Tag: Memphis power pop

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Music Record Reviews

J.D. Reager Brings a New Vision to Light with Latest LP

Though this latest is his third album, J.D. Reager’s latest, Where Wasn’t I?, leaps from the turntable like a sizzling, fresh-off-the-grill debut. After all, it’s been ten year since his last solo release. Yet perhaps we ought to celebrate third albums more, assuming OK Computer, London Calling, Electric Ladyland, and Led Zeppelin III qualify as milestone works. Let’s say Where Wasn’t I? (Back to the Light) is Reager’s own bid to enter that esteemed company.

The larger point is that this really hangs together as an album, a unified body of songs and moods, despite springing from a variety of disparate recording sessions and venturing in multiple stylistic directions — much like Led Zeppelin III, in fact. When kickoff “Diane” explodes from the speakers, it sets a standard for what’s to come: perfectly raw-yet-crafted pop gems. And, as gems go, “Diane” is a stomper, a soaring power pop steamroller given wings with seraphic background voices.

(Credit: album art by Jason Pulley; layout and design by Graham Burks)

Speaking of voices, Reager is in better voice than ever, keeping his trademark vulnerability but now adding a more determined tenor to it. “There’s no reason to shy away!” he cries out in track two. While unique, Reager’s voice might arguably be compared to Bob Mould’s, in terms of feeling equally at home (and authentic) in a soaring post-punk power pop anthem or a screaming punk rager like “Stop Staring.”

But keep listening, and soon the fourth track will summon echoes of Rick Danko. “I need help from a friend,” Reager sings with a quaver, and it may bring a chill to many a listener. “Through all we recover/The dead friends and lovers/What we discovered/Was that it meant everything.”

Later, you’ll hear traces of Thunderclap Newman. But whatever the echoes, Reager’s uncanny ear for a rock arrangement ties the tracks together, backed by a host of A-list guest artists who always step in with the perfect part. Each pop gem fits together like clockwork.

Though Reager’s often been known to collaborate, he notes on his own Back to the Light podcast that the 2020 quarantine helped him take that to a new level. “I’ve always had a little home studio or project studio of some kind; previously, I would just invite folks over to the studio. But under quarantine, with everybody getting into home recording and file sharing, I caught the wave at exactly the right time, and everybody said yes.”

As Reager told Commercial Appeal’s Bob Mehr in August of last year, “There is a bit of a story to the record, about my recovery, and in a way, finding myself in the midst of all the madness in the world.

“The pandemic also created an availability for other people to work with me who normally wouldn’t have. I don’t know that nailing down people like Steve Selvidge [of the Hold Steady] or Dave Catching [of Eagles of Death Metal] would have been possible if everyone was as busy as they normally would be.” Beyond those players on the international stage, the LP hosts a legion of local luminaries, often grounded by the Midtown powerhouse, John Bonds, the drummer formally known as Bubba. Mark Edgar Stuart, John Whittemore, Paul Taylor, Jeff Hulett, Jeremy Stanfill, Jeremy Scott, and Graham Burks also make appearances.

Those players help bring a rock classicism to this project that gives the tracks a timeless feel. But while the guitars might channel a ’70s/’90s timewarp, and the synths the ’80s, this is most strikingly an album for now. Something in Reager’s frank delivery doesn’t let us forget that.

J.D. Reager (Credit: Jennifer Brown Reager)

That may be because the album grew out of a major time of struggle and growth for the artist. As he told Mehr last year, in 2019 “I finally got into therapy and quit drinking – now I’m over two years alcohol free. But then the pandemic hit and I lost my job. It came to where I didn’t have anything else to do but work on music and podcasts all day.”

Yet all backstory aside, coming to grips with his own personal demons seems to have pulled out some of the songwriter’s most emotional work. It shows in his delivery, but that’s taken up a notch by the delivery of another, one Ross Johnson, who makes two cameos on this LP. His trademark self-excoriating humor (is self-directed schadenfreude a thing?) proves to be a perfect foil for the slamming sounds of Reager’s band(s), especially on “Philanderer,” which hits like a pounding outtake from Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk (that’s a compliment). And Johnson touches a very personal nerve when ruminating on his father’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (“PTSD Story”), stemming from the World War II era — eerily reminiscent of what this author’s own father experienced.

As crazy-quilt as all this may seem, the best approach is just to listen. Listen to the well-crafted prose of Johnson the wordsmith, and the well-crafted power pop of Reager, and you’ll hear the album as a seamless whole, offering many flavors of regret, passion, and maybe even redemption.

“What does it mean to be a best friend?” Reager asks with childlike wonder in the album’s closer, “Wore Me Down.” But, as with most of the album, the raw nerves and sensibilities of youth are soon met with more adult concerns moments later in the song: “There are times when I can’t sleep next to you/And I thought about running ’round/But you wore me down.” From there, the song leaps along like a go-cart over the landfill: perfect power pop, complete with trash and shadows.

Songs from the new album and more can be heard at the Back to the Light Fall Turnout, Saturday, November 5 at 2 p.m., Wiseacre Brewing Company, featuring these bands:
2 pm – Loose Opinions
3 pm – Rosey
4 pm – J.D. Reager
5 pm – S p a c e r
6 pm – The Subteens

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Music Record Reviews

40 Watt Moon Carries the Torch of Classic FM Pop

Imagine you’re listening to the radio as you drive through the Bluff City, when a song jumps out of your speakers, all driving guitar riffs and pounding drums, a perfect power pop epiphany, and you think, “Where did this come from? Tom Petty is no longer with us. Matthew Sweet, maybe?” But then a voice, not as sardonic or cutting as Petty’s, nor as sweet as Sweet’s, sings, “Well lately, I’ve been tryin’ to change, but I never seem to get that far/And maybe you can burn it down like another little shooting star.” This is another band altogether: Memphis’ own 40 Watt Moon.

If it seems like hyperbole to compare the group to such greats, just have a listen to the title song from 40 Watt Moon’s latest, I Hope the World Lasts for You. They’ve perfected a blend of that now-endangered genre one might call Classic FM Pop — not quite classic rock, and certainly not hair metal, but a more upbeat, propulsive flavor of power pop that thrives on driving riffs, harmonies, and wry-yet-sentimental lyrics evoking relationships past and present.

The band wears its influences on its collective sleeve, with classic Memphis self-deprecation. “Kind of like Tom Petty, but not as good,” they quip on their Bandcamp page, but that’s unfair to what they’ve accomplished here. A lot of the emotional authenticity comes from singer/guitarist Kevin Pusey’s delivery — a more hapless everyman than Petty, to be sure, but no less trenchant or pithy in his observations of everyday life and the ways people escape it.

Super low, that’s where you’ll go
Hiding secrets everyone knows
Find a pen at the back of the bar
But, these love letters won’t get you too far
Out of time, on this rocket ship
Lately I’m so tired of all this
Nothing’s real or meant to last
And it’s catchin’ up with you so fast
— “One and Lonely”

He’s backed by a band that blends driving rock and sparkling textures with a disciplined feel for arrangements. These players — drummer Vince Hood, bassist Michael Duncan, and guitarist Chip Googe (senior account executive at the Memphis Flyer) — have an almost architectural approach to arrangements, always playing at the service of the song. That’s equally true for the feelgood opener, “Everytime I Fall” (reminiscent of the Face’s classic, “Ooh La La”), the pummeling “Over You,” the lilting “Madeline,” and everything in between.

It doesn’t hurt that the pounding rhythms and shimmering guitars are given a bit of extra panache via Toby Vest’s production at High/Low Studio. Nor does guest keyboardist Rick Steff, typically heard with Lucero, hurt the overall effect, bringing pitch-perfect piano flourishes or organ pads as needed.

DJs take note: the opening scenario is not just a daydream. You need to play this album on the radio. It was meant to be blasted over the airwaves, carrying news of love and heartbreak, with ringing guitars, across the Mid-South and beyond.

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Music Music Blog

The Becomers: Time Warp’s Power Pop Heroes

The Becomers (Photo by Graham Burks)

The band at last Saturday’s Time Warp Drive-In certainly lived up to its name. Seemingly out of nowhere, they simply became. Where at first only scattered musical gear was strewn in front of the concession stand at the Malco Summer Quartet, suddenly a band manifested itself. True, one of their songs mentions “beaming me up and beaming me down,” and with that clue alone, this reporter was intrigued. How exactly did they become?

I donned my sleuth’s hat, but all my years of investigative music journalism were of no avail. The band, shrouded in mystery, simply materialized at the golden hour, played a short, tight set, and were gone, leaving the gathered Earthlings only to wonder at what just happened.

Their SoundCloud page reveals precious little, its profile explaining only that the band consists of 7-year-old Seba, 12-year-old Holland, and 10-year-old G3. These reported ages were the first clue that something didn’t add up, that something unearthly was at work in this musical ensemble. For their playing was not a mere children’s curiosity, a slapdash, charming exercise in naivete. Rather, this was the sound of advanced beings well-versed in the niceties of rocking out.

The Becomers play before a screening of E.T. Note fuzzy faux alien in milk crate. (Photo by Alex Greene)

Deciding their deceptively juvenile ages were the result of traveling at near-light speeds before returning to Earth, I simply took in the power of their performance. There was a quick introductory song by the duet Breeze, featuring G3 on drums and friend Noah on bass. Then, as Holland sang and wielded her Gibson SG with aplomb, Seba’s bass and G3’s drums locked in like a locomotive and they were off, delivering a fine rendition of Nena’s “99 Red Balloons,” aka “99 Luftballoons.”

That set the tone for a short, sharp mix of covers and originals that mined a similar vein of power pop marked with an ’80s edge. Even “Immigrant Song,” Led Zeppelin’s dinosaur rock chestnut, took on new meanings when played by a trio of bass, drums, and distorted ukulele, and delivered by instrument-swapping singers with a combined age of 29.

The real gems of the evening were the group’s originals. Their “Get Get Get It Going” is a fine mod anthem on par with the spiky punch of early works by The Who or The Creation, with just a touch of the Kink’s “Come On Now.”

Another uptempo number, “Energy,” had the audience singing along with gusto. And what an audience it was: When Time Warp co-curator Mike McCarthy seemed to half-jokingly imply that this was the best crowd turnout for any pre-movie warm-up band at the monthly event, I turned around to see that he was not joking at all. A crowd of dozens was gathered around the band area, cheering them on.

Among the crowd, and offering the occasional assist to G3, was another being, G2, who looked suspiciously like Graham Burks, better known for his role in local bands like Pezz, Sweet Knives, and Loose Opinions.

One original song The Becomers played, also available online, “Satellites Are Spinning Around the Earth,” was a perfect set-up for the evening’s first film, 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, directed by Steven Spielberg. That song, of course, featured lyrics about beaming this way and that, in the manner of space-faring, sentient beings who can simply become at will. We can only hope that more frequent visitations on other local stages will “become a thing.”

*Full disclosure: G3 may or not be Graham Burks III, a piano student of the author’s.

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Music Record Reviews

Your Academy Schools You in Memphis Power Pop with New Album

For a certain age group in this region, the two album titles from blind to blue (Craven Hill, 1999) and Another Vivid Scene (Craven Hill, 2002) are sure to conjure up memories. Those were the two albums by the Memphis band crash into june, and for a time it seemed they’d make many more, but it was not to be.

Yet the words “another vivid scene” find their way into a release that just dropped in the past week, Your Academy. That’s also the band name of the latest project by crash into june’s founding member and bassist, Johnny Norris. He recruited guitarist Chris Gafford and drummer Dan Shumake, both of whom appeared on from blind to blue. Since leaving crash into june, Gafford and Shumake had lately been seen in Stephen Burns’ most recent reincarnation of The Scruffs.

As that pedigree alone might suggest, this is unabashed power pop, full of huge guitar riffs, chiming chords, layered background vocals, and soaring leads. But it’s not quite the jump-cut rush of The Scruffs, opting instead for the broader, open sounds of Big Star or the Raspberries.

Such territory demands a great vocalist, of course. Enter Memphis native Brandon McGovern, whose band, Madison Treehouse, often played with crash into june in the ’90s. He also had a solo record, 2002’s Pala-Dora, from that era. Later he backed the renowned power popper Dwight Twilley on guitar. McGovern went on to release three other LPs: Bowling Alleys, BBQ Joints & Billiard Halls, Pet Food, and Signal Heights.

Finally, running with their Big Star-centricity, the group also recruited Adam Hill, who has not only produced many national and local bands, but assisted Ardent Studios founder, the late John Fry, with locating, transferring and mixing long-lost Big Star and Chris Bell tracks for inclusion on box sets released in the early 2000s. He does double duty here, playing lead guitar in and engineering the recording.

And the polish of this record bears the mark of one who worked with John Fry. Between the rich, jangly-but-chunky recording, the tight, rocking band, and the natural bent of the songwriting, this is a great addendum to the annals of Memphis Power Pop.
Larry Hsia/Sierra Hotel Images

Your Academy

Because of the depth of the talent they’re drawing on, a listener can forgive the overt wearing of the power pop emblems on their sleeve. One song, “Heaven Knows,” has the line, “Nobody can dance to the tortured voice of Christopher Branford Bell,” then goes on to a chorus of “You drink red wine and sipping yellow pills/You’re guided by voices and you’re built to spill.”

Happily, these similes can be enjoyed at face value, embedded in the song’s mood, rising above in-jokes. But clearly these are proud power pop nerds who revel in the sounds that came before them. Another song, “Better Alone Together,” a song about the tumultuous relationship between Alex Chilton and Lesa Aldridge during the recording of Big Star’s Third, inspired by Aldridge’s quote about their relationship in Rich Tupica’s There Was a Light: The Cosmic History of Chris Bell and the Rise of Big Star: “We did better alone together.” All backstories aside, the number also happens to be one of the album’s catchiest, propelling itself along in a manner befitting #1 Record more than Third.

The quieter “Sunrise” may be the greatest track here, evoking the folksier side of Big Star, even as it develops Your Academy’s own unique sound. That’s a sound very rooted in the early- to mid-’70s, but ultimately the group forges its own identity, a kind of band out of time, purveying the Platonic ideal of power pop.

There are other Memphis influences, naturally. “Talent Party” features bass by John Lightman (Big Star) and keys from Rick Steff (Lucero), and is an homage to Memphis garage bands of the 1960s, inspired by Ron Hall’s book, Playing for a Piece of the Door: A History of Garage & Frat Bands in Memphis, 1960-1975. Other songs touch on Elvis and the Bluff City’s sense of its own importance, or lack thereof.

That last sentiment is ironic, even as Your Academy pulls together some of the city’s most astute masters of power pop to revel in that style’s sense of celebration and, yes, fun. It’s great to hear that these sounds aren’t being forgotten, but live on in new and inventive ways no one could have predicted. 

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Music Music Features

The Scruffs: Rare Seventies Tracks See Light of Day

So many Memphis musicians have experienced the “Big in Japan” syndrome, though many would need to insert “Europe,” instead. It’s the phenomenon where relative unknowns here are embraced overseas for their groundbreaking vision, their refusal to bow to trends, their determination to follow their own muse. One expression of this is the perennial European (or Japanese or Australian) tour. Suddenly, local nobodies are treated to applause and paying audiences for a few weeks or months, only to return to sleepy, indifferent crowds on the home front.

The same dynamic is at play with overseas record labels. One case in point: Mono-Tone Records, based in Nice, France, who may be doing more to preserve the history of the Memphis underground than any label around today. Their 2018 release of archival tracks by the Klitz, Rocking the Memphis Underground 1978-1980, is the definitive chronicle of the city’s first punk group in their heyday. This year, the label’s done it again with Teenage Tragedies 1974-1979, a collection of previously unreleased gems by the Scruffs that they’ve released in collaboration with Pop Supérette Records.

Alas, the Scruffs are known and loved by only a few local scenesters these days, despite having forged a sound and attitude that has aged very well. Rick Branyan, the group’s original bassist, thinks it may go back to a problem the band had even then: They’ve always been hard to pigeonhole.

“We cut our first album at Ardent with John Fry in ’77, and released it early ’78, I think,” he recalls. “It had a few songs with a very slight punk edge to them, and because of that we were misclassified as punks here. We were slated to warm up for the Sex Pistols. It didn’t happen, but people thought we were a good match. Really, we weren’t punk at all; we were poppy as hell. But because our songs were short, and we didn’t have a hundred guitar solos and long jams, we were ‘punk.’ Our album was well reviewed in New York, so we went up there, played CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City, and all the places, but in New York we had the opposite problem: We weren’t punk enough. So we were too pop for New York and too punk for Memphis.”

That’s not a bad characterization of their sound. Choppy, jangly guitars cascade over pounding rhythms and Steve Burns’ attitude-laden vocals, complete with irresistible hooks and background harmonies. Though Memphis had already bred its own style of power pop, with Big Star and others, this was a new sound that would also be tagged with that label. The mid- to late-’70s brought a new power pop, epitomized by the Knack and similar hitmakers. But this didn’t sit well with most Memphis crowds at the time.

“It was real hard to get gigs,” recalls Branyan. “The Scruffs had to leave town because we literally couldn’t get gigs. And when we did get them, we would have the same 20 people show up and the rest would just hate us. Everybody wanted to hear cock rock or ZZ Top-type stuff or mellow-out type stuff. Club owners hated it. They’d just pull the plug on you.”

Still, the Scruffs found a niche, and Burns still fronts revamped versions of the band to this day. Their debut, Wanna Meet the Scruffs?, was praised by uber-critic Robert Christgau at the time: “A middle-period Beatles extrapolation in the manner of Big Star (another out-of-step Memphis power-pop group on a small, out-of-step Memphis label), it bursts with off harmonies, left hooks, and jolts of random energy. The trouble is, these serve a shamelessly and perhaps permanently post-adolescent vision of life’s pain, most of which would appear to involve gurls [sic].”

The new Mono-Tone collection digs even deeper, with side A devoted to more Ardent tracks cut before the debut, and side B comprising post-debut tracks cut at Shoe Studios. They’re all of a piece, revealing a band that hit the ground running with a fully realized sound as early as 1974. Still, there’s a downside to all this recognition coming from elsewhere. Teenage Tragedies 1974-1979, released in France this June, sold out quickly. The label assures fans that a new pressing will be available in December, but you’ll need to visit your favorite record store and request an order from the distributor, Forced Exposure. But for those in search of the city’s true innovators, it’s well worth the legwork.

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Music Music Features

Van Duren: Revisiting Memphis’ Golden Age of Power Pop

CREDIT: Seth Tiven

Van Duren isn’t resting on his laurels, though he has accumulated over 40 years’ worth of them since releasing his first power-pop masterpiece — Are You Serious? — in 1978. That album and its follow-up have enjoyed renewed interest of late, especially since the 2019 release of the film Waiting: The Van Duren Story, made by Australian super-fans who became obsessed with Duren’s Memphis-grown, post-Big Star approach to the perfect pop gem.

Now, after international reviews of both the film and Duren’s performances to support it, the attention has culminated in reissues of both of Duren’s late-1970s works, fully remastered and with new liner notes, to be released by Omnivore Recordings next month.

Seth Tiven

Van Duren, circa 1970s.

But when I speak to Duren about all this, the first thing he wants to talk about is the new single he and Vicki Loveland released digitally in late August. “A Place of No Place” features Duren’s Stonesy guitars under Loveland’s angry, impassioned singing of lines like: “Tell us we’re unpatriotic/We question despicable deeds. … You’re keeping children in cages/Doubling down on your hateful speech.” Recorded at Royal Studios, its flourishes of soul horns give it an unmistakably Memphis sound.

Memphis Flyer: The political/social commentary song seems like a new direction for you.

Van Duren: Yeah, maybe so. Previously, on the Loveland Duren records, it’s been more about familial things. Family and abuse, things like that. And there are a lot of love songs or out-of-love songs, which has been my thing for decades. But yeah, the new single’s very topical and gets more so every day.

We had a song on our last record, from 2016, called “Not Allowed in the House Anymore.” And it’s exactly the same theme, really. Nothing changes, it’s only gotten worse.

MF: Was that song and the others from the upcoming Loveland Duren album influenced by last year’s tours, where you promoted the film Waiting by revisiting your early work?

VD: Touring behind the film last year in Australia, we went back to those songs from 40 years ago. And that forced me to go back and play keyboards again, which I hadn’t done since 2013, when Vicki and I started working together on records. So that opened up a different avenue to writing that I had kinda shut down. Because I didn’t want those things, seven or eight years ago, to start sounding like the things I’d done 40 years ago. Well, when it came to this one, since I’d been playing piano on that tour, it opened me up to playing piano. I hadn’t forgotten.

MF: I imagine it’s been emotional, seeing the old stuff come out. Especially the second album, Idiot Optimism, which was simply shelved.

VD: The first album was released in 1978 and it actually sold well for a new independent label. The album came out in March, and we toured in the spring and into the summer. And the experience of playing live for great crowds in the northeast really made me want to do less ballads and acoustic-oriented things, and a lot more band-oriented things. So we started recording in October 1978, and it took until January of 1980 before we had the thing completely done. At that point, the label had changed names and a couple of the original owners had left. I was hanging on for dear life. Everybody except for me and one other guy had converted to Scientology.

The pressure was on to go to the mission and take out bank loans for unbelievable amounts of money to pay for courses and all that. I just put ’em off and tried to be nice and buy some time. When the record was mixed, I got a cassette of the mixes and I walked. I just left. One thing led to another over the years, and then Omnivore did the soundtrack ablum for the film last year. It was a natural progression, and we decided to do these records right. I had a heavy involvement in everything this time. It’s hard to believe that, 42 years after the fact, these two records are coming out like they were supposed to. Jeff Powell mastered it for vinyl, and the fidelity is just astonishing. I can hear all my mistakes.

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Music Music Blog

New Memphis Colorways: A Man, A Band, A Plan

Paul Taylor, aka New Memphis Colorways

Memphians not hip to specific personnel in the local music scene may have seen the name New Memphis Colorways pop up in their feeds from time to time, and wondered just what that could be. A man? A band? A plan? [Panama? – ed.]

Actually, it’s all three. First of all, it’s the man otherwise known as Paul Taylor, a self-taught multi-instrumentalist who grew up in the midst of many Memphis music luminaries, including his own father, legendary singer and guitarist Pat Taylor. “And I learned most of my songcraft from Richard Orange,” Taylor adds. “He was very much a second dad to me.”

Orange, of course, first came to Memphis as leader of the band Zuider Zee, whose recent release of archival material from 1972-74, Zeenith, was dubbed one of 2018’s best reissues by Rolling Stone magazine. That’s especially relevant because echoes of that era, albeit with some serious reconfiguring, are all over New Memphis Colorway’s new album, The Music Stands., to be celebrated at a release party on Friday, January 31 at The Green Room at Crosstown Concourse. It will simultaneously become available on all streaming services.

“The first two tracks are my weird modern take on Memphis power pop,” says Taylor, “and then it shifts to songwriter/acoustic mode for a couple songs, and then a couple of art rock instrumentals. Then the last song is a reflective ballad.”

While it’s easy to lay claim to the territory first mapped out by Big Star, Zuider Zee, or the Hot Dogs back in the day, the proof comes as soon as the proverbial needle drops. (Someone please put this out on vinyl!) “Impossible Goals” revs up like the Clash, then hits you with unexpected riffs and the kind of unaffected, straight-arrow singing you might have thought was extinct.

One astounding feat is the way Taylor’s voice has hints of Alex Chilton, even as his songwriting has more echoes of Chris Bell. And yet the music also could sit comfortably next to much later touchstones, like the Posies, in all its unexpected harmonic and rhythmic turns.

“I don’t want to be super-referential to the past,” notes Taylor. “I hold in my head, daily, the Sam Phillips quote, ‘If you’re not doing something different, you’re not doing anything at all.’ I do make study of older music, and I think it’s critical that you learn it note for note. I’m transcribing jazz solos or learning Steve Cropper or Teenie Hodges or Reggie Young, or the drumming of Gene Chrisman and Al Jackson Jr. These are my heroes. But I don’t deliberately set about making music that shows that off. At the end of the day, I try to throw that away and just let the songs come out.”

And come out they do, as some notable musicians, having heard advance tracks, have remarked on.

“Paul Taylor’s new record, under the nom de plume New Memphis Colorways, is like looking through a glass phosphorescently. Truly an artist of wizardry, sailing uncharted waters of sound, colour and light. An otherworldly adventure in melodic transcendence. Not to be missed.” – Richard Orange

Okay, that was from his “second dad” and mentor. But other songwriters have weighed in as well. Chuck Prophet, with whom Taylor has worked extensively in the past, said, “Paul has really come into his own here. Although the songs are deceptively simple, there’s a world inside each track. These little musical creations are killer. They will creep up on you. They’ll reach out and grab you. It’s all very soulful. And a little magical too. Kinda proggy. Kind of indie. And utterly impossible to describe. I dig it.”

And one of Memphis’ more literary songwriters, Cory Branan, had this to say: “Paul’s out of his damn mind. He conjures more original musical ideas in 12 bars than most musicians do with entire albums. The Music Stands. finds him, as always, accessing strangenesses and welding the unexpected with a singular vision.”

One striking thing about the record is that it doesn’t sound, like so many records, like the product of tinkering. It has the impact of a full-on rock band. Which would seem to answer the second query as to what exactly New Memphis Colorways is. But if you assumed it was a band from, say 1979, playing on these tracks, you’d be wrong. Nearly all the instruments were played by Taylor. New Memphis Colorways is a band in a man.

“I grew up listening to a lot of Todd Rundgren and a lot of Prince, and people like that who made records where they played everything. It’s what I’ve been doing since I was literally seven years old, when my dad was helping me four-track songs, so it seemed like a natural thing for me to do. The next record I make, I would hopefully play an acoustic guitar and hire a band around me, and do it live, like a lot of Memphis records that I love were. This one is more of a D.I.Y. affair, which is fun.”

Nevertheless, the album release show will have a full band. “I have musicians that are just incredible,” says Taylor. “Hopefully we’ll be playing more shows.”

Add that to a long list of releases, projects and entities with which Taylor is associated, much of which he releases on his own label, the Owl Jackson Jr. Record Company. “New Memphis Colorways is my brand,” Taylor clarifies. “And it’s all encompassing. Anybody who knows me knows I do a bunch of different things. The EP I released previously [Old Forest Loop] was drastically different from this, and the next one will probably be drastically different.” Still other eclectic expressions come in the form of an album of experimental instrumentals that exist only under the hashtag #nmcvignettes, and an even earlier online release, The Old Forest Trail.

The diversity of these varied projects is a delight in its own right, and ultimately shows that, at heart, New Memphis Colorways is a plan. “I’m a huge fan of skateboard art and graphic design in general,” explains Taylor. “If you were to release a skateboard, it might have different color combinations and variations on the same graphic: colorways. The whole concept of New Memphis Colorways is that it’s new combinations of ideas.” In this newest work, one finds the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach of the ’70s alive and well, and definitely kicking. It’s an approach that suits New Memphis Colorways just fine.