You can trace the shifts in Chris Milam’s songwriting style through the type of guitar he’s opted to play over the course of his three albums. And music fans who’ve come to appreciate the more sparse Americana of his first two albums, Kids These Days and Meanwhile, will hear the change immediately when they play his latest album, Orchid South. The songs mine an anthemic, power pop vein that he’s hinted at before, but never embraced to this degree. And of course, with power pop comes the sound of electric guitars. In this case, the triple guitar team of Milam, Steve Selvidge, and Luke White.
Electric guitar has always been in Milam’s toolbox, but never in quite this way. “In the lead up to making Kids These Days, and then touring that album in 2017, I was playing solo electric. There’s a lot of acoustic guitar on there, too, but the main guitar you hear me playing on that album is a hollow body, Gibson-sounding, reverbed-out electric. So yeah, there was a couple years there where I was doing a fair amount of electric playing — in solo shows. But then I shifted to acoustic surrounding Meanwhile.”
That sophomore effort, released in 2020, was a sparse masterpiece of which Milam said at the time, “I inadvertently wrote a good album for quarantine, honestly. It’s basically 10 different versions of how we deal with loss, or survive being in limbo.” Along with that pensive mood came pensive music, with acoustic guitar at its foundation.
Now that’s all changed.
“For this one, I don’t know, maybe this is impolitic to say,” he says, “but I’ve just been bored to tears by so many singer-songwriter albums” with acoustic guitar at their heart. “I just was like, I think that you can discuss weighty topics and still make an album that is fun and dynamic and that people actually want to listen to.”
And that’s a fair description of Orchid South, which seems custom-made to burst from radio speakers while blasting down the highway on a hot summer night. “I’ve always been a big fan of power pop from the 1970s and alt-rock of the 1990s,” he says. “That was the stuff that I was listening to when I first picked up a guitar and when I first really fell in love with music. That was really the soundtrack of my adolescence.”
Yet it wasn’t until recently that Milam, now 40, felt he could address those years with the proper tone and voice. And the tone, he knew, would have to be full of jangle and crunch. Who better to bring that sound than Selvidge and White?
“Most of the lead guitar is Steve, and all the 12-string Rickenbacker guitar is Luke, kind of on the left channel. With Steve on the right. I added rhythm guitar, for the most part.” Moreover, the album gains its immediacy and energy by virtue of having largely been tracked live, with the players all in the same room. “At the heart of the album, the core band was Shawn Zorn on drums, Mark Stuart on bass, and then me and Luke. And then Steve came in for an overdub day, and the horns [Art Edmaiston and Marc Franklin] did an overdub day. And that was pretty much it.”
The end product is a big, radio-friendly sound that conjures up the longings and impulsiveness of adolescence. And ironically, though Meanwhile came out during the onset of Covid, this album is even more of a product of that time. “A good chunk of the album was written during quarantine,” Milam says. “And I was probably going a little stir crazy and wanting to be loud and kick out the jams.”
Yet he was also applying his more finely-honed writerly chops to an earlier version of himself, the young man listening to alternative radio in the ’90s. “When I was a teenager, growing up in Memphis, I was listening to 96X [FM],” he recalls. ““Hey Jealousy’ was one of the first songs I learned on guitar, and there’s a lot of Gin Blossoms influence on this album.” But there was more to evoking his youth than turning his amp up to 11.
“My earlier stuff had been more in the Americana or folk realm, and so the lyrics were a little bit more of that narrative style,” reflects Milam. “But when I was a teenager, I didn’t really experience things in that way. It was all very heightened emotions, very amplified feelings, and everything was just evocative and impressionist. That was the type of writing I did when I was that age and I wanted to get back to that again, but hopefully do a better job on it. Instead of narrative lyrics, I wanted stuff that had more freshness, or was a little bit more evocative. That makes emotional sense, even though it doesn’t necessarily make literal sense.”
Chris Milam is in the midst of a national solo tour now, but will celebrate the release of Orchid South with a full band at Railgarten on Saturday, August 10th, with Alexis Grace opening.
