It’s an almost eerily quiet, strangely balmy winter Saturday when the Scene catches up with All Them Witches at the historic United Record Pressing plant on Chestnut Street. Between its famed, meticulously preserved Motown Suite — where the stars of Hitsville U.S.A. stayed when no other establishment would put up black artists during the days of segregation — and its hallways, haunted by decades of music history, the old URP building is a pretty damn ideal location for a photo shoot. And the band members (singer/bassist Michael Parks, guitarist Ben McLeod, keyboardist/violinist Allan Van Cleave and drummer Robby Staebler) look the part, thanks to their grunge garb and varying degrees of bedhead.
The plant’s fluorescent-lit party room, with its bright marble flooring, ’70s living-room furniture and Formica wall paneling — making it feel like a time-machine destination — also ain’t a band spot for interviewing a band that borrows inspiration from dark, earthy Brits like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, and channels them through bluesy, stoney psychedelics to arrive at a heavy Southern gothic sound fit for the 21st century.
As of December, after 67 years of shellacking hot wax, URP stopped pressing records here. Business is booming, and the company has migrated operations to a newer, larger facility in South Nashville. That’s where copies of All Them Witches’ Dave Cobb-produced full-length, Sleeping Through the War (out Friday on New West) were pressed and packaged for human consumption. At the same time, it might not be totally accurate to call ATW — formed in Nashville in 2012 — a Nashville band anymore. In fact, for the better part of the past four years, Nashville has claimed them more than they’ve claimed Nashville. And for good reason, as McLeod is the only member who still calls Music City home. Parks resides outside Asheville, N.C., Van Cleave lives in New Mexico, and Staebler lives in Columbus, Ohio. Is it better to be a Nashville band if you’re not actually living in Nashville? “It’s pretty awesome,” Van Cleave says playfully but without hesitation.
“We literally don’t really talk to each other that much when we’re not on the road,” Parks says, with a slow and steady baritone of a young Sam Elliott. And All Them Witches are on the road most of the time.
When the Scene catches up with them, the band is coming back from four months off the road — their longest stretch of downtime in years. “It gives us more space to feel creative,” Staebler says. “And then when you come together, you bring all your individual creativity back, instead of everybody killing each other’s dreams all the time.”
“It’s weird,” Parks says, “because everybody always calls us a Nashville band, and obviously we started here, and obviously we play here sometimes. But that’s the thing: Sometimes we’re a road band — we’re always gone. … We’re an American band.”
And with that, a brief — very brief — lighthearted sing-along of the Grand Funk Railroad radio staple of the same name, a tune about the rock ’n’ roll road life, breaks out. Then Van Cleave brings a question to the floor: “Who’s the greatest American band of all time?”
“Allman Brothers,” says McLeod.
“Grateful Dead,” says Van Cleave.
“Bootsy Collins,” offers Parks.
“I thought you guys were gonna say Korn,” jokes Staebler, sort of, before expressing excitement upon being informed that two Korn members now call Nashville home. “Dude, I love that band. Seriously.”
“We should get dinner with them,” Van Cleave suggests.
ATW’s sound melds the aforementioned influences (sans Korn, mostly) and more, but with their heavy riffs and deep-in-pocket grooves, that doesn’t mean Korn fans wouldn’t dig the band as well. On Sleeping Through the War, the band’s fourth LP, the quartet realizes their at-times-inscrutable all-American sound even more fully than they did on their acclaimed 2015 LP Dying Surfer Meets His Maker. That’s thanks in large part to the road-worn, water-tight band going into the studio with the album’s eight tracks already written and well-rehearsed. It’s also thanks to Dave Cobb, the Grammy-winning vanguard producer behind breakout albums by Chris Stapleton, Sturgill Simpson and Jason Isbell — Cobb has given All Them Witches some of his Midas touch for this go-round.
“You can tell that they’re brothers,” Cobb says of the band. “There’s no doubt those guys are one-minded. They went in the studio and put blinders on everybody else’s music and made their own.”
Cobb’s interest in working with the band goes back to the first time he saw them live, three years ago at 3rd & Lindsley. The super producer was struck by the band’s combination of familiarity and originality, because it’s hard to approach classic rock and come up with something new.
“I was blown away,” Cobb recalls. “It’s awesome to see a refreshing rock band coming at it from a different angle, creating their own sound and their own path. And that’s what I really dug about the band. … It felt like a retro inspiration but was completely fresh, everything was fresh. I loved it. It had all the best elements of Sabbath and Zeppelin and then something that’s not associated at all with that stuff. I thought it was such a cool, amazing blend of everything good about rock ’n’ roll. … I think with rock ’n’ roll it’s really hard to be dangerous, but they do a pretty damn good job at it.”
Though he’s mostly known as a country producer, Cobb, a Georgia native, is quick to point out that he originally set out to make rock records. “I definitely come from a rock background growing up, big time,” he says. “I wanted to be in a heavy rock band.”
This is ATW’s first time working with a producer, something they’re glad they didn’t do when Cobb first approached them about producing Dying Surfer, a record the band wrote and recorded over a week of experimenting in a cabin in Pigeon Forge. “It would have been embarrassing,” McLeod says, explaining that the band would have been unprepared to work with an audiophile like Cobb.
“He makes it seem like it’s not rocket science,” Van Cleave says of Cobb’s process. “What makes him a good producer is that he makes you feel cool and makes everything feel so easy, when there’s really so much going on in the machine room.”
“We had a plan going into this record,” Staebler says, noting the four-day writing and demoing session that birthed the songs.
As such, Sleeping boasts a broader sonic palette than its claustrophobic, cabin-fever-capturing predecessor. There are more major chords on this record; there’s even a shuffle (“Am I Going Up?”). “I wanted to start getting a little bit faster, a little more upbeat,” Parks explains. “You can have hooks, and have it be upbeat, and have it be poppy, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be pop music.”
It also doesn’t mean the band’s dumbed down their sound. Instead, the lighter shades cleverly mask the moody darkness. Such is the case with “Don’t Bring Me Coffee,” a heavy metal stadium anthem fit for a lazy, sunny Sunday morning. “ ‘Coffee’ sounds like Bruce Springsteen with a flamethrower,” Van Cleave says, making his bandmates laugh.
“They have that band/family dynamic where they don’t have to speak a lot,” says Cobb, who says he felt an immediate kinship with the band. “They know where to go when they start playing together. … What you’re hearing [on the album] is the band. There’s nothing holding them back. There’s no Pro Tools editing or trickery, it’s just the band playing, and then [me] trying to capture that and drive them as hard as I can.”
But Staebler says there were some intra-band discussions going into the record. “There were key words thrown around. I think someone said ‘space punk.’ ”
“I think the way it came out [sounds] like they’re a rock band that went into outer space, in the best possible way,” Cobb says, keeping it on the cosmic tip.
But the sentiments within the songs on Sleeping are rooted right here on earth, right now.
“It’s just what we’re doing,” Parks says. “Sleeping through the war. It’s like so many terrible things have been happening for so long to so many people, you just wake up every morning and check your Instagram and watch some fuckin’ cat videos and you work your job that you hate, and it’s just furthering all of this other shit that people are doing. And you can just escape it by abusing drinking or any sort of substance, or working too much, or just being disconnected from [what’s going on]. … What’s it like to be a filter in these times?” It’s a question Parks ponders on bluesy, woozy, speak-sing-y album-closer “Guess I’ll Go Live on the Internet.”
On Friday night, All Them Witches will headline Exit/In. The 500-capacity club is comparable to venues the band headlines nationwide, like the Roxy in L.A. and New York’s Bowery Ballroom, but smaller than the up-to-1,200-capacity venues they headline in Europe.
“I’d say 90 percent of the people come up to us and say that they found us on YouTube,” Staebler estimates, saying fans the world over discover their music via the video streaming platform’s “recommended” sidebar. “Even if the people don’t ever buy the album, and they just listen to it on YouTube, at least it gets them to the shows, and they buy T-shirts,” says McLeod.
But this really is one of those records that’s worth buying.
All Them Witches' Sleeping Through the War being pressed at United Record Pressing.
All Them Witches' Sleeping Through the War being pressed at United Record Pressing.
All Them Witches' Sleeping Through the War being pressed at United Record Pressing.
All Them Witches' Sleeping Through the War being pressed at United Record Pressing.
All Them Witches' Sleeping Through the War being pressed at United Record Pressing.
All Them Witches' Sleeping Through the War being pressed at United Record Pressing.
All Them Witches' Sleeping Through the War being pressed at United Record Pressing.
All Them Witches' Sleeping Through the War being pressed at United Record Pressing.
