Few rock bands stick around for more than a few years, and even fewer can claim to be doing the best work of their career after three-and-a-half decades. But that’s exactly where the members of Government Cheese find themselves with their new album Love, which is set to hit stores and streaming services on April 29.
The Cheese will preview material from Love at a show on April 23 at The Basement East, and the lineup taking the stage will be the same one the band has had for more than 30 years. That includes the four musicians who led the band to regional fame out of Bowling Green, Ky., in the 1980s — Scott Willis (vocals, guitar), Tommy Womack (vocals, guitar), Billy Mack Hill (vocals, bass) and Joe “Elvis” King (drums) — along with guitarist Viva McQueen. McQueen became a full-fledged member around 1990 after a couple of stints as the band’s roadie, during which he often would sit in with the group at the end of the night.
After a 15-year hiatus, the band reunited in 2010 for some shows in conjunction with the release of Government Cheese 1985-1995, a 43-track anthology that included almost everything they had released on vinyl and CD, as well as some previously unreleased material and alternate takes. They followed that in 2015 with The Late Show, their first album of new material in 20 years. Last year, Willis got the itch to make another record.
“I heard Tommy’s latest, I Thought I Was Fine, and I was like, ‘Holy shit! This rocks,’ ” he says about bandmate Womack’s 2021 release. “ ‘A Little Bit of Sex, Part 2’ rocks as hard as anything out there ever. And I was like, ‘Damn it, I want to do this.’ So I was like, ‘Do you want to do another Cheese record?’ And he always is game, you know — whether it’s the right thing to do or not.
“So I called the rest of the guys and said, ‘Hey, Tommy and I were talking about doing a record. You want to?’ And everybody was like, ‘Fuck yeah!’ But Joe was like, ‘We’re not doing it unless Brad Jones produces it.’ ”
Jones produced The Late Show, and the band previously had worked with him on It’s a Rock ’n’ Roll Party With Government Cheese, their 1995 vinyl single featuring “The Shrubbery Is Dead” backed with “Jailbait.”
“We had recorded ‘Shrubbery’ before, but it just didn’t have the balls we wanted,” Willis says. “Then once we recorded with Brad in ’95, we were like, ‘Oh my God, this guy knows how to make our records pull together and make our songs sound better.’ ”
One of the band’s strengths is there are three writers: Hill, Willis and Womack. For about half a year, the trio shared demos of songs with the entire band via Dropbox — more than 60 songs were considered, according to Hill. “We had a big bucket of songs,” he says.
“It’s kind of the way we’ve always done it,” Willis says. “We’ve never passed a notepad around and traded lyrics. We all had our ideas — we brought pretty much full songs to the band.”
Eventually they shared between 20 and 30 songs with Jones. “He went through and said, ‘Here’s the 11 I picked,’ and then we went back and forth with him,” Willis explains. “A couple songs dropped off, a couple more came on. We were like, ‘Damn it, we need another song.’ Then Tommy came with ‘Love’ at the very end — on the Friday, I think, before we started recording on Monday.”
They recorded the album in September at Alex the Great Recording, which Jones co-owns with Robin Eaton. If Love is their best album, the band gives the producer a good deal of credit.
“Brad arranged the material and suggested licks we should play,” Womack says. “He would say, ‘That’s a good part — but what if we tried this?’ ”
“You’d see him through the window coming back out [into the studio] and go, ‘Oh my God, is he coming for me because he’s going to tell me to change what I’m doing,’ ” Willis says with a laugh.
While Hill, Willis and Womack all agree Love represents their best work, it’s easy to connect the dots from the new material to the band’s earliest recordings in the ’80s. As titles like “Younger Than I Was,” “Wake the Dead,” “So Cliche” and “Rock N Roll Retirement Home” suggest, the irreverence, the humor, the sense of absurdity and the punk ethos that infused their earliest work and attracted an audience of loyal fans is still there. The songs are just a little more grown-up — and better played.
“Will it make the old-time Cheeseheads feel 19 again?” Womack asks. “No. But the [past two] records are the best music we’ve ever made, the most sophisticated we’ve ever made — a lot of the best songs we’ve ever made.”
