INTERVIEW: The Road to Solid Sound: Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band
06/26-06/28 @ Mass MoCA, North Adams MA
Photo by Justin Murphy
“It was a lot of talking, not-talking and a lot of feeling like, ‘How did I get to a place where I’m driving around with one of my songwriting heroes who is treating me like a peer and giving me the respect that he feels like I deserve?’”
Ryan Davis, the singer-songwriter behind Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band, has spent the majority of his career as a bit of a musical nomad. During the 2010s, he played in the country-leaning indie rock band State Champion as well as the noise punk band Tropical Trash, gathering a bevy of musical collaborators and a smattering of critical acclaim along the way.
After those projects had run their course, he started learning new instruments and exploring new sounds, lending his talents to the instrumental avant-garde project Equipment Pointed Ankh all while working on songs of his own. Those songs were eventually collected to create his debut album under the moniker Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band, Dancing on the Edge.
“It was designed to be a true solo record,” Davis said regarding the making of Dancing on the Edge. “In my mind, I was going to bring a friend in to play drums and a little steel [guitar] and then I was going to play bass myself and just overdub keys.”
The project ended up being a bit more of a band effort than he originally intended, but not by much. To Davis, Dancing on the Edge still feels like more of a solo record.
“With that first record, I wasn’t even sure if this would ever be a live thing,” Davis continued. “I was kind of burned out on touring at that point in my life because State Champion and Tropical Trash toured so much over the years. I just felt like I had more gas in the tank for writing songs but didn’t really care about having a life of touring, but then it became kind of obvious that it was a thing that we wanted to do live.”
So Davis went about bringing in his longtime friends and collaborators Jim Marlowe and Dan Davis who he had worked with in Tropical Trash and Equipment Pointed Ankh. Lou Turner and Trevor Nikrant from the Louisville band Styrofoam Winos as well as Christian DeRoeck from the Athens, Georgia based Little Gold round out the live Roadhouse band.
“I made this band under my name to have it be whatever feels right, but so far this band has been feeling right and we’ve been having a lot of fun with it,” Davis concluded.
Photo by Christina Casillo
While the new record was more of a collaborative process and was made with the intention of it being able to translate to a live setting, it’s still very much Davis’ creation.
“The songwriting itself could not be a less collaborative process,” Davis explained. “I’m very introverted when I’m writing a record. I don’t bring others in and ask their opinions very often; I don’t even really hang out with other people when I’m writing a record. It’s a borderline obsessive, unhealthy relationship to the work where I’m just holed up in my bedroom or my studio or my family cabin in the woods just trying to follow the scent.”
Once Davis is happy with the song structures, that’s when he brings in his collaborators. Marlowe and Dan Davis, his trusted confidants, are frequently the first people that Ryan will bring in to put ears on what he’s constructed.
“They are just people I trust to say ‘this sucks’ or ‘this isn’t working’ and I don’t take it personally,” Davis continued. “From there, we bring in a few other people to help stitch together the quilt of sounds that wind up being the record.
“I like to think of it as ‘once I’ve built the house, now I can bring others in to help me decorate it.’”
Through this process, came New Threats from the Soul, the critically acclaimed sophomore record and it feels as though it’s a culmination of Davis’ whole career, tracing all the way back to State Champion and Tropical Trash. In listening to the record, you can hear the vast and diverse influences from all of his past work being “stitched together” to form a beautiful, patchwork soundscape that accompanies his absurdist, didactic musings on modern life.
A quick aside here to just celebrate one of my favorite records from last year. “I will never be anything, other than a caged bird swinging from a chain swing, whistlin’ for my payseed, pecking on a W9,” is one of the more brilliant turns of phrase put to record in a good, long while.
I could spend the rest of this article quoting another thousand brilliant lines from the seven-song-hour-long record, but seeing as we’ve got Davis himself talking about the music, let’s get back to him.
With rave reviews from Pitchfork and NPR, it feels like Davis, now in his early 40s, is finally getting the widespread attention that his music has always deserved. While he cares little about all that, garnering the respect of his personal heroes has been an awe-inspiring result of the new record.
Davis grew up on the music from Chicago-based record label Drag City — mainly that of Bill Callahan and his earlier work with the band Smog.
“We did a tour together last year where it was just me and him driving around in my mom’s car for a week,” Davis said when asked about a good Callahan story. “It was a lot of talking, not-talking and a lot of feeling like, ‘How did I get to a place where I’m driving around with one of my songwriting heroes who’s treating me like a peer and giving me the respect that he feels like I deserve?’”
Another artist that Davis and the Roadhouse Band often get compared to is Jeff Tweedy and Wilco. While Davis didn’t grow up with Tweedy and Wilco in the same way that he did with Callahan and Smog, he became aware of them while living in Chicago in his twenties and having band members put on their records while on the road.
“It was one of those things where you think you know what a band is and you hear mumblings about it and think to yourself, ‘I don’t know if that’s really my thing,” Davis said regarding Wilco. “But then you hear it, and realize what it actually sounds like and that it’s awesome.
“My partner and I were cleaning the house last night and I put on A Ghost is Born for the first time in a long while and thought to myself, ‘Man, this is still one of my favorite records.’”
Now, this weekend, on Saturday, June 27, Davis and the Roadhouse Band will have the opportunity to play at Tweedy’s Solid Sound Festival at MASS MoCa in North Adams, Massachusetts.
Davis reflected on the opportunity by remarking: “The longer I do this, I get into these situations where I think to myself, ‘I can’t believe I’m in the same room as these guys.’ I’ve never met Jeff but I expect that if I do, I’ll be taken aback by the fact that I’m in a room with a dude like that. It means a lot to still be doing it after all these years.”
For more information on Solid Sound Festival, visit www.solidsoundfestival.com
For more of our pre-festival interviews, visit https://www.themetroland.com/blog-main/tag/solid+sound+festival
