In many ways, Surprise Me Mr. Davis is a name for the longtime friendship that exists between singer/songwriter Nathan Moore and The Slip. Over the years, Davis has been a loose collaborator, a formal side project and even a musical priority. Though the group has only released a few recordings and only tours a few times per year, Davis continues to impact how primary songwriters Moore and Slip guitarist Brad Barr approach their craft. In 2010, the group also added longtime friend Marco Benevento to their lineup and the ensemble entered the studio last year to work on their first, full-length album. While aboard Jam Cruise, Barr and Moore discussed the group’s fuzzy history, future plans and favorite moments.
Surprise Me Mr. Davis slowly evolved out of a series of sit ins, opening spots and chance encounters, so the project does not have an exact start date, but 2002 was the first year Nathan first really started working on music with The Slip. So that means that this year is in many ways this is the 10th anniversary of Davis.
Brad: Originally it was Nathan Moore with The Slip. That’s how we billed it—I think we had known each other vaguely for about a year. We first met at High Sierra in 2001, so the story of Surprise Me Mr. Davis is really the story of High Sierra. We [The Slip] saw Nathan play there and stopped him to tell him how much we enjoyed his set.
Nathan: [Laughter.] Actually, I saw The Slip play and ran over to them when they were pulling away in their van. I said, “I really just wanted to tell you that I enjoyed your set.” Shortly after that, I became The Slip’s merch guy. A lot of people might not know that I started off as the Slip’s merch guy. There is a great story that goes along with that. I am a pacifist and one time this guy stole a t-shirt off the merch stand, and I chased him down and tickled his arm-pit to stop him. That’s what pacifists do.
Brad: Then in the winter of ‘03 into ’04 Davis was born. In fact January/February of ’04 is when we started tracking songs and we named it Surprise Me Mr. Davis. We wanted to release the album without our names on it—that was the idea for a while, to sort of make the band a mystery and veil who we really were. Before that, we were just friends playing music together.
Nathan: For me it is strange to think back on that time—what it must have been like for me to have gotten in my van and gone to visit you guys because I just don’t do things like that [sarcastic laughter in reference to Moore’s traveling living room Hippy Fiasco Tour]. There was something going on there. The youthful magnetism was strong.
Brad: Nathan doesn’t just get in cars and drive around to places without a plan. [Laughter.]
When I talked to you both five or six years ago, and you both mentioned how much you learned from each other, musically, during that period. I can still hear it in your songwriting—both of your approaches shifted after those early Davis sessions. Especially in terms of The Slip, who before that time were more jazzy and instrumental. Do you still feel like you still influence each other on a songwriting level?
Brad: When Nathan was on tour with The Slip we were the two smokers in the group. We’d go downstairs when we were at the hotel and talk about songwriting. I think back in those days we had more time together.
Nathan: And we had a deeper need for it. I mean deeper is maybe a terrible word but I think that when Brad and I saw each other, we both had wanted to get from something each other—very specifically. After a while we sorta got it. I remember the time when I was like “Oh shit, Brad doesn’t need me anymore.” I forgot what song it was, but after he wrote it I was like, “Damn! He just doesn’t need me anymore.”
Brad: That’s… not true.
Nathan: And he said he felt the same way when he heard “In The Basement” [off Moore’s 2011 album Dear Puppeteer ]. It was like, “Oh, he got it” though that’ll never be completely true. But when we were younger, there were more specific reasons why we were together. There were certain things we took from each other—their playing crept into my music and these old lyrical sensibilities became part of their music. We just had a lot to learn from each other. It’s some heavy shit right there.
Brad: That’s nice to hear. I guess I always felt like I took more from you than you were able to take from me.
Nathan: Are you kidding me? You knew how I played music before I met you. I took guitar lessons but just hanging out with [The Slip] changed the way I played, the way I heard music—the way my fingers moved. The effect is almost like doing a drug or something. I would soak it up like a sponge, and [Brad] would teach me specific things. But it was mostly the sponge thing that was so addictive. Like, “Oh my god, just being with them made me better.” [But to get back to your question], it’s still very true that we learn from each other.
Brad: That’s incredible. I thought that I was the only one using the sponge. I wouldn’t have written any of the music I write these days if I hadn’t met Nathan. Any of the songs where there’s a lyric that makes you go back and want to hear it again would never have happened if we had never met.
We are currently onboard Jam Cruise. Brad, this is the first time you have been on the cruise and Nathan this is your second trip. What are your thoughts on the event so far?
Brad: It’s really something. I’ve never seen anything like it. Just the boat itself is crazy and being this far out in the middle of the ocean is dizzying. It’s disorienting in a nice way and people seem hell bent on a good time which is great.
How do you think it compares to last year Nathan?
Nathan: It’s funny: for me, I’m wearing such a different hat. I came here as a folk singer last year and now I’m here with Davis. It definitely colors my perception of things but, beyond that, I think the food tastes better.
I’m still blown away by the whole experience. I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that will ever not be just riddled with magical implications. It’s a bunch of great musicians and beautiful people ready to party on a fucking boat. We were talking the other day: when else do you play music while you’re in motion? That never happens. I mean maybe on a train or something like that but there’s so many things happening on so many levels.
Brad: And you’re always just one leap away from death all the time. There’s a danger element that almost spurs people on. I think it’s there somewhere—the high seas. The oceans are battlefields. I did notice the water when we did the Rocks Off cruise many years ago with The Slip and I actually fell over a bit. That was a much smaller boat, though. With such a huge ship, you feel it in a different way. It makes you really think about the swells in the ocean and what they’re doing and the ship’s relationship to the ocean. It’s quite something.
Nathan: It’s intense.
Brad: It’s really interesting and it is one reason I think people on this cruise should really give thanks that Nathan is here. There’s so many musicians on this boat but only a handful could just get out there by themselves and turn a room into a magical place. Nigel Hall’s amazing at that and Ivan Neville can do it but besides Nathan there’s not that many other musicians who can captivate an audience on their own.
That’s not to take anything away from those other musicians. The whole history of music is filled with that: some people play as groups and do a more esoteric kind of thing and some people go out there by themselves and are storytellers. In the midst of such a jam situation, I think it’s really important to have people like Nathan who slow it down and remind us to think in a different way.
Nathan: I told this story the other night and it’s very true: Someone recently asked me on my website what accomplishment I was most proud of. Number two was getting on Jam Cruise [in 2011] as a folk singer. To me, it was such a telling moment that they’d ask a folk singer to play Jam Cruise. After years and years of being in this scene, it felt like a cumulative experience that I was asked to play folk music on this boat. I think it gave me a lot of courage for the Hippy Fiasco tour that soon followed after that.
But my first favorite accomplishment was being on stage with the guys from Davis. First off all, I am a huge Slip fan and a huge Marco fan, and I never thought I’d have a chance to play with that caliber of musicianship. When I started out, when I was young, my gift was not raw musical talent. I wasn’t one of those guys who picked up a guitar and could automatically play. I knew dudes like that who were almost like athletes who just picked up a baseball for the first time and could play without any effort. I’m sorta like the Pete Rose of music. That’s what my dad says—it wasn’t talent that got me into it. It was love of the game. I just love the game and—through years and years of playing and being onstage with that caliber of musicianship—I still blow my own mind that I am in Davis.
After years of playing with Marc Friedman and Andrew Barr in The Slip, what drew you to Nathan as a performer?
Brad: It’s great having a leader. There are so many different kinds of groups out there, but I like having one where someone is able to really speak onstage. In The Slip, none of us are incredibly extraverted and able to do that. We have a knack for looking out and seeing what a room needs, but we would just get up and do our thing and be sensitive to everything, musically. But there are times when you really wanna interact and Nathan’s really good at interacting.
Nathan, you say that you never possessed raw musical talent. Do you feel like you were always a natural songwriter?
Nathan: It definitely developed later. I’ve got a good twelve years of songwriting—a couple hundred songs—that no one will ever hear, which I think is sort of rare. It’s part of the Pete Rose thing. Nobody wants to hear the fucking songs I wrote for the first ten years of my career. No one would ever want to hear that. I don’t want to hear them for sure.
I heard you and Keller Williams actually wrote a song together when you were both living in Virginia over ten years ago.
Nathan: “Sideways Tree” or something like that. He actually just reminded me about that when I saw him on Jam Cruise. I went through a lot of different phases, whether it was completely emulating one of my heroes or an awkward year-and-a-half when I just wanted to be Tom Waits. I hear bootlegs of that stuff and I’m like, “Are you crazy?! What were you thinking?” And after years and years of thinking I had to come up with the most complicated chord progression and words that didn’t make any sense, I stripped things down. For a while, I thought that if my lyrics made sense, I was doing something wrong. Everything had to be tricky or complicated to really feel like I’d done something and it just was later in life when the simplicity started creeping in and then it just eventually boiled down to this essence. I don’t know how it got to be such a nostalgic vibe or whatever that is but…
Brad: That’s pretty cool. I think that’s the archetypical path of the artist, we all start out by emulating someone else. It was the same way with everyone in The Slip. For a while we tried to imitate the artists we admired and then we tried to make things as complex as we possibly could. We tried to test your cerebral virtuosity or lack thereof and find those limits. There are a couple of other stages in there as well: defeat, considering working at the 7-11, pushing through and finding some kind of revelation.
Nathan: I still go through those levels—sometimes all eight of them in eight days. And I come out of the end of the week with a nice, little, simple song about what a fucking amazing weird exciting week that was. But the three songs I wrote earlier in the week probably wouldn’t be as interesting as that final one.
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.
