Few musicians are as familiar around town as the indefatigable Graham Winchester, the drummer/multi-instrumentalist who plays with the Sheiks, Jack Oblivian, Turnstyles, Devil Train, the MD’s, and a few others. Along the way, he founded Blast Habit Records with Lori McStay and her late husband, Jared, and is now producing other artists — like Cheyenne Marrs — in his home studio. Yet that last achievement, ironically enough, was only made possible by the quarantine years of Covid, when Winchester was forced to relax the furious pace of his gigging schedule and delve into himself more, writing and recording songs entirely on his own. Now the product of that time is emerging as an LP, Nobody Waters the Flowers, on Red Curtain Records, and Winchester’s gearing up for a record release show at Bar DKDC on March 22nd.
The album has been available on streaming platforms since December of 2022, and, given the album’s provenance, it’s understandable that he was impatient to get it out in the world well before it could exist on vinyl. For this record is a document of another time, the lockdown prompted by Covid and those trepidatious months that followed it, from 2020-2021.
“I think that in the isolation of the shutdown era of the pandemic, anything I was writing was for me. I didn’t even know if there was going to be a future of playing on stage with my friends anytime soon,” Winchester says now. “The songs came from an intimate, personal place and most of them were written and recorded between 2020 and 2021. And a lot of them come out of a place of self-reflection, and reflection about the world we live in. Not being able to be busy made me meditate and think about my own life more.”
Song titles like “Quietly,” “Coming Down,” and “I’ll Be Sad With You” evoke Winchester’s frame of mind at the time. “It was a necessary slowdown for me, personally,” he says. “Obviously, I wish there was no Covid and no isolation, but I made the most of it, I guess.”
Indeed, many families untouched by Covid directly found more quality time during lockdown, and the Winchesters were no different. “There’s a song on the album called ‘From the Start’ that I’m singing directly to my children. And that was inspired from being around my boys all day every day for the first time. Since they’d been born, I’d spent any waking moment I could with them, but I’m a busy guy, a busy dad. To be able to just sit in the backyard on a picnic blanket with my sons brought us so much closer to each other.”
Other songs are not as bound to Winchester’s own life, but spring from his penchant for the pure craft of writing. “‘Nobody Waters the Flowers’ is more of a story song,” Winchester says. “That’s me trying to get into that old country music storytelling zone. ‘Can’t You See?’ as well — sort of like The Band’s approach, or even Creedence Clearwater Revival’s.”
While the album does include the odd garage stomper like “Lab Rat,” listeners who largely associate Winchester with the amped-up sounds of Jack Oblivian or Turnstyles may be in for a surprise. Yet he’s actually been cultivating his quieter side for some time now, often leading songwriter nights at Bar DKDC. The way Winchester tells it, the less raucous approach is really at the core of his compositional style.
“I’ll usually even write Turnstyles songs on the acoustic in sort of a folky way,” he says. “And then I’ll bring it to Seth [Moody] and go, ‘I need help rocking this up.’ So we might put a more aggressive beat on it, he puts his distorted, Jaguar guitar surf-ness on it, and then it becomes this rock song. But when I approach songwriting I think, ‘Is this a song that can be played in any style? Do the lyrics and the chords stand up on their own, to where anybody can adapt it?’ I’m not a huge riff songwriter. I like to start with melodies and chords. And a lot of times I’m writing on piano. I’m really coming at it from a songwriting standpoint, where the song can be taken any kind of way.”