Friday, Aug. 2, 8 p.m., $12
Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro
Chris Stamey has spent four decades quietly cementing his legacy as a top-tier auteur of the indie-pop underground, both on his own and with bands like Sneakers and The dB’s. But around 2015, something shifted for him.
“I had started to feel that the whole ‘three chords and the truth’ thing was a confining space, like [if] literature followed only in Hemingway’s footsteps and Joyce had never existed,” Stamey says.
Stamey’s response was to tap into the Tin Pan Alley influences of his childhood to craft his new double album, New Songs for the 20th Century, on which guest vocalists from jazz legend Nnenna Freelon to power-pop hero Marshall Crenshaw are accompanied by the likes of Bill Frisell, Nels Cline, and Stephen Anderson on Stamey-orchestrated pop/jazz tunes that take the template of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and the like as a starting point. We caught up with the Chapel Hill-based artist and producer for the backstory.
INDY: Obviously, when you were absorbing the Great American Songbook in your youth, you were also listening to rock ‘n’ roll. How did you reconcile the two at that time?
CHRIS STAMEY: I was skeptical of The Beatles at first, I remember that! “Beware of any enterprise that requires matching suits,” as the saying goes. I’m kidding, of course. Not really. Later I got to appreciate them a bit more. But the first radio songs I remember included those of Carole King, Burt Bacharach, Henry Mancini—some harmonically fertile material. Also, the ‘60s creative country of Roger Miller, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson—what is “Crazy” but a Great American Songbook tune?
How did your jazz/pop influences affect the way you went on to approach music as a young man, with Sneakers and The dB’s?
Sneakers was all about The Kinks and Television; what came out was really like neither, but that was what was in the air then. There were still, even in the very raw recordings, some meter changes and modulations that were kind of cool. The dB’s was more “anything goes,” as I remember it. I had a few tunes in the dB’s with richer changes, such as “She’s Not Worried” and “Espionage,” but that was more due to Peter Holsapple’s Pet Sounds influence, and looking back, I find his songs to be more consistently inventive on those two dB’s records I was on. I did write the song “Occasional Shivers” around that time, though—that was where this started up again.
Some songs on the album could have fit comfortably into the mid-twentieth-century musical milieu, but others are obviously born of a more modern time.
There are a few outliers on this record. With one of them, “I Am Yours,” I wanted to go totally the other direction and write a song with only the same four chords as Max Martin uses on every hit song. So it’s there in contrast to the rest. I went back and forth on including it, but in the end, I thought it balanced the collection, and Millie [McGuire] sounds so great on it. “Dear Friend” is a bit outside the harmonic world of the rest; it’s more from the Carole King vocabulary.
Regaining the family piano of your youth helped spark this album. How much had you composed at the keyboard before this?
According to my mom, I told her at age five that I wanted to be a composer, based on a picture of one in a Childcraft Encyclopedia. And I started banging on the piano for many hours, trying to make the sounds I heard my dad make, as he played the repertoire of the day. But when I started playing in bands with my friends in high school, a bass guitar was a lot more practical: If you play bass, you always have a gig.
What made you decide to use other singers for these songs? Did you ever consider singing them yourself?
Once I’d accumulated a small stack of scrawled notation in a pile next to the piano, I wanted to see what happened when, in an old-fashioned way, singers and players looked at the paper and made sounds out of it. Also, I wasn’t necessarily writing “confessionals” in my own voice. I was tempted to sing “It’s Been a While,” but gosh, Django [Haskins] sounds so great on it. I am now thinking about learning how to sing some of these, though. Honestly, they are a bit tricky at times, with some leaps and some notes that are not in the chords, and it’s been a relief to put them in the hands and throats of more accomplished vocalists.
How did you choose vocalists?
I started by writing new songs for a project with Kirsten Lambert, a Chapel Hill singer and family friend whose voice I’ve always loved. I knew Django, Brett [Harris], and Skylar’s [Gudasz] voices so well from the [tribute] concerts of the Big Star Third record, and their voices inspired some of the songs they sang. Nnenna Freelon is amazing. It was such a “wow” when she agreed to sing one. But I wasn’t looking for “musical character actors” like Mick Jagger, I was looking for folks who could really hit the notes with compelling tone each time, and also bring the lyrics to life. I’ve never heard Millie McGuire sing less than excellently; finding Faith Jones and Ariel Pocock was a great boon. Right now our area has a lot of outstanding singers; it wasn’t difficult.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
You must be logged in to post a comment.