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.
