Domenic Dunegan, lead singer and founding member of the Pittsburgh-based band The Ghost Club, views music as a form of communication. With the band’s first tour coming up, he and his band will have the chance to communicate with new local music scenes, including Washington, D.C.

The up-and-coming Pittsburgh-based band The Ghost Club is set to go on tour for the first time, with stops up and down the East Coast. They are releasing an album on Feb. 28 and will begin their tour the next day. The band will perform at the Songbyrd Music House in Washington, D.C. on March 3rd.

The journey to this tour has been a long time coming. Though The Ghost Club formed in 2016, they released their first song in 2018 and didn’t play their first live show until the start of 2023 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It took a while for Dunegan to gather a group of band members, but the 26-year-old frontman was determined. He reached out to a number of people, trying to get them involved.

“There’s always a lot of face value and enthusiasm, but they didn’t realize I was actually being serious about it,” Dunegan said in an interview. A lot of people ghosted him, but that sparked inspiration for a band name. Many dead group chats later, Dunegan finally found a cohesive group of bandmates that would last, and thus The Ghost Club was formed. 

All members of the band are Pennsylvania natives.  The band now consists of Dunegan on lead vocals, saxophonist Jake Barber, bassist Logan Casper, drummer Christian Laliberte, and Isaiah Ross on lead guitar. 

Dunegan felt relieved when this iteration of the group came together because he could tell they all love doing what they do together. With the new album coming up, he was proud of the musicianship that his bandmates put into it.

Despite all these efforts over the last eight years, Dunegan was not planning on pursuing music – that is, until his father took him to a Bruce Springsteen concert.

“I went in and then came out thinking to myself, ‘Okay, I need to try to do what that guy does,’” Dunegan said. “And since then, it’s just been stepping stone after stepping stone, figuring out how a band works, how to write music, how to perform. And I’m just still learning as I go.”

In terms of writing music, Dunegan emphasized that the process is never linear; it is hard to sit down and force himself to write, and often the best ideas strike randomly. He described an incident in which he was packing for Los Angeles to record a song with producer Eric Palmquist.

“I had a bass guitar that just came in the mail that we were going to use, and I was just playing it while I was walking around, packing my bags,” Dunegan said. “And then I wrote the baseline for the song ‘Same Graves’ and just kind of hammered that one out while I was packing.”

With its poignant lyrics and electro-funk rhythms, ‘Same Graves,’ originally released in 2020, is currently The Ghost Club’s top song. 

There have been a few notable artists that have come from Pittsburgh, such as Mac Miller, Wiz Khalifa, and Christina Aguilera. But according to Dunegan, the music industry in Pittsburgh can often be cold to those who want to continue a career in music. Many artists move to Los Angeles or New York where the industry is more supportive of those careers, but The Ghost Club has been able to establish a name for themselves in the Steel City.

Pittsburgh does play a role in The Ghost Club’s music, though. The city has a lot of rock fans, so their new album will feature a lot of rock influence, according to Dunegan.

Hannah Levitt of Shelter Music Group, The Ghost Club’s manager, is as excited for the tour as the band members are. She first saw the band perform at Mr. Smalls Theatre in Pittsburgh and saw so much potential in them.

“This is all they’ve wanted to do, just begging to get out on the road,” Levitt said. “So I think the energy will be incredible.”

Dunegan said the band actually tends to thrive in environments with nervous energy. He said the band’s two best gigs were their first ever show in Pittsburgh and a big show in Los Angeles.

“We were so absurdly scared because it was Los Angeles,” Dunegan said. “That scared nervous energy made us just way, way better onstage.”

Regardless of the size of their shows, the band always tries to keep their audiences in high spirits.

“I get a little bit too in my head, but when people throw energy at you, you throw it back at them and then they just keep bouncing that back and forth,” Dunegan said. “That's always just a great feeling.”

The band and their team are excited to perform at Songbyrd Music House at the beginning of March.

“Oh man, I mean, Songbyrd as a venue is just legendary,” Levitt said. “D.C. is a hotbed of where great musicians get to go, and we couldn’t do an east coast run without hitting D.C.”

Despite the band’s close ties to Pittsburgh, Dunegan also has a connection with the nation’s capital.

“D.C. was actually where I recorded the first songs I ever worked on, so it’s going to be cool to be back in D.C.,” Dunegan said.

The band will be on tour between February 29 and April 20, 2024, with a stop in Washington, D.C. on March 3 and finishing it off at home in Pittsburgh.

(Main Article Photo Credit: Franciss Bonn III)

To learn more about The Ghost Club, please see the following web resources:

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• TIDAL
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