson play through a Birmingham storm. He didn’t know about the Ford or the friends who would share a stage with him. He only knew that the music had moved him.

And all these years later, it still does.