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“You Can’t Steal My Shine” – New Music from The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band
It’s been a while since a song has made us want to jump up from our seats, throw our hands in the air, and shout hallelujah, but that’s exactly what “You Can’t Steal My Shine” from The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band accomplishes.
“Like a star in the sky I shine, the darker the night the brighter the light, you can’t steal my shine, I shine too bright, you can’t dim my light,” Rev hollers, over a foot-stomping blend of stanky slide guitar, tambourine shakes, a zipper-y washboard, and Pentecostal drum rhythms, and dadgum, it feels good.
“This one was inspired by those people that stick around in a relationship long after they know they don’t want to be there, and cheat and lie and hurt people, instead of owning up, being honest, and moving on,” Rev says of the tune. “I wanted this one to feel like a dance song from the Chess Records era.”
With their delicious blend of classic country-blues, featuring the foremost finger-picking steel guitar player in the Rev, the sensational rhythm and vocal accompaniment of “Washboard Breezy,” Rev’s wife of 15 years, who has played by his side since the band’s inception and is known for setting her washboard on fire, Jimi Hendrix-style, the band sets the scene ablaze. Their album Poor Until Payday was released on October 5th, and “You Can’t Steal My Shine” is our favorite. Take a listen:Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube | Spotify
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Premiere: “She Is Waiting” by The Prescriptions
Everyone needs a healthy dose of folk rock to round out their musical appetites, and The Prescriptions are just what the doctor ordered. The seeds of the group were sown in the tight-knit music scene of Birmingham, Alabama, but the band began to bloom in the Nashville creative community. Composed of members Hays Ragsdale, Parker McAnnally, John Wood, and Chris Luebeck, the band is working on their first full-length album. Today, they unveil a new single, “She Is Waiting.”“She Is Waiting is the first song we ever played as a band, and it’s also the song that brought us all together,” says bassist McAnnally. “We all found our common shared influences in Hays’ writing, and in this song learned how to collaborate together for the very first time. When it came time to record, we snuck into the Sound Emporium on Easter Sunday when the rest of Nashville was preoccupied to capture it in the same amazing room which has hosted and facilitated the creative process of record making for some of our biggest heroes and inspirations.” “With me being the later addition to the band, it’s the song I first heard on the early recordings which made me want to be a part of The Prescriptions,” adds guitarist Luebeck. “It was the project I had always dreamt to be a part of.”With its bright harmonica-laced refrains, understated organ sizzles, and vintage, wide-open road feel, “She Is Waiting” is sunshine from beginning to end. Without further ado, Mother Church Pew proudly presents “She Is Waiting” by The Prescriptions:Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify
[If you’re in the Nashville area, The Prescriptions will be providing opening support for fellow folk rockers Arts Fishing Club on October 11th, info HERE.]
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Premiere: “Tennessee Years” by Melanie Brulée
Photo credit: Emma LeeNashville and Toronto-based Melanie Brulée will release her new album Fires, Floods & Things We Leave Behind on October 19th. Today, she unveils her new single “Tennessee Years.”
A western-tinged meandering tune with understated flourishes of yearning pedal steel, “Tennessee Years” is a comforting fireside tribute to her one-and-only—a love song by someone who doesn’t generally write love songs. It’s “more please” music—because after even a cursory listen, that’s what you’ll want.
“’Tennessee Years‘ was written in Nashville in collaboration with singer-songwriter Guy Christiano,” Brulée explains. “He and his wife and child moved here from California–she wanted to continue her studies and she convinced him to come to Nashville so he could work on his music. I guess you could say I’ve bonded with more newcomers and Canadians in Nashville- it’s a tough place to get into at first,” she adds. “We wrote this song together for our respective partners as a thanks for sticking with us through this absolutely insane career choice.”
Without further ado, Mother Church Pew proudly presents “Tennessee Years” by Melanie Brulée:
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Premiere: “The Night I Found Jesus (Down at Robert’s Western World)” by Matt Campbell
Photo credit: Josh Goleman From the first notes of Matt Campbell‘s “The Night I Found Jesus (Down at Robert’s Western World),” the imagination fills with images of a charismatic, road-worn troubadour, one like Woody Guthrie, strapped with an acoustic guitar and some scuffed-up boots, who steps up onto a table in a crowded room, and grabs everyone’s attention with artfully-crafted storytelling and a sense of humor. And couldn’t we all use a little more humor these days?
“I was draggin’ in the city, I was longin’ to be free, so we circled up the wagons and headed down to Tennessee,” he sings as he tells the story of an ambitious cowboy who has a life-changing encounter at one of the Music City’s most famous Lower Broadway haunts. “The song is about faith in the idea that ‘making it’ is more about maintaining perspective and less about the trappings of fame,” Campbell explains. “I wrote it shortly after I started working at Robert’s. It’s hard not to feel discouraged when I’m taking out the garbage in the shadow of the Ryman Auditorium when I’d rather be on the stage, but staying true to myself is what will take me there. Or not,” he adds. “There’s more to life than playing the Ryman. Like meeting Jesus in a bar!”
“The Night I Found Jesus (Down at Robert’s Western World)” appears on Campbell’s forthcoming album The Man With Everything, set for release on November 9th via Flour Sack Cape Records. Co-produced by Campbell and Joseph Lekkas, the album houses nine swirling tales supported by honky tonk-inspired instrumentation and Campbell’s lonesome tenor; listen closely enough and you can almost hear the shuffle of two-stepping feet across a sawdust-covered dancehall floor.
Without further ado, Mother Church Pew proudly presents “The Night I Found Jesus (Down at Robert’s Western World)” by Matt Campbell:
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Interview: Sons of Bill
Photo by Anna Webber “My dad was a musician and a songwriter. He was also a professor. He was a shy, introverted man who was blessed, and cursed, with six kids. He didn’t get all that necessary alone time that I knew he needed. He would get up at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning while everybody still sleeping to read his books and play guitar. We all realized at a really early age that music was important. My dad my dad just loved tragic, beautiful songs,” says James Wilson, frontman of Virginia-bred band of brothers Sons Of Bill. “That’s something that still speaks to me.”
Though Wilson has traversed many planes in his musical journey so far—from his teenage goth years (makeup-free, however, as his father would not have approved), to punk and metal, and to his current lane of introspective Americana—his father’s teaching, influence, and love of those tragic, beautiful songs, can be heard in Wilson’s work. “I love great music–I can listen to bluegrass and metal and jazz and classical and it can all speak to me,” he says. “You just gotta follow your goosebumps. The whole point of this band with my brothers is I trust and I love them and I love to make music with them. And we’re willing to chase our goosebumps on each record no matter where it leads us,” he adds. “There’s no one I’d rather make music with.”
In June, the group released Oh God Ma’am, their latest album, a ten-song collection of ruminations and revelations about coming of age, taking stock or what’s important, and following the path set before you. “The record feels like it was kind of made in that stage of adult life when you’re trying to figure out what innocence of your youth is worth holding on to and what parts are worth letting go,” Wilson recalls. “Youth has its own illusions and adult life has its own illusions. That was the space I was coming from when writing–what does music mean to you in your adult life? I think each of us was kind of in that moment in our own ways. We just knew we needed to make a different kind of record. We knew we had hit a point where if we were going to keep making music in a time when it’s really hard to make original music–it’s a tough time in the digital age to make original music–we knew if we were going to it was going to have to be a different kind of record, maybe a risky record.” Towards that goal, the band started recording in Seattle with Phil Ek (Fleet Foxes) for a change of scenery, hoping to dive into a new space creatively that still felt like “them.”
“I didn’t need this record to do anything for us professionally, I just needed it to be for us,” he continues. “Faulkner had a great line — ‘you don’t hit home runs looking at the grandstand.’ You don’t do anything good when you’re thinking about what other people are going to think. Rock n’ roll sort of thrives on the innocent grandiosity of youth. There’s always an illusion to it, and that’s okay. Part of it is like, ‘you believe in the dream hard enough, but it’s still a dream.’ Guys like Tom Petty never stopped believing in the dream, he was still living it right until the end,” he says. “It becomes harder and harder to hold onto, and as you get older you just forget why you started in the first place, You have to work harder and try harder to keep searching for that innocent place to make music from because it gets harder to find it.”
“We knew we wanted to take as long as we needed, and we knew these songs were different and wanted to find the right world for them to live in,” he says of the decision to record in Seattle. “It was really freeing. When you make records in Nashville a lot of times there’s a lot of smiling and high-fiving and hitting print on things that aren’t good enough. That wasn’t at all the case here,” he reveals. “Phil was really hard on us in a way that was great, like a football coach, he demanded the best out of us and wasn’t going to settle until we got there. It was really refreshing. Sometimes it’s nice to get out of what you’re familiar with and get a really fresh perspective.”
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In the midst of recording, the band hit some personal bumps in the road that caused them to pause the process.“We had to take a long break after that starting point to get healthy,” Wilson relays. “There was some depression and alcoholism and all those things that kind of sneak up on you in adult life, you don’t expect that kind of darkness to get you, but it did. Not to be cliché, but I think the record is better for it, us going through all those things.” Sons Of Bill regrouped and moved the process to Nashville to finish the record with Sean Sullivan (Sturgill Simpson). “We were grateful to be making music, to be there with people that you love trying to make something special,” he recalls of the bi-coastal recording process. “Honestly, maybe for the first time, I’m really just going to sit back and enjoy this. I’m not worried about what’s gonna happen next year, We’re just going to put this record out and try to reach as many people as we can with it,” he adds. “We’re really proud of it.”
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Premiere: “Carnival Barker” by Vanessa Peters
History repeats itself, and Dallas-based folk-rocker Vanessa Peters reached back into it to find the perfect metaphor to embody her timely new tune “Carnival Barker,” the new single from her forthcoming album Foxhole Prayers, out October 5th via Idol Records.
“I wanted to use the 1920s and ’30s as a reference point for where we are today,” she explains of the song. “A lot of people are unaware that ‘America First’ was a Harding/Coolidge slogan. Warren G. Harding is universally considered to be one of America’s worst presidents, in no small part because his administration was plagued by corruption (though much of that came to light after his death). So this song is about a snake oil salesman type who finds himself in power due largely to scandal and grift,” she continues. “I purposely kept the song a little vague, because it’s not about any one leader. It’s about the way we allow ourselves to be divided into the red camp and the blue camp and we let the system play us off of each other, and it’s about the way that powerful people manage to grease their way to the top time and time again while the rest of us are left holding the check. Harding, the Teapot Dome Scandal, the Roaring ’20s, the rise of nationalism… it’s all happening all over again,” she adds. “I believe that historians will look at where we are now one day, and wonder why we weren’t able to learn from mistakes that happened less than a century ago.”
The inspiration may be from a century ago, but the sound is firmly fixed in the present. With yearning guitar riffs propelled by a driving rhythm section and coupled with Peters’ vocals which were made for musical storytelling, “Carnival Barker” is a desert-bound open-road tune kicking up its fair share of dust.
Without further ado, Mother Church Pew proudly presents “Carnival Barker” by Vanessa Peters:Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube | Spotify
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Premiere: “French Braid” by Besides Daniel
“‘French Braid’ is a vivid confession,” says Danny Brewer, the creative force behind Georgia-based alt-folk outfit Besides Daniel, of the band’s new single. A boundless chorus and kinetic verses weave a backdrop while trembling lyrics gush “I will peel back the crust of the earth, I will dive in.” Written over a five-year period, “French Braid,” which took many different forms before the final version emerged, is a dynamically-imparted dreamy reflection that simmers with desire.
“French Braid” is featured on Beside Daniel’s new album T E E M I N G, inspired by life lessons learned during the initial deep dive into young adulthood. T E E M I N G is set for release on August 24th.
Without further ado, Mother Church Pew proudly presents “French Braid”:
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Premiere: “If I Needed You” by Daniel Daniel
Nashville-based Daniel Daniel, who released his debut album The Lonesome Hollow on May 4th, is back with “If I Needed You,” a reimagined version of Townes Van Zandt’s 70’s era tune.
“Townes Van Zandt is one of my favorite songwriters and when I got the itch to try and cover one of his songs, I knew I wanted it to be ‘If I Needed You,’” he explains. “One of the reasons I love this song so much is that it is a fine display of Townes’ ability to express differing emotions. This is a love song but there is a certain sadness to it which has always drawn me in. I wanted to extract more of the beautiful melancholy in the song with my version of it. We tracked this song live in East Nashville not far from where Townes penned it.”
With his warmly tender vocal style and unfussy production awash in acoustic guitar and yearning pedal steel, Daniel Daniel offers a fresh take on an old classic. Without further ado, Mother Church Pew proudly presents “If I Needed You” by Daniel Daniel:
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Video Premiere: “Rattling My Bones” by Brian Pounds
“If you don’t like this video, then I’ve wasted 1/4 of my life savings,” laughs Brian Pounds of “Rattling My Bones,” his newest release. The song appears on the quick-witted Texas-based singer/songwriter’s 2017 album, Southern Writer; in personal protest against mainstream streaming services, Pounds made the thoughtful decision not to make the album available via iTunes, Spotify, or other platforms other than his website.
“Streaming services don’t pay their songwriters enough. They’ve essentially taken the main revenue stream for songwriters and chopped it into about a tenth of what it should be,” he explains in a letter to his fans found on his website. “I think it’s also changing the way we listen to music. With such an unending catalog of music available, and so many artists vying for your attention, it’s become way too easy to just click the skip button if the song doesn’t catch you in the first 10 seconds. To me, that encourages uncomplicated music. I personally think great music takes time to evolve. Great music has to grow on you. You have to invest your time and figure it out. And I think streaming services undermine that process.” We tend to agree.
Even so, we were captivated immediately with “Rattling My Bones”; filmed at Blue Rock Studios in Wimberley, Texas, the video features Pounds in-studio, with dreamy footage interjected throughout, as he poignantly recalls the loss of someone he loved. With the tenderness of James Taylor and the conviction of Chris Stapleton, Pounds’ wistful melodies wind their way into the heart, tugging all its strings.
Without further ado, Mother Church Pew proudly presents “Rattling My Bones,” the new video from Brian Pounds:
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“The Addict” – New Music from Lyman Ellerman
“Call me an addict,” sings Lyman Ellerman–the first words of his recent aptly-titled single “The Addict” which lay all the cards on the table. Dedicated to his late son, who struggled much of his adult life with drug addiction, Ellerman recalls a conversation the two had before his passing; “At the time, he was using and trying to get me to accept him the way that he was,” he says. “Of course, I accepted him, but I told him I couldn’t really understand where he was coming from, from a clean person’s point of view.”
“The Addict” is featured on his forthcoming record I Wish I Was A Train and is a beautiful example of the troubadour’s honest, soul-baring style, as road-worn lyrics delivered in solemn contemplation remind us of his, and in turn our, humanity.
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