Coming home: The Bergamot opens for Barenaked Ladies at Morris 100 Fest

South Bend native Nathaniel Hoff fondly remembers performing at the Siam Thai Restaurant just behind the Morris Performing Arts Center when he was a student at Marian High School more than a decade ago.

"I would perform for Morris crowds. People would come in for dinner, and I would be performing dinner music or whatever," he says by phone from near Chicago. "You'd look out the front window, and you'd see the Morris right there."

Hoff says, as a high school student, it was "always a dream" to perform at the iconic Morris theater. On Oct. 22, 2016, that dream came true for the first time when he played a concert there with his wife, Jillian Speece, who he met at Marian.

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In addition to being husband and wife, Hoff and Speece make up the indie rock duo The Bergamot. More than six years after their first performance at the Morris, the couple will get to live Hoff's childhood dream once again on Oct. 1 when they open for Barenaked Ladies at Morris 100 Fest.

The concert won't be the only major accomplishment for The Bergamot that weekend. Just the day before, on Sept. 30, the duo will release their fourth studio album, "Far Out."

"I used to cover Barenaked Ladies songs playing shows in South Bend when I was in high school playing Fiddler's Hearth and some other places," Hoff says. "My buddies and I used to play shows, and 'If I Had $1,000,000' was one of those songs that we used to cover, so it's like another childhood dream come true."

At the concert, Speece says, they will play "mostly new stuff from the album with at least one or two throwbacks" in the setlist as well. Html

'The album we really didn't want to make'

For the next year and a half following their concert at the Morris, Speece says, The Bergamot will be touring with "Far Out." But surprisingly, at one time, the couple didn't even intend to make and release an album this year.

"It was kind of like the album that we didn't really want to make," Hoff says.

In September 2019, The Bergamot released their third studio album, "Mayflies," and toured until March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the live music scene worldwide. The Bergamot had been preparing to open for One Republic at the University of Notre Dame’s Joyce Center that April.

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When COVID hit, Speece says, she and Hoff were in Austin, Texas, preparing to perform at South by Southwest, another concert that, due to COVID, never took place.

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"The day before South by Southwest was going to start, the world shut down. We had let go of our apartment in New York to go on tour because we thought we weren't going to be back for like a year and a half," Speece says. "So we didn't have a place to go, and I remember being slightly panicked."

Soon, some fans reached out to the couple, explaining that they'd just moved out of their home in Sedona, Ariz., to move into their dream house and offered to let The Bergamot stay in their old house for free.

Hoff and Speece lived in Sedona for four months, and there, Speece says, they had the initial idea for "Far Out."

"At that point, we literally were far out," she recalls. "We were living right next to a big national park. We felt super isolated because there weren't many people around, and it was just us and the stars and our thoughts and our dreams … dreaming up the newness of how we were going to rebuild after this."

In order to stay in touch with fans, the duo went live on Facebook every day for the first 100 days of the COVID lockdown.

"At the same time, it was like, 'What do we do with the other time we would have spent on tour and we would have been promoting 'Mayflies'?'" Hoff says. "And I was like, 'Well, I think we just start working on another album.'"

Hoff says they began creating "Far Out" with "zero expectations" and simply saw it as a reason to keep going during the lockdown, a time when, he says, it would've been easy to close the books on their music career after the success of "Mayflies."

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In writing songs for "Far Out," Hoff says, he tried to explore key signatures, time signatures and "energetic things" the duo hadn't included in "Mayflies" and tried to imagine what it would be like performing them on stage, opening for One Republic if they ever had that opportunity.

As they recorded the album, Hoff and Speece didn't stay in one place very long, moving from Sedona to another fan's house in Flagstaff, Ariz., then Phoenix, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Hoff's parents' home in Ogden Dunes.

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In contrast to the "beautiful studios in London" where The Bergamot recorded "Mayflies" with British producer Matt Wiggins, Hoff says, "Far Out" was recorded in bedrooms, bathrooms, closets, outdoor spaces and even a cavern-like, stone room at a fan's house in Phoenix.

"I mean, it was like this album just kind of trailed our lives. It really does express all the musical feelings we felt during that time period," Hoff says. "It was like having your favorite blanket with you during all these experiences. It was coming along with us everywhere we went."

Songs on the album reflect the couple's feelings during the pandemic

In addition to being physically divorced from a single location to call home during the creation of "Far Out," Speece says, she and Hoff explored the concept of "being mentally far out" in the album.

"It's about just embracing who you are, so like, 'In this solitude, who am I? What is my purpose here? What is it that I want to contribute to the world in a greater, more meaningful way?'" she says. "So it's this idea of sometimes, in order to find yourself, you have to go out far out, away from people to figure out who you are, what your dreams are and how you can contribute to society."

She says the album's title track, which Hoff wrote only a few months ago, especially explores these themes.

"It talks about how you can 'go your own way, far out, if you just run away from here,'" she says. "There's a lot of vulnerability in the album, and it's one of my favorite albums I've ever been a part of with Nathaniel. … It's very raw, and when you listen to the lyrics … you can be on that journey with us through the highs and the lows over the last two years."

Another song on the album, "Breakdown," encapsulates Speece's feelings during the first few weeks of the pandemic when, she says, she realized "just how small we are when looking at the stars."

"I think everybody lived through a moment or a breakdown over the last two and a half years where you just hit that unbelievable low," Hoff says of the song. "We hit that, and, lyrically, this song explores that space."

On a lighter note, Hoff says, he looks forward to sharing the song "Paradise" with fans, which features the harmonica "front and center."

"For people who have followed us, they've always known that the harmonica is always a big part of our live shows, but it hasn't really made a feature debut on an album, so this was a personal kind of thing that I felt really good about because it felt like it was connecting a little bit more our live show to our records," he says.

Documentary achieves success in international film festivals and bolsters the duo's platform

Not only did the pandemic give Hoff and Speece time to create a new album, but it also allowed them to finish a passion project more than six years in the making ― their documentary film, "State of the Unity," which they shot, edited and starred in.

The film, which was shown at the Acorn Theatre in July, follows Hoff and Speece throughout 2015, 2016 and 2017 as they traveled to each of the 50 U.S. states, playing concerts for Americans from diverse walks of life during the 2016 presidential election cycle.

Growing up, Hoff says, he always saw music as "the universal language" and wanted to "unite people with music, community and collaboration" in a time when he and Speece say they observed a lot of political polarization and divisiveness.

Hoff and Speece traveled throughout the country in a used station wagon they called the "Unity Car." They instructed people at each place they stopped to sign the vehicle in sharpie with a message of unity. After eight months and 207 concerts, Speece says, the entire inside and outside of the car was signed by Americans on every side of the political aisle.

"We had Republicans signing next to Democrats. We had homeless people signing next to billionaires. We had everyone of all cultures and races signing the Unity Car with what they thought unity was," she says.

From 2018 until 2021, Hoff and Speece learned how to edit and then edited "State of the Unity." In February, the film was accepted into the Sedona International Film Festival, where it won Best Feature Documentary.

Since then, Speece says, it's been accepted into 22 film festivals ― including the Paris Independent Film Festival, the Richmond International Film Festival and Atlanta Docufest ― and has won seven awards. On Oct. 7, the Heartland International Film Festival, an Academy Award-qualifying festival, will screen "State of the Unity" at Newfields in Indianapolis.

"It's been very humbling receiving the awards, because we had no idea that people would actually enjoy this art," Speece says. "We were making the art because it was something that was laid on our hearts, and we were dedicated to bringing this message of unity forward."

Email Claire Reid at cereid@gannett.com.

In concert

● Who: Barenaked Ladies and The Bergamot

● When: 7:30 p.m. Oct. 1

● Where: The Morris Performing Arts Center, 211 N. Michigan St., South Bend

● Cost: $135-$45

● For more information: Call 574-235-9190 or visit morriscenter.org

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: The Bergamot returns to South Bend for Morris 100 Fest, album release