Thick As Thieves

Thick As Thieves

Thick As Thieves is a group from Los Angeles. The name is used by more than one act, including a US band and a Canadian folk band with rag and bluegrass influences.

Los Angeles band

The Los Angeles group forms in the summer of 2004, when guitarist Aaron Benson and drummer Mike Cotter meet on an eastbound train travelling from Chicago to Boston. They discover shared musical interests during their conversation. Benson is completing an MP&E major at a local music college and has just bought a guitar, with an interest in songwriting. Cotter has played drums since childhood, but stops after helping his family recover from locust plagues and drought that damage their farm in northern Illinois.

The pair begin writing long guitar-and-drum pieces that avoid conventional timing and song structures. Their songs often start from a short guitar riff or a fragment of a beat before expanding into complete tracks. This work leads to an experimental album, Telemakos Airlines, with an accompanying light show of the same name. Although this project is described as an artistic success, it does not have the immediacy and energy of a full band, so they decide to add more players.

The bassist has been playing in several local bands and working on his own material. He meets Benson while both are waiting in line at a vegan diner in Allston, and they connect immediately. Around the same time in late August, Cotter meets writer Tyler Littwin, who puts aside a novel he is working on and returns to music.

After a series of noisy rehearsals, the group develops into a quartet. Despite being banned from the first venue they play, they tour and write songs for two years. Littwin has written a 235-line poem, Overshore & Undersky, inspired by a childhood spent beside the ocean; this becomes the basis for the band’s first album, We Planted Driftwood And Nothing Changed, which appears in May 2006. The follow-up album, True Believers In The Long Walk Home, follows in 2008.

Other act

A second Thick As Thieves is a Canadian folk band with rag and bluegrass influences.