Devotchka

Burlesque pits and a Russian word for girl

DeVotchKa came together in Denver in 1997 with more instruments between them than members. Nick Urata sings and plays guitar, bouzouki, piano, trumpet and theremin; Tom Hagerman covers violin, accordion and piano; Jeanie Schroder plays sousaphone, double bass and flute and sings; Shawn King plays drums, percussion and trumpet. The name is a transliteration of the Russian devochka, meaning girl.

The first steady work was accompaniment. The group backed burlesque performers, which meant playing to somebody else's timing and somebody else's story — a discipline that shows up in everything they later did for film. There was no label campaign behind any of it. The early records were self-released and the audience was built by driving to it.

What came out of that arrangement was a four-piece with no rhythm section in the usual sense: the bottom end is a sousaphone or a double bass, the lead lines come from violin and accordion as often as guitar, and Urata's voice sits somewhere between a crooner and a mariachi tenor. It is a line-up that can play a theatre and a street corner with the same instruments.

How It Ends, then the film

The 2004 album How It Ends became the calling card. Its title track moved into film trailers and television and reached number 101 on the UK singles chart, which is the sort of placement that puts a band in front of music supervisors rather than in front of radio programmers.

Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris then hired them for Little Miss Sunshine in 2006, and the commission was larger than a licence: the band wrote and performed the majority of the soundtrack, working alongside the composer Mychael Danna on the score. The album was nominated for the Grammy for Best Compilation Soundtrack. Two decades later, The Winner Is and Till the End of Time are still fixtures of the live set, and the pieces most of the current touring is organised around.

Seven albums, a symphony and a long quiet patch

The studio run goes SuperMelodrama in 2000, Triple X Tango in 2002, Una Volta in 2003, How It Ends in 2004, A Mad & Faithful Telling in 2008 — which reached number nine on Billboard's Heatseekers chart — 100 Lovers in 2011, and This Night Falls Forever in 2018 for Concord Records. Alongside those sit a soundtrack for I Love You, Phillip Morris in 2010 and DeVotchKa Live with the Colorado Symphony in 2012, the orchestral pairing being an obvious fit for material already written with strings in mind.

Urata has also built a separate career scoring for screen, including a shared Hollywood Music in Media Award in 2017 for best main title theme on a television limited series, written with Daniel Handler.

No eighth studio album has followed This Night Falls Forever, and the most recent release under the band's name is a piece of catalogue housekeeping. Curse Your Little Heart, the covers EP they issued on Ace Fu in 2006, finally arrived on streaming services on 29 October 2025 through Cicero Recordings. Its opening track, I Cried Like a Silly Boy, has since gone into the nightly set — one of the few things in the current running order that a 2006 audience would not have heard.

The anniversary year, dated

2026 has been organised around the film's twentieth anniversary, with the shows billed as A Tribute to the Music of Little Miss Sunshine. The run opened at the Boulder Theater on 14 February, doors at seven and music at eight, and worked through club rooms across the spring and early summer, including Thalia Hall in Chicago on 13 June.

The centrepiece was Red Rocks Amphitheatre on 13 July. Wheelchair Sports Camp opened — "I don't know if you know, but we're punk now," said Kalyn Heffernan, playing the amphitheatre for the first time. Dayton and Faris introduced DeVotchKa in person, describing the band's music as the emotional heartbeat of their film and noting it was the biggest audience they had ever shared it with. The concert ran straight into a twentieth-anniversary screening and opened Denver Film's Colorado 150 Film Festival. "Thanks for sharing this magical movie with us for 20 years," Urata told the crowd. The set was a short, open-air seven songs, closing on How It Ends.

The autumn leg started on the east coast: the Atlantis in Washington on 9 September, Music Hall of Williamsburg on the 11th, the Sinclair in Cambridge on the 12th and Longboat Hall in Toronto on the 14th, then Foro Indie Rocks! in Mexico City on the 18th. Back in Colorado there was a benefit for Vertical Skills Academy at Leopold Bros. Distillery in Denver on 26 September, followed by Pappy and Harriet's on the 29th, the Belly Up in Solana Beach on the 30th and the Ford in Los Angeles on 1 October.

Europe is next, and those tickets went on sale on 27 February. Oran Mor in Glasgow on 6 October, Gorilla in Manchester on the 7th, Heaven in London on the 9th, Chalk in Brighton on the 10th and the Lantern at Bristol Beacon on the 11th, then Melkweg in Amsterdam on the 13th, Point Éphémère in Paris on the 14th, Nochtspeicher in Hamburg on the 16th, the Yard Club in Cologne on the 17th and the Cactus Club in Bruges on the 18th. Sons of Town Hall are main support throughout the British dates.

Halloween at the Stanley

The tour finishes where the band's calendar has finished for years. After roughly a decade of Halloween shows at the Boulder Theater, DeVotchKa moved the tradition up the mountain to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, and the eighth annual Costume Ball takes two nights there on 30 and 31 October 2026.

The 2024 edition gives the measure of the thing: three nights from 31 October, seventy dollars a ticket, with magic, fortune-telling, aerialists and belly dancers, and the SlaVic Sisters Macabre Circus Sideshow working the weekend around the band. Urata describes it as a new-age, no-holds-barred vaudeville. He also has a ghost story about the ballroom, which is part of why the hotel asked them in the first place: "I was fishing around in my stuff and heard someone walking on stage, then someone started stamping on the stage, like angrily stamping."

It is a useful counterweight to the anniversary billing. One half of the band's live identity is a film score played to people who have carried it around for twenty years; the other is a costumed Halloween residency in a haunted hotel with a sideshow attached.