Denver’s enduring and globally adored chamber rockers will play homage to the film that changed its trajectory before Monday’s screening at Red Rocks.
On a hot July afternoon in 2002, I gathered with members of the band DeVotchKa on the patio of a north Boulder bar to tell them the serendipitous news: A poll of 47 local music experts had declared these seductive chamber-rocking outcasts the underground local band most deserving of more mainstream recognition. They had shot all the way to the top from No. 6 the year before.
“It’s definitely one way to move up: Murder the competition,” Tom Hagerman deadpanned.
Frontman Nick Urata, the hauntingly handsome frontman I once called “the physical impersonation of perpetual heartbreak,” joked about the terminology: “Underground band,” he said with a laugh, “is a nice way of saying, ‘hanging on by a thread.’”
Fast forward 24 years and Urata is talking with me from Los Angeles about Monday’s upcoming Film on the Rocks concert and 20th anniversary screening of “Little Miss Sunshine,” the breakout indie darling that catapulted DeVotchKa onto the global stage in 2006…