For the past decade, Bethany Thomas has been a fixture in the Chicago music and theater scenes. She’s appeared at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Second City, Court Theatre, and Writers Theatre, among others, and she won a 2013 Jeff Award for a role in South Pacific. As a musician she’s played almost every major venue in the city (including shows with Robbie Fulks and Jon Langford), and she’s also a regularly featured artist at the Paper Machete and Salonathon.
Thomas began writing some of her first original songs a little more than three years ago, while on her longest out-of-town acting gig. In September 2013, she moved from Chicago to Milwaukee (near her native Kenosha) to perform in Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s fall production of Ragtime. She did well enough to be cast the following spring in the company’s production of Ain’t Misbehavin’, but she had a lot of downtime.
They never got around to that, but they did play several Machete shows, and over the next couple years they gigged occasionally as a trio—Bethany & the Two Johns, naturally. When Bliss left to focus on family and other commitments, Martin stepped in—he was a friend of Thomas’s, and he’d already been gigging with her when the Johns weren’t around. He and Szymanski became the nucleus of her current five-piece group.
Thomas has sung R&B, soul, jazz, rock, classical, musical theater, and more. And when it comes to writing songs, she doesn’t tend to stick to one style. “I don’t do well when I’m trying to write for a certain genre,” she says. “It usually ends up wherever or however I want to sing it. And we’ll build off of that.”
Thomas is already on another record, in fact, but it isn’t one of hers. She’s in a new band called Jon Langford’s Four Lost Souls with the Mekons and Waco Brothers front man, and this fall they’ll release a self-titled album on Bloodshot. The lineup consists of Langford, Thomas, Szymanski, and Tawny Newsome, and everybody but Szymanski takes a turn on lead vocals. “It definitely sounds different from anything else Langford’s done,” Thomas says. Last November, Four Lost Souls recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with veteran producer Norbert Putnam and a band that included legendary session bassist David Hood (father of Drive-By Truckers songwriter Patterson Hood). They plan to tour to support the release.
