Boston Soul-Funk Act Ripe Host a ‘Summer Beach Party’ at Indian Ranch
With it being the summer, there’s always the opportunity to throw an outdoor party somewhere. It could be in someone’s backyard, a public park or the beach. To embrace the vibe of the latter by a lake that has a name that’s way too long for this article, Boston soul-funk dynamos Ripe are having a get-together on August 10. It’s happening at the historic Indian Ranch on 200 Gore Road in Webster, Massachusetts and they’re going to be joined by the Westerly multi-dimensional songwriter Will Evans, fellow Bostonians Bermuda Search Party and Toronto disco-R&B groovers The Free Label. The show starts at 12:15pm, so it’s an ideal way to spend a Saturday afternoon without having to worry about being out too late.
The idea for this stacked event came about through both Ripe and their management. After they had the date booked at Indian Ranch, the pieces came together for it to become something greater than just a typical show.
“This was sort of a combination between us and our team,” frontman Robbie Wulfsohn says. “We were looking at the Indian Ranch show and oftentimes our summer shows are opportunities for us to get together with bands who we’ve formed long-working relationships with, such as Will Evans and Bermuda Search Party. We also have a lot of love for The Free Label, we’ve seen them a couple times and they opened up for us once in Colorado. When the opportunity was presented to us to make this more of a full day of music rather than the standard opener, headliner and everyone going home, we thought that it would be something that we would want to do during the summer. When we were given permission to build something like this, it excited us a lot to be able to do it.”
A few months ago, Ripe released a music video for “Get Over”, which is the first track off of the band’s sophomore album Bright Blues that came out in March of last year. The video depicts a magazine photo shoot with the band wearing different outfits, even at one point with Wulfsohn looking like an emo kid with a parted hairdo, and they had a blast making it.
“The experience was actually a lot of fun, as much as the entire aesthetic was that we weren’t supposed to be enjoying ourselves during the shoot,” Wulfsohn mentions. “Nick [Callais], who also did the directing for the ‘Paper Cups’ video, stepped in with a ton of vision for how to make it come to life. He and his team did a great job of making us feel comfortable the whole way through. We really wanted to use the music of Bright Blues as sort of our entrance into the foray of making music videos. We grew up loving music videos and we still have a ton of feelings towards them, even as the form of content starts to shrink in length.”
“Nick is somebody who we met through some friends of ours,” he adds. “We really enjoy his vision of the way that he was able to make things spring to life through his sheer force of will. When he pitched us this idea, he wanted to keep it a little bit light and focused on us rather than this high concept video similar to what ‘Paper Cups’ is. We got really excited, we love the song, and we love the ability to sort of add different layers to the world of music that we’re building. We were always cautiously optimistic when things were getting made and not actually finished, but when we saw the end result everybody individually laughed at some points, and we knew that we had what we wanted.”
After the show and going into the rest of 2024, Ripe has plans to release some new music that they’ve been working on when they haven’t been touring. They’re hoping to put out at least once single before the year ends, but time will tell.
“We’ve spent the entire year so far getting new music together when we’re not on the road,” Wulfsohn says. “I don’t want to give it a defined shape until every I is dotted, and T is crossed, but we’ve been hard at work getting new music together. For the rest of the year touring wise, we’re going to be doing a bunch of shows for the rest of the month and probably a little bit more through October and November. We’re going to be moving at a slower pace after a full summer of being on the road. I know that there’s a super concerted effort within our community to make sure that some new music comes out this year.”
“We’re really excited about it and we’re looking forward to showing it to our extended family and the fans,” he adds. “There’s definitely a lot of things in the works, but everything is still at the point where it’s almost finished so it’s still kind of in a soupy shape.”
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