When the band Snowglobe was most active in the Memphis scene, back in the aughts, they had a run of albums and live shows that any group would envy, culminating in 2010’s Little More Lived In, their sixth release. After that, it seemed the core players — Nahshon Benford (trumpet, flute), Jeff Hulett (drums), Brad Postlethwaite (vocals, piano, guitar), Tim Regan (vocals, piano, guitar), and Brandon Robertson (bass) — went their separate ways. Yet there was never a definitive breakup, as their sporadic reunion shows through the teens proved. Indeed, though band members moved around and their live performances grew less frequent, they began recording new material soon after Little More Lived In, though those tracks would not emerge until 2016’s Snowglobe was released. By then, the band had grown to include Luke White on guitar and John Whittemore on pedal steel.
Now, with a similarly long gestation period, and extra time thrown in for health issues and a pandemic, their eighth and ninth releases, The Fall (an LP) and The Climb (an EP), will both drop this Friday, courtesy of Regan’s Nine Mile Records, based in Austin, Texas.
And while many bands now assemble whole albums from parts recorded in the members’ home studios, these new tracks were generally created the old-fashioned way, with the band convening in a studio. “This happened over plus or minus five years, maybe?” says Regan. “Like, we’re all always writing stuff, and we’re all buddies. So we would just get a weird text from Brad saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got the studio booked for this time, let’s go do something!’ Then I’d come to town and whoever was around would go in there and start messing on stuff. It was all done in Memphis. I mean, I probably did a handful of overdubs from my house, but most of the stuff was cut in a studio with engineers.”
Those engineers, Regan is quick to point out, were almost always Toby Vest and Pete Matthews of High/Low Recording, though some recordings were done at American Recording Studio when Vest and Matthews operated in that space, before renovating a dedicated building of their own. As Regan explains, working with professional recordists helps the band focus. “I think one of the benefits of getting in the studio is not coming back to find out that Posty [Postlethwaite] put 68 tracks on something. Which happens a lot. He’ll put everything and the kitchen sink in there. So it helps to be working with Pete and Toby and Kevin [Cubbins], who will tell you, ‘We don’t really need six guitars on this.’”
That said, the new tracks are, like much of Snowglobe’s output, rich with layers of ear candy. Though often grounded by chords on an acoustic guitar or piano, the arrangements fill out from there with all manner of harmonies, synthesizers, or electric guitar riffs and hooks. That’s partly a result of the many cameos by friends of the band, invited into the studio sessions over the years. There are so many appearances like this that Regan and the band lost track of who plays what.
“Talking with the guys, it’s like, ‘Who played on this? I don’t remember.’ That’s kind of how it goes. There are two or three where you can tell it’s Paul Taylor playing drums. I think I’m playing drums on one, and Jeff’s on a lot of stuff. It’s just whoever was there, whatever needed to happen.” Other guest players, according to the press release, include Mark Edgar Stuart, Ken Stringfellow, Jonathan Kirkscey, Krista Wroten, and Jana Misener.
“There’s a song of mine on the EP called ‘Need to Know’ that I actually got Kat Brock from Dixie Dirt to sing because I realized that I’d written and recorded it out of my vocal range. We said, ‘Oh, well, we can either re-record this or get someone who can sing better than me to sing it.’ So I called up Kat for a favor and she knocked it out — it sounds damn cool.”
Yet Regan makes it clear that what sounds the coolest to him is a song that stands as a milestone of sorts in the Snowglobe catalog for guitarist Luke White. As the Memphis Flyer reported in 2019, White had a seizure that year that revealed a cancerous brain tumor. While he’s been on a roller coaster of medical treatments ever since, he’s mostly hopeful about that process. “He’s in pretty decent spirits,” says Regan, adding that “his song ‘Willow Tree’ is so damn beautiful. And it’s also the first one that Luke’s written [with Clay Qualls] for us. Not that he hasn’t been a big part of our recordings before, but with this one, he brought it to the table and said, ‘I’ve got a song.’ We were all like, ‘Let’s do it!’ It’s his first writing credit with Snowglobe.”
