Brad, I guess this goes for The Barr Brothers, as well as Davis, but at some point in that creative development, you learned to mix flourishes of those early, more complex moments with the simplicity of your latter songwriting period.
Brad: You find a way. It’s almost like The Matrix or something: you can find a way to incorporate that stuff without making it feel forced or overcomplicated and make those things accessible to people. Making the complex stuff feel actually quite simple is an important step. I guess it’s just depth, and, by depth, I mean you work on a thing for so long that eventually you get some clarity and stopping a bullet becomes actually quite an easy task.
It has been almost ten years, but Surprise Me Mr. Davis is actually going to release a studio album this year. What is the status of your “full-length debut?”
Nathan: Its coming, slowly, and there was no pre-production whatsoever. We just locked ourselves in Studio House for a week. All five of us stayed there, and we just sort of lived and breathed it. I loved it. It’s the way I like to work. We didn’t have to commute to the hotel or anything like that. We’d just wake up, and we’d just start playing. Some songs we had recorded before but we wanted to do them better and there are a lot of new songs. It was like playing a set without a setlist. We played what we wanted to play and Jesse Lauter [Low Anthem, Elvis Perkins] would record it. It was hot in there—even the mics. were hot.
Brad: Yeah it was pretty similar to the way we do a show actually. We made a list…
Nathan: …a master song list…
Brad: We had a board with an erasable pen marker, and I think there were probably about 50 songs on it. We just started whittling away by what we felt like doing or what we had prioritized.
Nathan: What would fit in the moment…
Brad: But I remember going to the bathroom and coming back and the other four guys in the band were playing a song I’d never heard before. They were like, “It’s a new one! Jesse’s rolling.” I said, “sounds good,” and I got my guitar and started playing. Being open to that kind of spontaneity is really important. It makes it fun and translates on record. So what if you don’t know the chord progression, find something else—find something you can do. Maybe it doesn’t ultimately make the final album’s tracks and stuff but it is a good exercise to fall on those reserves. There is a great version of “Ghosts” on the record that I am hoping will make the final version, and that’s exactly how we recorded it. I walked in, they were playing the song, Jesse was rolling and we just had to find some sounds to add to it.
How did Jesse get involved in the project?
Nathan: We’re definitely dear friends with The Low Anthem and he made that magic happen with them on their first two records.
Brad: We joke that The Slip broke The Low Anthem. I think we may have brought them to some places further than they had gone before—like Baltimore or something. [Laughter.]. We take full credit for their success. [Laughter.] Then they brought The Barr Brothers to the West Coast for the first time. They love Nathan and ask about him whenever we see them.
Nathan: We put them on the fast train out of dodge and then they took off without us!
Brad: Here’s how it’s done, go do it!
What’s the plan for the album? Do you have any release date scheduled?
Nathan: No specific plans. Davis has always had this…we’ve had some issues. We’ve always been torn between the commercial career potential against and the true nature and beauty of the band, which is why we go into the studio to record in the first place.
It’s always sort of confusing, and it’s hard for us when we get on the road together. We become 15 year old kids again and, of course, we’re dreaming of the stadiums we could fill and that whole kind of thing but it’s tough. I’m ultimately glad that we ended up recording songs while Brad was in the bathroom because that is the Surprise Me Mr. Davis vibe: the magic that happens when we come together. I do think that there’s lots of potential, lots of money to be made in all those kinds of things and different ways of looking at it. But I’ve now officially forgotten the question.
Brad: That’s the rub. The plan is exactly what you think it would be. Mike, your grandkids will probably be running around your leg by the time we release the album. That’s not true. [Laughter.]
Nathan: We’re definitely going to finish the record, we’re going to make sure it’s available and we’re gonna play shows behind it. That kind of the standard fair. We have a lot of fun ideas when we’re all sitting around talking about lots of different things we could do. We’ll just see what all happens. I’d like to see surprisememrdavis.com have a free “surprise” for everybody every Tuesday or something.
That’d be cool.
Nathan: There’s just a lot of different ways we can have fun and keep building up the idea that when these five guys get together, it’s something special and let the world take that on its own shoulders a little bit more ‘cause the world could get us together a lot more than it does. Who knows how that will unfold but the world should know the power that it possesses. I’m saying it here on the record.
Brad: Go world.
Nathan: Go world! Make this happen.
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