All Them Witches’ uncanny ability to improvise its way out of any situation is one of the band’s defining traits. So when the coronavirus torpedoed the Music City-bred heavy-psych masters’ plans to tour their forthcoming sixth LP Nothing as the Ideal — recorded on location at Abbey Road — drummer Robby Staebler naturally went with the flow.
“I’ve actually never been so busy in my life,” Staebler, 35, tells the Scene over the phone from Los Angeles. He’s spent the quarantine months working on music videos for selections from Nothing and completing his side project UVWAYS’ 11-song debut Moses Lynx. In his spare time, he’s been making and selling prints of the hallucinatory Rorschach-inkblot artwork that adorns the Witches’ album covers and show posters (also under the name UVWAYS).
He’s also dating Drea de Matteo, known to Sopranos fans as Adriana La Cerva, star-crossed lover to Michael Imperioli’s troubled Christopher Moltisanti in the HBO mobster classic. Staebler produces de Matteo’s Sopranos rewatch podcast Gangster Goddess Broad-cast, and the couple co-directed the forthcoming music video for Nothing as the Ideal’s expansive closer “Rats in Ruin,” shot on 16mm film.
Staebler, guitarist Ben McLeod, bassist-vocalist Charles Michael Parks Jr. and former keyboard player Allan Van Cleave formed All Them Witches in Nashville in 2012. The quartet shared a house where they honed their hazy, distinctly Southern strain of hard psych rock through relentless rehearsing and recording. They self-released two full-lengths before signing with New West and leveling up with 2015’s stellar Dying Surfer Meets His Maker, which the Scene crowned Best Rock Album in 2016’s Best of Nashville issue.
McLeod is the only Witch still living in Tennessee full-time, but the band has never taken long breaks, even when Van Cleave departed between 2017’s Sleeping Through the War and 2018’s ATW. Not wanting to pass up an offer to hit the road with Primus and Mastodon, the other members quickly enlisted Jonathan Draper as interim keyboardist. After completing the touring cycle for ATW, the group decided to move forward as a three-piece and record what became album No. 6 at a converted church outside Nashville owned by Staebler. Then, a friend offhandedly suggested a historic North West London studio immortalized by Pink Floyd, The Zombies and a certain Liverpudlian foursome.
“The thought of going to Abbey Road had never entered my mind, but it was available,” Staebler says. Their four-album contract with New West was set to expire, so the time seemed right to give it a shot. “We figured out we could afford it, and were like ‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing — let’s do it.’ ”
In February 2020, days before the pandemic would bring the world to its knees, Staebler, Parks, McLeod and producer Mikey Allred crossed the Atlantic and entered Abbey Road’s Studio Two.
“It was kind of grungy, man,” the drummer remembers. “The piano The Beatles [played] was just sitting up against the wall. ... The Dark Side of the Moon board was propped up underneath a stairwell with a ladder leaning on it. ... Hundreds of thousands of dollars’ [worth] of mics were just in these drawers, in piles.”
The trio capitalized on Abbey Road’s arsenal of vintage gear, tracking and mixing eight songs in as many days. Allred, who previously helmed Dying Surfer, worked in tandem with in-house assistant engineer Neil Dawes. The final product is at once locked-in and far-out, crisp and streamlined but also loose and intuitive. Parks’ open-to-interpretation lyrics casually incorporate hundred-dollar words like “oubliette” and “hierophant” — no easy feat — while ambient curiosities culled from Staebler’s home demos help fill the sonic margins formerly occupied by keyboards.
With more than a half-dozen albums in just under a decade, All Them Witches’ potent hybrid of blues, prog and desert rock has ripened into an idiosyncratic body of work that swiftly rejects baseless claims that rock music is dormant, dying or dead. When there’s mutual trust between a band and its fans to take the trip even when the destination isn’t predetermined, the reward is material like Nothing’s smoldering centerpiece “See You Next Fall.” The group wrote and recorded the song on the spot.
“ ‘See You Next Fall’ was the last thing we did at Abbey Road,” Staebler explains. “We had a few hours of studio time before we had to pack up and leave. We’d tracked everything else, so three out of five of us ate some mushrooms and just jammed.” Asked if they took the obligatory crossing-the-street band photo on their way out, Staebler’s answer is a firm “absolutely not,” followed by a hearty laugh.
The jam that spawned “See You Next Fall” would be the group’s last for a while. After flying home, Parks decamped to rural Arkansas, McLeod headed to his home state of Florida and Staebler got to L.A. two days before attempts to slow the spread of COVID-19 shut everything down.
“It’s the longest we’ve gone without seeing each other since the band started,” he says of the involuntary hiatus. “It’s weird not having anything to fight for or work towards at this moment … but at least we made a good record. We’ll see what happens next.”
