by Danny Colman
originally published on Rock On! This Week’s Sound Bites…12/25/2025 (NewJerseyStage.com)
“We’ve had a transition of different people, new keyboards; we’ve got a bunch of new people and now D.D. is singing so we have a female and she’s actually the first one to record with Roomful and it’s going really well. We’ve been working with her for about a year now and the record came out a couple of months ago and it’s doing pretty well,” stated guitarist Chris Vachon of the long running blues band Roomful Of Blues as he previewed their upcoming January 16 show at The Sellersville Theater as well as their January 18 show at Tuckerton’s Lizzie Rose Music Room.
Vachon has run the band for more than three decades and with new vocalist D.D. Bastos, new keyboardist Jeff Ceasrine, sax player Craig Thomas and Trumpeter Christopher Pratt have decided to “Start over.” Having these new editions to the unit has not only brought a fresh start and a new album on Alligator Records called, “Steppin’ Out!” but a new direction that the band and their fan base seem to love.
“Well yeah, since I joined in 1990, it has always been a male voice,” explained Vachon about the transition to a female front person. “I hadn’t worked with D.D. in about 10 years; I had a little side band called The Sons of Providence and she fronted that sometimes. So, I just thought of her, unfortunately, our singer Phil (Pemberton) before her, his health went south and he couldn’t do it anymore and I figured she might be a really good candidate and it turned out really well. This all happened so fast and I didn’t have a lot of time to put an original record together because when she started working with us, people were saying, “I want to buy something with her on it. They didn’t want to buy our old stuff anymore (Laughs). So, I was like, OK we have to do something; I wouldn’t call it real quick but we had to do something and we didn’t have a lot of time to write songs and all of that but that will be up next I suppose.”
.Putting a record together in a hurry is never ideal for any artist but “Steppin’ Out!” was done in such a way that leaves, at first listen, one wondering if the tunes are their own or what have been labeled as “Obscure covers” in a recent press release; turns out, obscurity isn’t such a bad thing.
“With us, they usually are obscure,” laughed Vachon. “I have a lot of stuff collected from over the years and stuff that when we go do a record, I’ll go to that collection of that bunch of stuff. So, I had a bunch of stuff to go through that we had never recorded and that’s the way it ended up; people are saying, “Oh, I’ve never heard that one before,” I wouldn’t want to do stuff that other people have already done anyway; you know what I mean? I think “Slippin’ and Slidin” is the only one that has been covered a lot. People don’t know where the songs come from (Laughs). I had a lot of blues stuff before I joined this band but once I joined, I just started collecting a lot of vinyl. So, I have tons of stuff to draw from so it was fun to do this kind of project.”
Admittedly “Starting over” as he stated before, Vachon readily proclaims the past as just that, the past. They have made a clean break and changed direction but when you don’t look back; does that ever leave some of the longtime followers disappointed?
“With D.D., we do all new stuff. I think we’ve kept maybe two songs that she wanted to sing and we’ve replaced all of the rest. We’re not doing anything from a bunch of our records, we’ve just decided to start all over again and it’s kind of working out good because we’ve pretty much beat on that stuff for so long, you know how that goes (Laughs). This is the second time since I’ve been in and running the band that we’ve had a major replacement. So, it’s tough but I’m glad that we don’t have her doing all of the stuff we’ve done before because; nobody is complaining about it, they’re just accepting her as the vocalist. We’ve never had any Rolling Stones type mega-hits (Laughs) and I think, although we’ve carried over a couple of tunes, that for the most part, people are liking the new stuff. Some people like certain versions of the band and over time you’ll get, “I liked that other version of you” and everybody has their own opinion about what they liked about our band but they still keep coming, so that’s cool.”
New band members, new direction, new record, how does this translate to the stage?
“We play 90 minutes and a generous encore or we might do two 45s, it just depends on what they want us to do. I don’t know; Sellersville I think we’re gonna probably just do 90. I think all of the shows on this trip are all 90s but we play longer than that. We like to cover the whole album and we have a few others we like to do. So, it always goes beyond that, we don’t like to cheat (Laughs). People are probably like “OK,” that’s enough (Laughs)!”
“We started playing for Lou when he kind of was starting off, we do it like once a year. It’s pretty small, as a matter of fact, it has been a while, I can’t remember all of the things that we do but the last time we played there, we played outside in a campground and I think we’ve been there once since; we’ve worked for Lou at The Lizzie Rose a lot of times.”
January 16 the new configuration of this seasoned classic rolls into Sellersville Theater in Sellersville, PA and then January 18 in Tuckerton at The Lizzie Rose Music Room and both promise to be a night of swing and jump blues guaranteed to get you moving both in and out of your seat!
To discover more about Roomful Of Blues or to find ticket information, please go to www.roomful.com/shows