There's a slim chance that you'd recognize singer-songwriter Steve Voss from his previous incarnation as lead guitar player in The Rouge, a Colorado roots-rock quartet that staked its fortunes on Nashville in 2010, with almost comically implosive results. The Rouge had trouble cultivating a local following, but that trouble was nothing compared to the steady demoralization the band endured at the hands of Atlantic Records. Voss laughs about it now, describing the experience as an interminable, Groundhog Day-like series of label-mandated pairings with outside songwriters, most of whom had little understanding of the band's sound.
"It was like a year-and-a-half of writing trips over and over," he tells the Scene with a chuckle, "constantly writing shitty songs in different styles, mainly with these Katy Perry and Carrie Underwood co-writers. I think we did like 90 or 100 co-writes. I still have all of them on my iTunes, and it's so embarrassing to listen to them now. We had a direction, but they were trying to refine it by throwing darts at a phone book of songwriters."
Voss can afford to laugh. Since then, he's found his niche locally producing other bands and making outlandish music videos with Jason Denton, frontman for local rockers Tesla Rossa, out of their Solar Cabin studio in East Nashville. The day Voss talks to the Scene, his back is sore from playing a thug who gets uppercut from a forklift onto a pile of cocaine (actually, flour) in the video for "Mythical Love" by Brian Carrion, an artist Voss is currently producing. Though he hasn't attempted any back-breaking stunts making videos for any of the songs on Whimsy, the solo debut he released in October under the name Tetherball, a penchant for theatricality on display throughout suggests it's only a matter of time.
Voss says he doesn't set out to pen songs about his own life, preferring to write from narrative perspectives that don't reflect his own personal experience. And after years spent playing amped-up roots-rock — a genre rife with straight-ahead story songs and autobiographical confessionals — with The Rouge, Voss didn't quite know what to make of the quirky material he started coming up with as his band began crumbling in the summer of 2013. Around that time he began making bedroom-pop recordings in the band house The Rouge shared with members of Tesla Rossa.
"I love the process of writing while recording something," he says. "It's like a puzzle that's all over the place until it becomes one solid object."
His distance from his own sounds and stories contributes greatly to the aptly titled Whimsy's sense of adventure. If you married the more acid-washed elements of Magical Mystery Tour with maniacal carnival music, added in notes of impressionist pop, bossa nova and cocktail jazz, then rocked it out with organic arrangements fleshed out by Tesla Rossa's rhythm section (who back Voss on the album), you'd wind up with something close to Whimsy.
The album makes dizzying jumps from genre to genre, but the idiosyncratic way Voss meanders through unorthodox chord progressions and harmonies provides a thematic structure. Voss creates a coherent sound out of a remarkably varied palette that at times lands somewhere in the realm of jazz-folk (the acoustic campfire strum of "Gilded Rings") but also touches on a vaudevillian brand of herky-jerky circus rock (album opener "Bootss"), country blues twang (the roadhouse swagger of "Boulderado") and elegiac balladry so convincingly rendered it'll stop you in your tracks.
Perhaps no tune shows how far Voss has come more than the album's closing cut, "Timely Doctor." Understated vocals atop jazzy guitar noodling crash into cacophonous "I Am the Walrus"-worthy flamboyance, only to give way again to feather-light soft-rock harmonies. The song would disappear into thin air if not for its gripping central melody.
Along with members of the aforementioned Tesla Rossa, Voss' six-piece live backing band features members of The Gills, Bad Books, The Almanacks, Ugly Kids Club and Manchester Orchestra.
Email music@nashvillescene.com
