The Band

Miss Fairchild

Nantucket Island, best known these days as a playground for the rich and famous, might seem an unlikely incubator for a pop band. But for decades, the island has also been a haven for a community of artists and musicians, a creative milieu that helped bring the creative talent Miss Fairchild to fruition. On a Grey Lady overrun by strangers, the band learned to stay local at heart, while beginning to craft songs that spoke to a timeless sense of modernity.

As young boys, the band learned to sing and play in the island’s churches. Singer Daddy Wrall, the son of a Congregational minister, recruited instrumentalist Schuyler Dunlap and producer Sammy Bananas to be the backup band for Sunday services. Using their knowledge of pop music garnered from the only two radio stations available, Casey Casem’s top 40 and Sandy Beach’s oldies show, the boys crafted arrangements of modern and classic pop and soul in a welcoming environment, covering songs by the likes of Prince, Sly & The Family Stone, Tony Toni Toné and Arrested Development.

Having honed their songwriting and arranging skills in bars and happenings, these three recruited drummer Todd “The Rocket” Richard and bassist Trick Johnson, and set sail for America, land of opportunity – Homemade Superstars on a homemade sailboat of pop music. The past year has seen Miss Fairchild tour extensively throughout the United States and Canada and have their hit song, “Vanilla Place” featured on MTV’s The Real World: Hollywood. Yet wherever they travel, the band is embraced as local. Armed with their island-grown sense of community, they are welcomed by fans everywhere who claim them as their own.

Autumn 2008 sees Miss Fairchild’s fourth release, Won’t Be Your Kept Woman, a pop record which displays a new sense of confidence and purpose. Delivered with the same energy and fun of 2007’s pop funk LP Ooh La La, Sha Sha, the new record displays traces of the bands Miss Fairchild covered in their youth. From the stomps and claps of “Kept Woman” and the sing-a-long of “Excuse Me, Sister” to the angst of “I Heard,” the songs on WBYKW have universal appeal. With this release, these locals prove that in a world so cold, there’s nothing like a little home cooking.

Daddy Wrall

Libra. Also known as Wrall Skillz.

Vocals, Percussion

Samuel P. Nice

Taurus. Also known as: DJ P.Nice, Sammy Bananas, Sam Nice

Turntables, Alto Saxophone, Synthesizer

Schuyler Dunlap

Aquarius. Also known as The Great Dunlap, The Original Homemade Souperstar.

Flute, Guitar, Keyboards, Vocals

Trick Johnson

Since the summer of 2006, Miss Fairchild has featured Patrick “Trick” Johnson on bass guitar. Trick has played the bass for nearly twenty years in many musical contexts. He has a road-tested fluency in funk, rock, jazz, reggae, and electronic styles. Recently, he can be found as part of “The Difference,” the rhythm section that includes Miss Fairchild’s Todd “The Rocket” Richard. Together they have played with Joshua Eden, Andy Happel, Slowing Room and founding Fairchild member Samuel P. Nice.

Recently, Trick took time out of his busy schedule gigging and building his home to speak with me about his life, the bass, and Elvis Presley…

Bass player for The Miss Fairchild Show.

Todd "The Rocket" Richard

Todd “The Rocket” Richard is a musician who has never cared much for genre tags and preconceived notions. An acclaimed, award-winning, and in-demand drummer/percussionist both live and in the studio, the Rocket has 15 years in professional music with artists and projects as diverse as his own record collection. Portland Magazine has declared him “Maine’s Most Sought-After Drummer.â€?

Drummer for The Miss Fairchild Show

Once upon a time, before they were Miss Fairchild...

Before they were referred to in hushed tones and shouted of by hoarse voices…

And before they could boast the ability to turn any night into Saturday Night…

Before all of this, Miss Fairchild needed a name. They had spent many sleepless nights scouring newspapers for fortuitous collisions of words, stabbing fingers into random pages of dictionaries, diagramming brainstorm sessions with vast sheets of butcher paper tacked to living room walls, all to no avail.

In a fit of pressure-cooked despair, the band did the only thing they could in such searching moments: they sent Daddy Wrall to the salon. Mr. Z, a genius in the trimming-of-locks and sculpting-of-hairs, was sure to have an answer to this dilemma.

But Z’s suggestions fell flat. As he sunk deeper into malaise, listening to the snip of shears, watching brown hair fall softly onto the floor, Wrall began to give up. The band would be nameless forever, a union of pop and soul music that never happened. Their dreams of all-night parties with rooms full of hands clapping and feet stomping, their visions of wistful and nostalgic laments to mysterious past loves, their plans of fusing their influences into a unique sonic experience that would leave fans restlessly searching the internet for more – all dashed upon the rocky shores of namelessnessdom, that treacherous land where so many great ideas go to die quiet, anonymous deaths.

“…and in any case,” the follicle fabulist was saying, “I’m no good at names. Why do you think this place is called ‘Mr. Z’s Salon,’ anyway? Names, not so much. Now, hair, that’s another matter. See here, where others might deign to use clippers, I would never dream of…”

Just then, the chime of the bell on the salon’s door caught Wrall’s attention. Shade of a pink hat, wisp of a mysterious chin, shimmer of a posterior departing.

“Who was that?” said Wrall, in a kind of reverie.

“Who, that, who just left? Miss Fairchild, and none other. Now that is a woman! When I cut hair – ” and he snipped ” – I dream of her, I dream of such beautiful tresses! And that smile she gives me, a little sexy, a little distant – mm hmm, how she inspires me. That’s what you need, Wrall – ” and he snipped again ” – a muse to inspire you. Now, when I was younger, I thought of…”

But at the word muse Wrall’s heart had leapt. He knew their search for random confluences of words were at an end, for it was not a catchy name the band needed, nor an ironic one. No, it was a name to give them confidence as their energies flagged in the wee hours of the night, sweat dripping as they blew their horns and belted out their tunes and roused the ecstatic crowd to new levels; a name to buoy them on its wings as they adventured into new realms of sonic wonderlands; a name, at last, to inspire them.

And so they took down their butcher paper with its wild diagrams of brainstorms, so they folded up their newspapers and recycled them, and so they replaced their dictionaries on the shelves: for they had a name. And if one night, as Daddy Wrall lifted his voice to the rafters, and Sam Nice cut breaks and spun samples, and Schuyler Dunlap beatboxed upon his silver flute, they caught a distant glimpse of a pink hat in the corner of the room, with that mysterious smile beneath and a sex curve to the hips, they would know their muse was with them, in spirit and in name.

Miss Fairchild is Daddy Wrall (vocals), Samuel P. Nice (production) and Schuyler Dunlap (instruments). Since 2004, they have made dynamic modern pop music that also serves as a music appreciation course for lovers of soul and funk music. On 2007’s Ooh La La, Sha Sha…, the trio blends a timeless sense of songwriting with timely production values, displaying a remarkable musical palette influenced by such artists as Sly & The Family Stone & Tony Toni Toné. With Trick Johnson (bass) and Todd “The Rocket� Richard (drums), they are The Miss Fairchild Show, an express train of energy, rapid transitions and positivity, which has drawn comparisons to the legendary JB’s.