If you still haven't heard of The Shadowboxers, then you might be a little late on the draw. Just under a year after moving to Nashville from Atlanta, the buzzing neo-soul popsmiths — whose champions include the Indigo Girls, Reba McEntire, Chris Stapleton and his Memphis-bred buddy Justin Timberlake — will headline a two-night stand at the 400-capacity Basement East on Thursday and Friday. The shows are the culmination of a monthly residency the band started at the still relatively new East Nashville haunt back in August, in which they paid tribute to their influences with help from the likes of Stapleton and McEntire. And if that short list of aforementioned famous friends sounds diverse, it's a distinction that fits the harmony-driven, funk-footed quintet, which combines elements of modern pop, '70s-style AM radio folk, meat-and-potatoes rock 'n' roll and classic R&B.
At the first installment of the band's Basement East residency — a funk night stacked with hot hooks and smooth grooves — Stapleton, whom the band had met only in passing and invited via cold email, took the stage and arrested the capacity crowd, guesting on a showstopping rendition of James Brown's "It's a Man's Man's Man's World." At the second, a tribute to harmony-heavy influences, McEntire and Little Big Town's Karen Fairchild and Kimberly Schlapman cued a club full of iPhone videographers by joining the band to sing Dolly Parton's "Jolene." The third installment, on Halloween weekend, featured a start-to-finish performance of Michael Jackson's Thriller.
"I think our band is kind of confusing," The Shadowboxers' Adam Hoffman tells the Scene. "Genre-wise and what influences we have, we're kind of all over the place, and I think this was a way to kind of show what each one of our influences are. And hopefully our original show makes more sense, and [now] we have to figure that out on a record."
This weekend's shows are already sold out. And this time, instead of relying on a repertoire of iconic covers, the band will try to win over clubgoers and Music Row insiders with a revue of unreleased original compositions. For a band about to celebrate its first anniversary as Nashvillians, there are worse positions to be in. But success, or at least the precipice and promise of it, didn't come overnight for The Shadowboxers. And the band — which singers Hoffman, Matt Lipkins and Scott Schwartz formed in 2009 — knows the grind of a lonely gig in Music City.
"When we were starting out, we had a tough time [in Nashville]," Hoffman recalls. "We played The Basement [the Eighth Avenue location] three times, and the last time we played there was honestly, like, 12 people there, and Grimey was like, 'We're not booking you guys ever again.' I don't know when it happened, but a year-and-a-half ago, after we played to 12 people, the next time we played here was at 3rd & Lindsley for, like, 300 people."
Six months later, exactly one year ago this week and a month before officially moving to town, the band sold out its first headlining show at Mercy Lounge. While Hoffman might not know exactly how that seemingly overnight spike in club-draw numbers came about, he has an idea: "The YouTube video — the Justin thing — definitely helped." Perhaps the biggest newish fan in attendance at the Mercy gig was Justin Timberlake, who, watching from behind a velvet rope, was catching the band's hard-won, road-tested live show for the first time. "That was a real moment," remembers Schwartz. But it wasn't the first time the band had made an impression on the "SexyBack" singer.
A year earlier, in December 2013, the band posted a lo-fi video capturing its rendition of Timberlake's "Pusher Love Girl" as part of a recurring covers series on YouTube. They related to Timberlake's approach on the the song, a deep cut off the singer's ambitious 2013 double album The 20/20 Experience.
"It still sounded very modern, but it was basically a soul tune," Lipkins says of the song. "But it also didn't sound retro. ... It was just like the perfect [blend]."
"The harmonies on it were what really drew us," Hoffman adds. "I mean, they're nasty."
Two days later, Timberlake stumbled upon it and elevated it to viral status, posting it on his official Facebook page and writing: "Every once in a while, you come across something. This is GREAT, fellas. Took it and made it your own. I'm humbled."
The Timberlake bump couldn't have come at a better time. That day, the band was in Nashville for a gig at The Thistle Stop Cafe, and morale was at an all-time low. "I don't know how much longer we can do this," Lipkins remembers telling bassist Carlos Enamorado before the gig. There was no after-show party. At around 1 a.m., as the band was getting ready for bed, they started getting cellphone notifications.
Sitting around the dining room table at their East Nashville band house (The Shad Pad), voices raise, laughs are had, and somewhere in the crosstalk the details get fuzzy as the quintet — its current lineup cemented in 2012 with the addition of Enamorado and drummer Cole McSween — affably split hairs over whose version of what came next is most accurate.
"Adam busted into my room [cellphone in hand] and was like, 'Look! Look at this!' "
"I stormed into Adam's room and I was like, 'Look at this shit!' Then I stormed into Scott's room and I was like, 'Look at this shit!' Then we all just started jumping up and then, 'Ahh, the girl from Paramore tweeted us! Ahh!' "
But Hayley Williams' missive wasn't the one they were freaking out over; Timberlake's was. He had direct-messaged the band on Twitter, something the singer said he'd never done before, but he wanted to know The Shadowboxers' story and what they were up to. A week later, he called them. It wasn't the band's first brush with fame, just its biggest.
Even at that point, the band had tasted success. They'd formed a friendship with the Indigo Girls, who took them around the world as both opening act and backing band. Despite the blacklisting at The Basement, the band had played the Ryman and many theaters like it on those jaunts. Other gigs haven't been as glamorous. Like moonlighting as a wedding band. The funked-out cover of The Clash's "Train in Vain" they say often opens the wedding set — and which they played for the Scene in the Shad Pad rehearsal room — absolutely kills, much like the reimagined funk and harmony covers the band's been knocking Basement East crowds dead with lately, or the "Pusher Love Girl" cover that inspired the bromance with Timberlake and YouTube views in the hundreds of thousands. But viral videos and crowd-pleaser covers make for a casualty-paved road to success, and the band knows it.
"I don't think of us as being, like, a 'YouTube band,' " Hoffman says, adamant in solidarity with bandmates in their promise not to cover Adele's "Hello" on YouTube, despite requests for it.
"All the while we were writing a lot of original songs, and we're really proud of them," Schwartz says. "We just did the cover series because we didn't have anything to put out and give people.
"We know we're walking a fine line — we want to be taken legitimately as a band with good, original songs," Schwartz adds, "and we realize that one of the biggest things that we're putting out there is shows with guests and covers. So it's just about navigating how to maintain our original songs and our original show with the five of us as being the selling point."
The band does have years-old recorded material, but say they don't really draw from it anymore. "We really feel like a different band [now]," says Hoffman. And though they're frustrated by not having current, original recorded material to offer crowds, they expect that'll change in 2016. There's whispers around Music Row of Timberlake producing The Shadowboxers, and though the band lets slip that they're working with their most iconic superfan in an "artist development capacity," they're tight-lipped when it comes to questions on what the status of that "creative feedback relationship" is exactly.
The party line: "Justin has been an incredible mentor to us and a great friend, and we are working with him creatively," Hoffman offers. "But what that looks like, we can't really talk about at this point. But we are pretty confident that there will be new music out in 2016 with his creative input."
With bated breath we wait.
Email music@nashvillescene.com
