Bio
The Story Of Our Band, Otto Mobile And The Moaners
“What country sounded like when it still had the blues.” – Kirsty Evans, East Bay Express
Otto Mobile and the Moaners deliver an original hybrid of Urban Country Rock and Roll. Their roots reach a century deep in the past and fuse with sonic textures of the future. The band is named in honor of the banjo wielding ancestor of Matt Lundquist who claims he jammed with Otto in a mystical dream. This dream inspired Lundquist to build a catalogue of over 200 lost songs that breathe with old rhythms and inventive lyriciscm.
Lundquist’s slide guitar work has obvious ties to Delta Bluesmen and Duane Allman. His style also mixes the flatpicking of Doc Watson with the Grunge sounds of his youth. Also a singer in the band, his delivery surprises and delights. To embellish his songs, his harmonica aches melody and his atmospheric pedal steel reflects the falling stars.
Elliott Peck’s soaring voice both empowers and lends the band feminine charm. The band’s vocal blend is an exciting rebirth of the Gram Parsons / Emmylou Harris archetype. Her smooth piano and Wurlitzer playing further complement Lundquist’s manic depressive slide. On the mic and on the keys, Elliott has magnetic stage presence.
Low end wizard Connor O’Sullivan boasts a diverse palette of bass tones. Everything from thumping stand up on grassy tunes, to pumping out Fender P-Bass lines on rock tunes, to bowing electric upright on spacey songs. O’Sullivan also wields a Jaguar baritone guitar to synthesize bass lines with colorful guitar arpeggios.
The foundation of the Moaners is drummer Rob Schwartz. Rob’s elevated sense of rhythm drives the band. His jazz chops add a composer’s flair to the ebb and flow of these lost songs.
The live experience of Otto and the Moaners resembles plugging the tube amps into a Midwestern thunderstorm, then waking up to the splatter of rain on a tin roof and the crackle of an all night log on the fire.
In their first year as a band, The Moaners displayed their flexibility playing alongside rock bands and string bands alike at clubs, pubs, banquets, backyards, galleries, ampitheaters, festivals, and theaters.
The Story Behind Our First Album, The Lost Songs of Otto Mobile
One winter night while Matt Lundquist slept in a shack in the rolling hills of Southern Indiana, he was visited by his great, great grand Uncle Otto – a banjo wielding ex-patriot of the Midwestern flatlands. In the resulting dream jam, Otto showed young Lundquist the secrets of the slide guitar and a songbook of unrecorded gems that he never got to record. Lundquist woke the next morning without the book, but with a few embers of inspiration to start a fire with.
After learning the melodies of the wind through the cracks in that Yellowood Forest shack, then learning slide to the beat of Big Branch Creek in the blue ridge mountains,
then deciphering the lyrics of his High Sierra backcountry dreams, Lundquist set off for the golden hills of Oakland to form a band that his ancestor could only dream of, ‘Otto Mobile and the Moaners’.
