OK Banjo: Computer Vs. Banjo Try to Conquer the World First, Then Nashville

NPR doesn't typically beat this paper in covering new Nashville bands, but Computer vs. Banjo is a special case—NPR featured the electro-acoustic duo in June, Nashville Cream blogged about them last month, and this is our first print article. Seeking the attention of local show-goers hasn't been part of Beau Stapleton and Johnny Mann's business plan. (They've yet to play live anywhere.) But making it onto the CMJ charts and writing music for an MTV show has been.

"Jumping into touring first seemed a little bit of a stretch," Stapleton says. "Johnny and I have both been in bands that have toured [in Stapleton's case the Coldplay-inspired, acoustic outfit Blue Merle, which was signed to Island Records, and in Mann's the acid jazz-, funk- and rock-blending band Gran Torino]. But those things take a long time to build and [there's] a lot of energy taken away from the creative process, and it's not obviously going to work out. So we looked at licensing and we looked at the Internet and we looked at new media as a way to facilitate some of that promotion, as opposed to hitting the road."

Computer vs. Banjo self-released their eponymous debut this summer—12 tracks layered with sun-dazed melodies, electronic whirs and blips and the occasional mandolin picking or clawhammer-style banjo frailing. "Probably 90 percent of the time there's a banjo on there, you can't even tell it's a banjo because it's been so processed," Stapleton says of the liberties they take with instrumental textures. And to their first independent album, they added their own licensing company: Diagram Collective.

It's the idea of friendly competition between traditional and experimental music-making—depicted on the band's website by a computer and banjo squaring off at Pong—that's gotten the band attention elsewhere. (Given the kinds of music Nashville is associated with in the popular imagination, the fact that they're based here must make the genre-bending seem all the more dramatic.)

So far, Stapleton and Mann's moody, hybrid sound has attracted the likes of Kenneth Cole's diversity-promoting ad campaign "We All Walk in Different Shoes" and MTV's family counseling reality show with Dr. Drew Pinsky, Sex...With Mom and Dad. "What we've noticed thus far is a lot of our music gets used in the tension moments in the therapy sessions," says Stapleton.

Computer vs. Banjo embody a new paradigm for the music business: They're pursuing paths they find creatively satisfying and doing it entirely on their own, yet they're also business-savvy and enterprising and often called upon to deliver the goods with just a few hours' notice. "I'll tell you, it's a ton of work," says Mann. "We're the people running to the post office."

But when Stapleton and Mann do start playing live—and they plan to next summer, after releasing their second album—they've got high, and not uninformed, hopes.

"We did tons of research, trying to figure out how to put this together," Mann says. "We took examples like the Superchunk guys that started Merge Records, [and] TV on the Radio not leaving New York City until their third record. And when they did, they show up at the Mercy Lounge and it sells out and they had to move it down to the [larger] Cannery [Ballroom] their first time in Nashville. We tried to figure out 'How are they doing things differently? How can we alter what our plan is to achieve some of those goals for ourselves?' "