BAND PROFILE: Wide Mouth Grin
Written by admin2 on June 23rd, 2009Filed under: Themes, Deaf Jam, Irked Audio
About the band:
Based out of Boulder, Colorado, Wide Mouth Grin is a three piece band led by Deaf guitarist/songwriter Steve Dicesare. The other band members are Mark Brummer on the bass and vocals, and Pete Solveson on the drums. They have a loyal (and growing!) fan base of Grinners. Using a combination of American Sign Language, homemade hand signals, eye movements, and facial expressions to communicate to one another while playing, these guys have a truly unique live chemistry.
About Steve Dicesare:
Steve has been playing and writing music most of his life. He began playing piano and guitar as a young child and then decided to focus just on the guitar. He also began writing music at a young age. When Steve was 9 years old, he began losing his hearing. He has been functionally deaf for many years now. Specifically, he has a progressive, bilateral sensorineural hearing loss, currently at about 85 db—translating to about 80 percent hearing loss. What hearing he has continues to diminish, and he must carefully protect it when playing by using special industrial grade sound-blocking headphones.
Quoting SPIN Magazine:
“We use hand signs onstage to communicate,” explains DiCesare. “When I mess up, I’ll look and see the guys pointing at their asses.” Such ass-pointing is a surprisingly rare occurrence.
Wide Mouth Grin is often described as a “jam band,” but that term mightily undersells them—their music is much, MUCH more than that. These guys can seriously play. They’re talented, original, funny, and have this…organic grooviness. They know how to write thoroughly catchy tunes, and bring a whole lotta energy to the stage when they perform live.
Here…listen for yourself. This is the song Wrench, off Wide Mouth Grin’s second full-length album, 2008’s ”Some Kind of Meat, with Some Kind of Cheese, on Some Kind of Bread”:
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