Is it too on the nose to liken Soup (as it’s billed on social media)—the erstwhile Dane Arnold and the Soup, Dane and the Soup, Soup Kitchen, etc.—to the allegorical stone stoup? In “Stone Soup” the folktale, hungry travelers convince villagers to each contribute a little something to the greater, soupier good. In Soup the band, the same principle applies.
Helmed by songwriter and vocalist Dane Arnold, Soup’s ingredients on the most recent Sunday night of its Mercury Lounge residency included cabbage (Greg Fallis, Bishop Marsh, and Jordan Hehl of King Cabbage Brass Band and multiple other projects), straggler (Jake Lynn and Andrew Bair of Jason Boland and the Stragglers and more), and brunch (guitarist Johnny Mullenax, who hosts Mercury’s noon Bluegrass Brunch show every Sunday).
Like so many of Tulsa’s residencies, it’s a collective of people who could front their own project (and often do) orbiting around a centerpiece, in this case the gentle songwriting and stellar vocals of Dane Arnold. Soulful singing spans genre: it’s a very easy thing to emulate and a very difficult thing to actually do. Arnold’s control and restraint were pitch-perfect all night; he is a tonally excellent singer. Likewise, the entire performance gave the sense of a stage packed full of people cautiously suppressing their individual virtuosity because the songs they’ve written and elected to cover don’t require constant displays of it.
Still, an eight-person band in a bar necessarily lacks the sparsity evident on Soup’s records—search “Dane & the Soup” if you’re hoping to stream—and the retro vibe this band can capture in a studio or a quiet room felt markedly different here, more like a band with a soul singer versus a soul band. Instrumentally, everyone onstage was stellar in their own right, and it was especially fun to watch Mullenax stretch his guitar legs, from quiet, rhythmic leads here to stressful, circus-y solos there.
Sunday’s Soup also came with a side of grits. Early in the night, Arnold sang a cover of Tulsa band Poppa Foster and the Grits’ “Lemonade.” Then, Christopher “Poppa” Foster himself joined onstage for a few of his own songs. (Soup and the Grits are sort of neighboring bands, with overlap in several members.) The band finished its first 45-minute set with another Poppa Foster song (the fourth, by my count), “Don’t Call me Crazy.” After a brief break, Soup returned for set two with the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody.” Tackling the vocals of a song written for siblings to sing together is bold, and Arnold and Hehl were up to the challenge. Drummer Jake Lynn took a turn in the spotlight singing lead on “Dressed in White,” a crowd-pleasing cover of the Malcolm Holcombe song maybe best known locally because of Jared Tyler’s rendition.
During the show, a woman I have never met approached me, drawn from across the room by my naturally dour expression and visible note-taking on my phone. She encouraged me to join in her dancing—or at least waving my hand to the beat—because the band deserved it. I agree that they deserved it and negotiated her down to head bobbing. When the Soup’s on, even in the audience, it takes a village.
