GOLD HILL - For many years, Andrew McConathy worked as a children’s ski instructor at Vail’s Golden Peak, and after enough time had passed, he felt he wanted to find a different way to make a living. He started playing music on the side with two friends of his from the slopes, skiing by day and playing bluegrass together at night.
He and Derek Shields had grown up ski-racing together in Vail, attending Middlebury College in Vermont to ski race before McConathy ultimately dropped out. Once both had moved to Vail on their own time, they started skiing again and playing together. The other friend, Ted Welles, ended up joining the two, and McConathy (acoustic guitarist and vocalist), Shields (upright bassist), and Welles (drummer) ultimately formed the first line-up of Drunken Hearts, playing in Welles’s basement and at open mics in Vail.
McConathy remembers that the band name came from opening up a book and being inspired by the song title “Drunken Hearted Boy” from the Allman Brothers, a similar process to how The Grateful Dead got their name. It also emulated the song title “Drunken Hearted Man” by Robert Johnson, and McConathy remembers that the band originally went back and forth between Andrew McConathy and the Drunken Hearts and The Drunken Hearts before finally truncating it to its current name, Drunken Hearts.
McConathy was impressed by Shields’s family, who all played together, as McConathy considers himself the only member of his family who truly focuses on performing music. In 2006, McConathy founded the Yarmony Music Festival (renamed from YarmonyGrass in 2019), an event in State Bridge Lodge named after the ranch that McConathy’s parents owned. The event hosted its 15th celebration in June 2024, having gone on a hiatus in 2019.
Through that festival, he met his guitar instructor Scott Law, a member of Honkytonk Homeslice, as well as Railroad Earth fiddle player Tim Carbone, who would serve as a mentor and produce the Drunken Hearts records Live for Today (their debut record) and Wheels of the City. From his experience founding Yarmony as well as having gone to Middlebury for creative writing as well as skiing and soccer, he realized he could apply his writing education to songs. Having originally wanted to be an author, he started focusing on writing songs, ultimately releasing Drunken Hearts’ debut record in 2012.
The band lineup has since changed drastically. Soon after the release of Live for Today, an electric bass player replaced Shields to fatten up the sound of the band, and in 2014, Welles passed away. Ultimately, the band cemented a new lineup, but after COVID-19 spread across the United States, half of that replacement lineup moved out of state to focus on their personal lives. No hard feelings exist between any of the previous band members, as McConathy still talks to them frequently, but during that time, he wondered if the career he had been pursuing since 2010 was finally coming to an end.
Ultimately, though, the trio turned into a quintet – McConathy, James Dumm on electric guitar and vocals, Drew Packard on bass and vocals, Tyler Adams on piano, organ, and vocals, and Eric Low on drums and percussion. During his time working as a security guard at a hemp farm in Longmont, McConathy found a renewed sense of faith in his abilities as a musician and songwriter, and the current lineup could record their latest album, 2023’s Reckless Ways of Living.
For McConathy, being able to perform with such professional and experienced musicians is a total blast, and he ultimately hopes that the group and the audience have a great time at and engage with their shows, enjoy the songs, and take away the kind of art that they want to create as a group.
You can see Drunken Hearts performing live at the Gold Hill Inn, located at 401 Main Street in Gold Hill, on Sunday, October 27, 2024, starting at 7 p.m. You can stream their releases over the last twelve years wherever you get your music, and to find their social media and learn more about them as a band, be sure to head to their website at thedrunkenhearts.com. Andrew McConathy will also be playing solo at Eldora, 2861 Eldora Ski Road in Nederland, on Wednesday, December 4, 2024, starting at noon.
