Category: Music Features

Categories
Music Music Features

Drew Holcomb’s Homecoming

Drew Holcomb (Photo: Ashtin Paige)

It’s a hopeful tale for any aspiring singer-songwriters out there, one that starts as any typical troubadour’s would: “I was doing a lot of shows at the P&H Cafe, and those Flying Saucer songwriter nights.” A couple of decades ago, that was Drew Holcomb’s life, pounding the pavement, chasing gigs, and honing his craft. Soon, this being Memphis, he was rubbing shoulders with like-minded artists. “Cory Branan was incredibly gracious to me,” Holcomb says, “and sort of invited me into his world a little bit and let me open up a bunch of his shows. Then later the Hi Tone was kind of my home for a lot of years.”

As he recruited bands to perform his songs, Holcomb hit it off with one local player in particular. “His name is Nathan Dugger. He was in his senior year at Houston High School when he started playing with me,” Holcomb recalls. “Then he moved to Nashville to go to Belmont and stayed with me on the weekends when he was playing around town.”

The fact that Dugger is still playing with Holcomb over 20 years later is proof positive that they had stumbled onto some great musical chemistry. So is the musical legacy of Holcomb, Dugger, and Rich Brinsfield, the core of the band that eventually coalesced as Holcomb too made the leap to Nashville. 

Holcomb’s mixed feelings about moving to the “Athens of the South” revealed his Bluff City roots. “As a Memphian,” he confesses, “I felt very reluctant to move to Nashville. I felt like I was sort of a traitor, in a way. But I married a Nashville woman, and this was where she wanted to live.” Put another way, in “I Like to Be With Me When I’m With You,” Holcomb sings, “If I could live on the moon, I would rather stay in Tennessee with you.”

“So we were looking for neighborhoods 20 years ago,” he goes on, “and I came to East Nashville. It’s the only neighborhood in Nashville that reminded me of home, you know? It had this sort of loyalty culture, and it was a little gritty. It was, like, hardworking. It had a chip on its shoulder about the rest of the city. And I was like, ‘Yeah, this is my spot. These are my people.’”

As it turned out, the entire band, including Holcomb’s wife Ellie (who’s since gone on to a solo career) wound up in East Nashville, and thus settled on the name Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors. That moniker is especially apt given Holcomb’s songs, which so often address the ties that bind, the friends we lean on, and the embrace of family, conveyed with a soulful, folk-infused pop sensibility. The inclusive message, bolstered by inclusive music, capped off by the disarming frankness of Holcomb’s heartfelt voice, has since resonated with millions, and the band’s trajectory is an object lesson in the rewards of simply honing your craft and staying true to your vision without selling out. That certainly holds true for last year’s Strangers No More and the new Strangers No More, Vol. 2.

“With both of these records,” he says, “if anybody wants to hear a band having fun in the studio, they can listen to these records. We had the time of our lives. We weren’t worried about commercial stuff. We weren’t worried about the radio. We just were like, ‘Hey, we love making music as a band.’ 

“I’ve got to be myself,” adds Holcomb. “That’s what I learned from the music I loved growing up in Memphis — you know, bands like Lucero, who are just so incredibly original. It was important for me to be my own version of that. But, I mean, I was influenced as much by U2 as I was by Bob Dylan or Bob Seger or Tom Petty, so some of my songwriting has a sort of broad universality to it, like a U2 song, and I’ve grown to embrace that instead of apologizing for it. And I think that that’s part of the Memphis in me, too: being unapologetically myself and not trying to be somebody I’m not.” 

Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors perform at the Mempho Music Festival Sunday, October 6th, at 4:30 p.m. on the Bud Light Stage. For details and a full schedule of bands, visit memphofest.com.

Categories
Music Music Features

The Equals Endure!

Derv Gordon with So What (Photo: Lily Chou)

While Gonerfest is known for bringing cutting-edge bands to Memphis, one can’t forget the keen sense of history that also informs their bookings. This week’s Gonerfest 21 is a good reminder of that, with the opening night’s headliner being Oakland’s So What fronted by Derv Gordon, the original lead singer of The Equals, a band founded in 1965. They could have hit it big in America like so many during the British Invasion, had they ever bothered to invade. But, being one of the first multiracial beat combos ever, they had mixed feelings about that.

“We didn’t want to tour the U.S. because we wouldn’t have been able to cope with this ‘no Blacks’ business and not being able to stay in certain hotels or whatever,” Gordon recalls today, speaking from his home in England. “Still, ‘Baby, Come Back’ made the Top 40.” But with no U.S. touring, they never made it big here.

Though The Equals’ blend of freakbeat, soul, ska, and bubblegum rock was plenty cutting-edge (and plenty infectious) at the time, having a group with both Black and white players pushed the envelope even further. Booker T. and the MG’s may have been the only such small combo to precede them. But The Equals were more of a rock band, paving the way for later groups like The Foundations, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Love. And while they did find greater success in Europe and Asia, race still factored into everyday London life. Harassment by the cops was a regular feature of life for Black Londoners, and that in turn led to the creation of one of The Equals’ most enduring songs, “Police on My Back.”

“I left the guys at rehearsal and went to a main railway station to get some cans of drinks,” Gordon recalls, “and as I walked into the station, two huge men, one on each side, picked me up, lifted me off the floor, and said, ‘You’re nicked.’ I said, ‘I’m what? Why am I nicked?’ They just said, ‘You’ll find out,’ and they took me across the street to the police station. I was there for what seemed like forever. I gave them all my information, then said, ‘Excuse me, can you tell me why this is happening to me?’ A policeman says, ‘You resemble someone who murdered his girlfriend.’”

Gordon cleared things up only after requesting that his band be brought in to vouch for him. As they entered, “I could see them coming in with big grins on their face,” Gordon recalls. “Bastards!” Humor aside, the incident was a wake-up call for them. Soon Eddy Grant, The Equals’ lead guitarist and main songwriter (who later gained worldwide fame with his solo hit, “Electric Avenue”), would pen arguably the best song about being on the lam, later made famous via a cover version by The Clash, with its heartfelt cry, “What have I done?” And Gordon’s voice brought the phrase to life.

The band had other politically charged songs, including 1970’s anti-war “Black Skin Blue-Eyed Boys,” but their primary focus was on fun and groove, with charging rock riffs paired with infectious beats and Gordon’s fiery, soulful vocals, often portraying whimsical characters: “Soul Brother Clifford,” “Michael and His Slipper Tree,” “Viva Bobby Joe.” And while their sound got heavier and funkier by the late ’60s and ’70s, The Equals always kept things short and sweet. “I don’t think Eddy enjoyed doing long guitar solos,” quips Gordon now. 

That makes The Equals’ music perfectly suited to the D.I.Y., short-and-sharp vibe of so many Gonerfest bands. And that’s an aesthetic shared by retro-stomp rockers So What, with whom Gordon first played in 2017, including an incendiary performance at Gonerfest 14 that year. Gordon feels they’re the perfect group to play Equals songs: true to that original stripped-down spirit, but with their own self-described “junkshop glam/bubblegum/proto-punk insanity.” Gordon notes that So What’s bassist, Sean M. Lennon (not the son of a Beatle), “is the only bass player I’ve ever heard actually do all the bass runs in ‘Police on My Back.’ And Jason [Duncan, singer and guitarist] actually knows more about Equals songs than I do!” 

Gonerfest 21 runs from Thursday, Sept. 26th, through Sunday, Sept. 29th, at Railgarten, featuring dozens of bands. Visit goner-records.com for more information. So What takes the stage at 9:30 p.m. on Thursday, and Derv Gordon joins them at 10 p.m.

Categories
Music Music Features

Jeremy Stanfill’s New Sound

Jeremy Stanfill (Photo: Jamie Harmon | Amurica)

For those who love live Memphis music, Jeremy Stanfill has been a familiar presence for over a decade, often as a drummer for either Star & Micey or James & the Ultrasounds, or, in more recent years, as a singer-songwriter. And Stanfill, sporting a denim jacket, looking a little weathered, toting an acoustic guitar, fits the latter role perfectly. His words, his voice, and a few strummed chords are all he needs to put the songs over in a room. But if you’ve only heard Stanfill in solitary troubadour mode, you’re in for a surprise. 

Over the course of the summer, he’s quietly been releasing another side of his sound, and it reveals just how expansive his musical imagination is. Don’t be surprised if you hear him on the radio one day soon. With three singles dropping on streaming services this year (so far), Stanfill has unveiled a new, confident approach that is unquestionably pop. July’s “4403 (Time Machine)” sports a slow disco beat, percolating synths, and the singer’s plaintive falsetto; the crunchy classic rock guitar underpinning last month’s “Wild Heart” spins a moody vibe for Stanfill’s tough/tender vocals; and the most recent, “Moving Day,” starts with his solo voice, then gives way to keyboard flourishes and stacked harmonies, complete with subtle pitch-correct effects. 

But unlike some rookies hungering for stardom, Stanfill came to this glossy soundscape organically. At heart, he’s a deeply personal songwriter, and that has not changed even as he’s upped his production game. Even those recordings were the result of his long-standing friendships with fellow Memphians Elliott Ives and Scott Hardin, both studio-savvy engineers/producers/musicians who’ve worked in the big leagues (Ives with Justin Timberlake, Hardin with bands like Drew Holcomb, Saliva, and Drivin N Cryin). 

“We’ve all been friends forever,” says Stanfill of the trio, “and we’ve always wanted to work together. We just haven’t had the time or it just didn’t work out until now, but we have so much love and respect for each other. We were connected to Elliott through Young Avenue Sound because Star & Micey were connected to Young Avenue Sound early on.”

Young Avenue Sound, in turn, was where they made the magic happen. But it wasn’t all fun and games. Stanfill was still reeling from a series of hits his life had taken after 2015. “I had a lot of things happen,” he says. “I got really bad off with drinking, then ended up getting sober. My mom passed away. I was in a long-term relationship that was falling apart just as I got a small record deal. I ended up making the record, but then chose to walk away from it. I thought it was the best thing for me as an artist — I just wasn’t happy with it. But I was still thinking, ‘I want to make something.’ So I called Scott and Elliott.”

Stanfill’s old friends knew he’d abandoned one album already. “They were like, ‘Do you want to re-record what you just did, and make it sound really good? Or would you like to throw caution to the wind and just see what we can come up with and be creative?’ I was like, ‘I want to do that: be creative, and feel like I did when I was a kid, and be excited about music again.’”

From there, “we started building these songs together. ‘Wild Heart’ was already written, but the other ones were built from scratch. We weren’t trying to make a record or anything at the time. I just wanted to make something different, and I just wanted to change the gears. And immediately there was this magical chemistry.”

In the finished products, Stanfill’s sincere folk disposition becomes larger than life through the trio’s collaboration. And, he says, there’s more on the way. For now, there are the online singles, with two of them (“4403” and “Wild Heart”) slated for a vinyl 45 release on October 30th. That will be celebrated with a Memphis Listening Lab premiere party on the day of release. Meanwhile, Stanfill carries on in troubadour mode, playing Music Export Memphis’ Tambourine Bash at the Overton Park Shell on October 10th, and opening for Bailey Bigger at The Green Room at Crosstown Arts on Halloween. 

Categories
Music Music Features

Alice Hasen’s Dream of Rain

Alice Hasen (Photo: Amurica | Jamie Harmon)

“I guess I learned from Covid what anxiety and depression really were.” Alice Hasen is recalling the genesis of her latest release some years ago, when cabin fever’s creeping trepidation was not only a personal matter, but a generalized fear for all of humanity. All of us went through similar emotions, but Hasen, being a classically-trained violinist and composer, and well-seasoned on the stages of the Mid-South, confronted them through her music. Hearing her EP Dream of Rain now, it’s clear that the stress helped her to produce the most powerful music of her career. 

But if the Covid lockdown era jump-started the musical project, it quickly grew beyond that, thematically. That’s made clear in “Temperature Rising,” the EP’s opener. As she explains, there are multiple dimensions to both the global and the personal stress she’s confronting, and the opening track is about “all of the different ways the temperatures were rising around us. Primarily, the EP is mostly about climate change, wildfires, and the mental response to that. But it’s also definitely a product of the pandemic because our internal temperatures were rising and the political temperature was rising, too. So it’s a musical embodiment of all of those anxieties, for me, coming together and needing to find a way to be expressed.”

Hasen, of course, wouldn’t be the first artist to respond to end-of-the-world angst. Local rock band Heels, for example, released Pop Songs for a Dying Planet a couple of years ago, and that title says it all. But Heels’ “pop songs” were punk-infused barn burners reminiscent of, say, the Clash — exactly what you’d expect from apocalyptic rage. Hasen, on the other hand, takes a subtler approach. While she’s dabbled in funk, classic rock, and other genres in her previous solo work (and in the work of Blackwater Trio, her more collaborative band), this EP reflects a more introspective approach and a lush beauty all its own. Facing up to such anguish, it turns out, can be a very delicate thing. 

The EP’s title song is a prime example. “Dream of Rain” begins quietly, Hasen’s violin meandering pleasantly before the subtle rhythm kicks in and, with Hasen’s conversational musings melodiously unfolding in the verse, it resembles nothing so much as Joni Mitchell. Clearly this is a world where beauty and fear come in equal measures. As Hasen reflects, “Part of me wants to let people interpret it for themselves, but for me, that song is about denialism and being invited into this world where nothing is wrong. It’s not real; it’s not a real world. So there’s extreme beauty and comfort, but also there’s something off about it that you can’t quite place. Yet there’s also sort of a hope that we can just dream of rain. Like in the bridge, where it kind of breaks down and turns into spoken word: If you can dream of rain, pray for rain, sing for rain, and dance for rain, then we can magically manifest it.”

Such magic is therapeutic in a world that seems to be falling apart. As Hasen notes, the vast scale and inexorable march of climate change “makes me feel trapped. But there is some hope in the album, too. Like, ‘Dream of Rain’ is an optimistic song for me because we’re trying to manifest rain to go to the places it needs to go.”

The fine line between hope and despair comes through loud and clear as the song unfolds:

“For generations this has been our home,” she sings, “our hiding place/But now we’re running where we used to play, all burned away/No fire escape, all burned away/Have you heard the news?/Where we’re going there is no more pain, no yesterday/Worrying or arguing on how to play the game/Funny how those words of peace and anger sound the same/When you’re the one in the flames.”

The grim imagery continues through other songs on the EP as well. “Goodnight Moon,” far from an homage to the popular children’s book, describes humanity as “coming in hot/Caught victim by our firelust,” as we become mere “victors of dust, prizes of rust.” But the first single off the EP, “Hold Still,” which drops September 20th, offers a kind of balm to this collective anxiety. Over some of the most delicate music of her career, Hasen sings some sage advice: “Hold still, this won’t hurt a bit/Finding the heartbeat, keeping the magic/Hold still, the world is an eggshell/We’re on the inside, nothing is tragic.”

Leaning into the fragility of the tune, Hasen also plays flute on it, a flourish that complements her arrangements for string ensemble throughout the EP. While she overdubbed herself for the latter effect during recording (with Estefan Perez on cello), she’s looking forward to featuring a live string ensemble and a flutist when she celebrates the EP’s release at The Green Room at Crosstown Arts on October 4th. And, she notes of the Green Room performance, “this will probably be the only show where I do the entire EP front to back, ever. Because this project, being full of emotions and a definite darkness, has been very laborious and emotionally taxing.”

Yet, on the flip side, Hasen’s looking forward to having fun while playing live this season. The first gig on the horizon will be the Mighty Roots Music Festival in Stovall, Mississippi (near Clarksdale), this Friday and Saturday, September 13th and 14th, with Hasen and band appearing Saturday at 2:15 p.m.

“I’m really excited about that,” says Hasen. “I spent four years in Clarksdale, and that was sort of where I was born as an artist, I think, because that was the first place I really got to experience playing non-classical music. And of course, it’s such a musically rich part of the world, I think it really influenced me and the way that I sound, and my particular voice on the violin, my songwriting voice.” 

She pauses a moment, then adds, “And Stovall is an amazing place because it’s the birthplace of Muddy Waters. When I was looking in Clarksdale, I used to ride my bike over to Stovall and just sit under a pecan tree and look out over the fields for a little bit before going home.”

Categories
Music Music Features

Celebrating Donald Brown

Donald Brown (Photos: Courtesy Donald Brown)

This coming weekend brings some overdue recognition to one of the city’s true jazz giants, Donald Brown. The pianist was born in Mississippi but raised in Memphis before going on to study at Memphis State (now the University of Memphis), where he was one of the “Memphis Three,” the trio of genius-level ivory-ticklers who emerged in the 1970s that also included James Williams and Mulgrew Miller. Of the three, Brown was arguably the most eclectic, ranging from classic straight-ahead jazz piano to more funk-influenced recordings over the course of 18 studio albums, plus appearances on records by the likes of Donald Byrd and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Through most of that time, he was a much-loved educator at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville from 1988-2020. 

This Friday, September 6th, at 7 p.m., he’ll receive a Beale Street Brass Note and a tribute to his life in music at the Museum of Science & History (MoSH), complete with a concert by the Memphis Jazz Workshop (led by Steve Lee, one of Brown’s former students). And Saturday, September 7th, at 6 p.m., the Scheidt Family Performing Arts Center will host a reading by Valeria Z. Nollan from her upcoming biography of Brown. It’s a pair of events befitting a career as distinguished as Brown’s, and yet the cruel irony is that he won’t be playing at any of them. 

That’s due in part to his aging. “I’ve been having problems with my hands, so I haven’t really performed for the last seven years, so it’s been kinda rough,” he says with some resignation. Yet, at 70, his mind is as sharp as ever, which bodes well for Nollan’s biography, slated for release in 2025.

Brown’s life since college has been single-mindedly focused on his mastery of the piano, but it wasn’t always thus. “I came to jazz kind of late,” he says. “Originally, I was a drummer, and then I played tuba in the marching band, baritone horn in the concert band, and trumpet in the ROTC band. Through high school [at South Side High School], even though I was playing trumpet and drums, I still knew enough about piano and harmony that I was arranging for my high school marching band. Playing trumpet probably influenced my writing more than my improvising, but playing drums definitely influenced me more as a pianist.”

And then there were the keyboardists who showed him the way, influences that came pouring out once Brown took to the piano as his main instrument when starting college. “All the great players that were in Memphis at the time just made me want to play the instrument. Booker T. [Jones] was a big influence. Marvell Thomas, Sidney Kirk, and other guys that were contemporaries of mine.” Like most Stax-affiliated players, these were virtuosos who were equally at home in jazz or pop settings. And that was true of Brown, too, as he progressed through college and began working more steadily.

“I played in a lot of top 40 bands and a lot of studio work,” Brown explains, “so I was influenced by the music of Motown and Philadelphia International, players like Bernie Worrell with Parliament-Funkadelic, Sly and the Family Stone, Prince. I was really into the group Yes and Rick Wakeman. So it was a very diverse amount of keyboard players and pianists that influenced me.” 

A grounding in funk is reflected in some of Brown’s greatest jazz work, where strong left-handed bass figures can be key, as in two of his tributes to civil rights leaders, “A Poem for Martin” and “Theme for Malcolm.” Yet even those reveal Brown’s subtle mastery of classic jazz piano as well, which comes to the fore in his piece “Phineas,” a tribute to the greatest of all Memphis pianists, Phineas Newborn Jr. 

Looking back on his storied life in jazz, Brown himself can hardly believe it. “I was blessed to have worked with so many other legends, like Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Donald Byrd, Toots Thielemans, and Johnny Griffin. But still, the highlight for me was playing with Art Blakey. I still have to pinch myself when I see recordings or videos and see that it actually happened. Even though I haven’t been there walking the streets with Bird and Bud Powell, I tell my students that that’s about as close as you can get to the source.” 

Categories
Music Music Features

Nubia Yasin and Eillo

Eillo (Photo: JC Hendrix)

You might think you know UNAPOLOGETIC. How could a Memphis music fan not know the likes of Cameron Bethany, AWFM, and PreauXX — or producers like C Major, Kid Maestro, and IMAKEMADBEATS? And yet there’s always more simmering below the collective’s surface than what its public-facing (or face-masking) side reveals. For example, at 10 p.m. this Friday, August 30th, at Bar DKDC, some talent whose faces may seem new to UNAPOLOGETIC fans will top the bill. And yet, paradoxically, they’ve been involved in the organization’s background for years, part of what’s always “simmering below the surface” there. 

Take Nubia Yasin, whose first appearance on an Unapologetic release was in 2019, contributing to the track “Eve & Delilah” on the collective’s showcase album, Stuntarious, Vol. 4. It’s telling that her contribution to that track was, as she notes, “the poem at the end,” a spoken word passage, for that has been what her most public work has been centered on ever since … until now. 

Moreover, her writing has been unflinchingly political, from her poetry to her more overtly activist work, including a stint as “chief storyteller” for the Black arts nonprofit Tone and her 2020 TEDx talk on gentrification. As she told Memphis Magazine in 2021, “Because I’m a Black woman, all the intersections that I exist in don’t allow me to be apolitical.” And her response to politics, and much of the world, has always been through the written word, which “informs everything,” as she said in 2021. “I’m multidisciplinary for sure. I do visual art, I do installation work, I do film, but the writing portion informs all of it. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to read. And I’ve been writing since I had the motor skills to hold a pencil.”

Nubia Yasin (Photo: A.C. Bullard)

And yet, ironically, her writing originally went hand in hand with her voice. “I was actually a songwriter before I was a poet,” she says now, “and I stepped away from singing because somewhere along the journey it just started feeling too audacious. Like, there’s something really bold about opening up and singing. So I stopped doing it when I was in my early teens, and pivoted more towards poetry because I felt more confident in that. It wasn’t until 2022 or 2023 when I worked as IMAKEMADBEATS’ assistant for a year, and I was just surrounded by music all day, every day, that my urge to do it just got bigger than my shame about not being perfect at it.”

Returning to music brought things full circle, in a sense. “When I was a kid, my first dream ever was to be a singer. I did choir, all those things. But I have a pretty unorthodox voice — it’s pretty deep for a woman vocalist. As I got older and deeper, I felt really, really insecure for a really long time about my singing. But over time I got prouder of how different I sound, and now I’m in a place where I’m really excited to share that with the world.”

Working with “MAD,” UNAPOLOGETIC’s founder and key producer, directly informed her return to singing, as the tracks that will be playing under her at Bar DKDC were collaboratively created by the two of them. The final product might surprise casual UNAPOLOGETIC fans, its reference points being more indie rock than hip hop. In truth, the label has always been eclectic, from Aaron James to Cameron Bethany, with many releases trading heavily on the poetry and wit of the lyrics. Yet Yasin follows her own star, her musings flowing over meandering melodies that might suggest The Smiths — if fronted by Nina Simone — or equally unpredictable destinations.

Speaking of long traditions at UNAPOLOGETIC, Eillo first showed up on my radar during my 2018 group interview at their old studio, when IMAKEMADBEATS quipped, “this young guy, 16 years old, he’s actually the son of Quinn McGowan, who is part of Iron Mic Coalition. He’s an intern here, and he’s amazingly talented.” By the following year, he was performing on the Stuntarious, Vol. 4 group project and was even name-checked in that album’s recurring comic book-like narration, where an arch villain decries, “And this child, Eillo, has continued to outwit you!”

Today, Eillo laughs at that moment and the talent who played the villain. “That was my dad on the vocal,” he chuckles. “He would be a super dope voice actor.” 

Over five years later, Eillo is no longer the “child,” having proven himself on countless contributions to recording sessions. In 2021, he was listed, with MAD, as coproducer of “Depression and Redemption” on MAD Songs, Vol. 1. Later, the multi-instrumental parts he brought to Aaron James’ Nobody Really Makes Love Anymore were key elements of that album’s musicality, and his other flourishes, like the jazz piano outro to PreauXX’s “Regret” in 2022, could be breathtaking. 

It all has flowed from Eillo’s fingers, who grew up in a creative, musical world. Not only is his father an especially savvy rapper; he drums and is a comic artist. His recently departed mother, Adrian Liggins, was a self-taught pianist and a well-respected soul singer under the stage name Mahogany. “She was an amazing singer songwriter,” Eillo says of her now, and credits much of his musicality to her support over the years. 

This Friday, that musicality will be on full display as an attraction in its own right. “I want to do all the things that I love about music,” Eillo confides. “So I’m going to be doing some raps, doing some singing, some original songs, and doing some, just, playing — just playing and building a vibe. I’m a huge believer in having the music speak for itself. I’m not the best with words, like talking to people and stuff like that. But when it comes to music, that’s the stuff that I want to speak for me. I guess it’s the purest way I can express myself.”

Categories
Music Music Features

Amber Rae Dunn Is Giving It Her All

Amber Rae Dunn with The Royal Blues Band at “A Tribute to the King” (Photos: Michael Donahue)

If you heard Amber Rae Dunn sing for the first time at the recent “A Tribute to the King,” you might want to know more about her.

The captivating singer filled the stage of Lafayette’s Music Room with her voice and personality at the event held August 11th, featuring headliner Ronnie McDowell as well as The Royal Blues Band with Wyly Bigger on keyboards.

“I am from Schererville, Arkansas,” Dunn says. “I grew up with six siblings and my dad was just a barber and my mom was a stay-at-home mom who took care of all of us. There was not a lot to do, but we had a three-acre garden. Just about every memory of my life, I have it in the garden. My favorite animal is a turtle, and I loved that I got to collect worms off tomato plants to feed to my turtle.”

Dunn also sang. “All the time. Everywhere around the house. I was definitely the loudest kid my parents have.”

Dunn with Leon Griffin

If she wasn’t singing “This Little Light of Mine” in church, Dunn was listening to her mother’s Al Green, Michael Jackson, and Prince albums and her dad’s ’90s country music. “So, I’m sure I was singing those songs as well.”

Like she still does, Dunn worked at her dad’s barbershop, Larry’s Hair Design, in West Memphis, Arkansas. She learned how to cut and style hair when she was in high school. “Other kids go to soccer practice or others take acting. I enrolled in hair school.”

She began singing on stage while attending Memphis College of Art for a degree in sculpture. Yubu Kazungu, a fellow student, invited her to join him at an open mic. She asked Kazungu, who heads Yubu and the Africans, why he thought she could sing. She says he told her, “I can hear you humming in the sculpture room working on a pot. You hum on key, and I feel like you can sing on key.”

Dunn joined Kazungu’s band and appeared with the group at open mics around town.

Kazungu “had been pestering” her to write a song, so Dunn came up with “Arkansas Line.” After some persuading from Kazungu one night at a soul food restaurant, Dunn sang the song in front of an audience while keeping the beat by snapping her fingers.

People at the show told her she was really good, but that she needed to go to Nashville because “that’s not really the type of music we have in Memphis.”

So Dunn got a job at Wayne’s Unisex, a Nashville barbershop. She went to clubs at night to “work tips for the band.” She did whatever she could, whether it was “do handstands” or “pinch cheeks,” to get customers to put money in the tip jars. “Then, finally, at the end of the night when everyone was good and drunk and half the people were gone, they would let me get up and sing two or three songs at 3 in the morning.”

Dunn was realistic about living in Nashville. “My plan was five years. If nothing happened, I was like, ‘Okay, I guess this isn’t the path I’m supposed to get on.’”

But nine months after she got to Nashville, one of her brothers was killed in a motorcycle accident, so she returned home to comfort her parents. “I’m a sucker for family.”

Starting at an open mic at Earnestine & Hazel’s, Dunn thought, “I need to meet people. If you build it, they’ll come.”

Mark Parsell stopped in one night and invited Dunn to check out his venue, South Main Sounds. Singing at one of Parsell’s Friday night shows, Dunn met Andrew Cabigao, who helped her get a job as social media representative at Mark Goodman’s MGP The Studio. While there, Dunn recorded her first album, Arkansas Line. Attending a songwriters workshop at Visible Music College, Dunn met Billy Smiley, founding member of White Heart, a Dove Award-nominated Christian rock group. He invited her to come to Nashville and maybe do an album at his studio, Sound Kitchen Studios.

She was two songs into the album when Covid hit. She released a couple of singles, but the album, I Guess That’s Life, wasn’t released until March 2023.

One of those songs, her popular “Barbershop,” is “just kind of talking about my dad’s barbershop and the type of customers we have. It’s just nostalgic.”

She also began going to workshops in and outside of Memphis in addition to bartending on Friday nights at South Main Sounds and performing with her band, Amber Rae Dunn and the Mulberries.

Dunn is thinking about a new album, but it might go in another direction. “Vocally, there’s a lot of soul and blues to my voice. But there’s also a lot of country. So, I don’t know. I feel like there’s a way to navigate the two.”

She’d like to mix “a Memphis sound” with her “traditional country sound.” 

When she’s not cutting records or cutting hair, Dunn, who is married to Justin Craven, is performing with her band around town. She’s also a guest host with Leon Griffin on Memphis Sounds on WYPL. 

Not forgetting her visual art chops, Dunn, who recently got into mosaics, currently is working on a mural at the Super 8 motel in West Memphis.

But Dunn is primarily sticking with songwriting, which she decided at 25 was going to be her journey. She told herself, “I don’t know what the outcome is, but I’m going to give it my all.” 

See Amber Rae Dunn live at Momma’s, 855 Kentucky Street, Wednesday, August 28th, 7 p.m., with Mario Monterosso.

Categories
Music Music Features

Mark Edgar Stuart: Never Far Behind

Mark Edgar Stuart (Photo: Jamie Harmon)

Some artists ponder making albums, wondering if they have enough material, enough musicians, or enough money. But when you’re a player on the level of bassist Mark Edgar Stuart, always staying busy with one project or another and forever mingling with other musos at gigs and in studios, albums sometimes just fall together. One recording session here, another there, and eventually the whole thing snowballs.

That’s how Stuart’s latest release, Never Far Behind, came about, as the singer-songwriter himself admits. “I didn’t really mean to put out another record,” he says. “I thought I was done for a little bit. And then this record just sort of happened.” 

Things like that tend to occur when you’re part of a crack studio band, as Stuart is — in this case at Bruce Watson’s Delta-Sonic Sound studio, where Stuart, as a member of the Sacred Soul Sound Section, plays bass behind artists like Elizabeth King on the Bible & Tire Recording Co. He can also be heard on secular Watson-related projects, some of which end up on Big Legal Mess Records. There’s always music cooking over at Delta-Sonic. And at times Stuart would show up only to find his own material on the menu. 

“Over the past two years, my buddies and I would get in the studio — Will [Sexton] and Bruce and that whole crew. We just slowly recorded tracks,” Stuart says. “I kind of felt like the universe produced it, you know? Will was the official producer, but every session was just last minute. Will would say, ‘Hey, what are you doing tomorrow? Bruce is in town, I’m here, let’s record some songs!’ And I’m on the phone going, ‘Well, who’s going to be the band?’ So it was pretty much whoever was available at any given moment. Then three months would go by, and Will would go, ‘Hey, we’re in the studio now working on your record! What are you doing?’ I’d say, ‘Oh, shit, I guess I’d better get down there!’”

That approach made Never Far Behind one of Stuart’s most collaborative efforts, including songs he co-wrote with Sexton, Jed Zimmerman, and, perhaps most strikingly, Greg Cartwright. “That loose approach made for some cool combinations,” says Stuart, “like when we recorded a song that me and Greg wrote together [‘We Better Call It a Day’]. I was like, ‘Greg, you in town?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Come over!’ So he played guitar, and Amy [LaVere] played bass, and Krista [Wroten] played on it, and Shawn Zorn, and Will played the keyboards. In the studio, it wound up becoming a duet. It was just real loose and cool. Amy was going to sing backup, and all of a sudden she sang the first verse and it was like, ‘Fuck it, a duet it is! Keep rolling!’”

That track draws on the wit and musicality of Stuart and Cartwright, two of the city’s finest songwriters, to create a kind of Eastern European lament over a failed romance, made all the more haunting by LaVere’s and Stuart’s swapped vocal lines, wistful mandolin, and atmospheric, Tom Waits-esque percussion. 

Yet another track, “The Ballad of Jerry Phillips,” grew from a would-be collaboration between Stuart and the song’s titular hero, son of Sun Records’ Sam Phillips. “I was hanging out with Jerry about a year and a half ago,” says Stuart, “and he said, ‘Man we’re gonna write a song together, and it’s gonna be called “Don’t Block Your Blessings.”’ 

“You know, we’re always blocking our blessings,” explains Stuart. “It’s like God’s trying to bless us, but we get in our own way. We fuck it up sometimes! Sometimes you’ve just got to let it be and just open yourself up to all the goodness. And Jerry and I were supposed to write that song together, but we couldn’t get anywhere with it. So I just turned around and wrote him a silly song about his own biography, and used the blocked blessings idea for the chorus. It came out perfect, you know?” The party atmosphere of the track, a Memphis cousin to “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” captures Phillips’ rock-and-roll spirit and epitomizes the loose recording style that shaped the entire album.

After many months of such hilarity, an album coalesced. As Stuart describes the process, “A year and a half later, Will was like, ‘Well, we’ve got 15 songs here. … Are you going to put a record out?’ And I was like, ‘I guess we should.’ It was really friendly, you know, and that was cool. I’m really happy with it, probably more so than anything I’ve done in a long time. Nothing against anything else I’ve done, but it’s just that cool! I think this could be it for a while. I think after this I’m just going to get into other things.” Could Stuart really mean it this time? We’ll believe it when we see it. 

Hear Mark Edgar Stuart at the 8750’ Barbecue and Music Festival in New Mexico on August 16th; the Fishstock Music Series in Wisconsin on August 25th; Thacker Mountain Radio Hour in Oxford, Mississippi, on September 5th; the Memphis Songwriter Series at the Halloran Centre in Memphis on September 12th; and the Mempho Music Festival on October 4th.

Categories
Music Music Features

The King’s Hometown Cuts

Having incorporated elements of Sun Studio, Phillips Recording Service, and Ardent Studios into the design of his own Southern Grooves studio, Matt Ross-Spang has an ear for history, so it’s no wonder that he’s become the go-to guy for mixing Elvis Presley. It started with his 2016 mixes of outtakes from Presley’s 1976 recordings at Graceland, and others followed, but his mixes on 2020’s From Elvis in Nashville compilation, stripping overdubs away from the raw tracks Presley recorded during marathon sessions in June of 1970, were Ross-Spang’s greatest feat, yielding such jaw-dropping tracks as the hard-choogling “Patch It Up.” 

Now, following a brief similar to that of the Nashville album, Ross-Spang has outdone himself on a new box set dropping just as Elvis Week commences this Friday, August 9th. With a nod to last month’s 70th anniversary of Presley’s first recordings for Sun Records, Sony Music/Legacy Recordings will release Memphis, a set of five CDs and/or two LPs produced by Ernst Jørgensen, collecting everything Presley recorded in his adopted hometown. 

Naturally, that includes Presley’s initial work with Sun Records’ Sam Phillips, though those foundational recordings were not tampered with (nor could they have been, not being multitracks), only given a thorough restoration and remastering. After the Sun era, there were three other distinct moments when Presley cut records in Memphis: in 1969 at American Sound Studio, in 1973 at Stax Records, and in 1976 during remote recording sessions the King set up in his own Jungle Room at Graceland. Also included is a live recording of Presley and his touring band at the Mid-South Coliseum in 1974. All of those recordings get the Ross-Spang treatment.

Working from digital copies of the original multitrack tapes offered him a glimpse into the recording techniques of a bygone age. “I was really excited to work on the Stax and American stuff simply because I’m a Memphis history nut,” he says, “and to get to hear those multitracks was really exciting. Working with Chips Moman at American, Elvis had a new band, a new producer, a new studio — everything was new. And yet Chips didn’t have nice technologies like RCA [in Nashville]. He committed all that music to four tracks, typically. And oftentimes he recorded the [reverb] chamber right onto the track. Or put the bass and the acoustic guitar on the same track. So it was really cool for me to open that up and see how much commitment he had, the vision he had from the beginning.”

Those American recordings yielded hits like “In the Ghetto” and “Suspicious Minds,” but the familiar versions, exploding with those distinctive string arrangements, are only hinted at here. The Memphis tracks reveal what preceded those orchestral flourishes: The sure-footed, house band Moman had assembled, aka The Memphis Boys, both soulful and rocking, playing their hearts out while the voice of Elvis rang out in the room. As Robert Gordon writes in the extensive liner notes, the new mixes put us “standing next to Elvis inside the recording studio, us and the basic band, hearing what he’s hearing.” 

Moreover, it’s a master class in minimalist songcraft, as one hears guitarist Reggie Young weave his lines in with those of keyboardists Bobby Woods and Bobby Emmons, the latter’s organ parts suggesting an orchestra, yet molded out of rawer sounds. Here and there are occasional overdubs, as in the remarkable “Don’t Cry, Daddy,” where Presley harmonizes with himself. As Ross-Spang explains, “We left in some of the overdubs that they did on the spot there [at American], but we didn’t use things that they went back to Nashville to do.” 

Ross-Spang didn’t have to mix these tracks entirely on his own. “It was really fun to get to work with Robert Gordon on this. I was sending him mixes and he was sending me notes back. And then producer Rob Santos and Ernst. Sometimes I can treat a mix too technically and not emotionally, but Ernst would give me very nontypical, emotional mix notes.” As the singer’s raw emotion explodes from the speakers, Memphis reveals Elvis to be one of the premier soul artists of his time. 

Categories
Music Music Features

Macrophonics About to Release Their First EP

Lawson Day, Margo Araoz, and Justin Weirich (Photo: Michael Donahue)

Cooper-Young Porchfest 2022 was the catalyst for Macrophonics, which features lead singer Lawson Day, lead guitarist Justin Weirich, and drummer Margo Araoz.

“It was the first Porchfest I’d been to,” Day says. He told Weirich, “We need to play this.”

The two met when they were in the seventh grade at DeSoto Central Middle School in Southaven, Mississippi. 

“I think when we really started hanging out more was in 10th grade,” Weirich says. “Physical science class.”

They would “talk about music and movies for an hour,” Day says.

“I wouldn’t really pay much attention in school. I was more focused on learning music and listening to different stuff,” Weirich says. 

Weirich was 11 when he bought his Fender Starcaster with leftover birthday money and $300 winnings from a family golf tournament.

Day began singing six years ago. He originally was “too lost in video games and things.” Also, he says, “I was terrified to hear my voice for a long time.”

He didn’t sing in front of an audience until he sang karaoke on a cruise. “I’m like, ‘I’m going to sing karaoke.’ And I did it every night on the cruise.”

“Get Down Tonight” by KC & the Sunshine Band was his first song. “I can remember being pretty nervous the first night. And then, I think, from every night onward, I didn’t really care.”

Araoz, who is from Birmingham, Alabama, joined the drumline in high school when she was about 10 years old. “Half the people in my school were in the band,” she says. “That was what the school was known for. I got to see a drumline play live. It was the first time I got to do this. I remember as a 9-year-old feeling the vibrations in my body. I said, ‘I need to do that. I’m put on this Earth to do that.’”

Araoz stopped playing drums and percussion when she was 14 to focus on her high school studies.

She majored in environmental science at North Carolina State University before moving to Memphis in 2021. She met Weirich when they worked together at Otherlands Coffee Bar. “I didn’t have a drum set when I moved here. I hadn’t played since I was 14. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s behind me. I’m no longer a drummer.’”

But, she says, “Justin encouraged me to buy a drum set and he just got the ball rolling for me to retry it.”

The trio got a practice space at Off the Walls Arts, “all hanging out playing music and having fun with it,” Weirich says. 

“It was such a cool experience,” Day says. “It felt like being in some kind of coming-of-age movie.”

Macrophonics at the practice space at Off the Wall Arts (Credit: Michael Donahue)

The name “Macrophonics” was Weirich’s brainchild. “I like the imagery of ‘macro,’ being ‘big,’ and ‘phonics’ — ‘big sound,’” he says.

They’ve described their music as “punk rock,” he says. “More the attitude for us in terms of musicality. We try to make songs that sound aggressive, but still kind of catchy.”

“Some of our songs, while they all have a bit of pop structure, sonically can be different,” Day adds. “They don’t fit what people think of as ’80s punk.’”

Their songs are “just do-it-yourself” with “a little absurdist humor,” Weirich says. “Because humor helps the reality go down smoother.”

They only had two originals when they signed up for their first Porchfest in 2023. Day describes their show as “overwhelming. It was me and Margo’s first show.”

Macrophonics at 2023 Cooper-Young Porchfest (Credit: Michael Donahue)

“I remember being very, very nervous. At that point I was kind of yelling instead of singing. I felt it was a controlled yell. But I was nervous as hell. Freaked out.”

Because it was hot, Day took off his shirt while he sang. He now sings shirtless most shows. “I didn’t want it to be a trademark, but I feel it kind of is.”

Their Porchfest experience was a success. “We wanted to keep doing it: ‘Okay. We’re pretty good at this. We can actually do this. Let’s keep it chugging along.’”

They played shows at Growlers, Hi Tone, Black Lodge, and “a lot of Lamplighter shows,” Weirich says.

Macrophonics is about to have its first EP mastered. They hope to release it “within the next month or so,” Weirich says.

Macrophonics: Justin Weirich, Margo Araoz, and Lawson Day (Credit: Michael Donahue)

Weirich doesn’t like to define their music genre. “I think we like keeping it vague like that. Who wants to be just a punk band? I feel like we have a lot more musical influences to branch into, more things we want to do with the band. For now, it’s more about the ethos of punk than necessarily the direct sound.”

Araoz also makes the band shirts. “I thrift the material for the T-shirts,” she says. “And I carve out my rubber stamps myself. Me and a friend.

“Environmental science shapes how I move through the world in every aspect. I did find a wholesale T-shirt company that uses a closed loop system for fabrics. There’s no waste being produced from any part of the company. They make new T-shirts out of old fibers.

“I wanted to make sure I was producing a product that can be broken down and reused again, not end up in a landfill in Ghana.”

Macrophonics played their second Cooper-Young Porchfest this April with “a lot more confidence going into it,” Day says. “I had a whole year of experience kind of flowing through my body.”

And, Weirich says, “We actually got our first encore. When they asked us, all we had to add on was ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ by the Ramones. We played it double time. We played it faster than the Ramones played it.” 

Macrophonics: Lawson Day, Margo Araoz, and Justin Weirich (Credit: Michael Donahue)