Mark Harrison, who has lived in Nashville for a quarter-century, doesn’t come across like a typical Nashville rocker. In fact, you might mistake the guitarist, singer and songwriter for a low-key session cat from the past. Harrison speaks carefully and, when you get to know him, humorously about things like the Nashville music business, Memphis rock ’n’ roll and the imperiled state of modern democracy. He is also a serious golfer who works on his game year-round.
Still, Harrison is one of Nashville’s greatest rockers, and one of the few remaining exponents of Memphis power pop, a form specific to the Bluff City that’s known today via 1970s records by Big Star, Van Duren and Tommy Hoehn. Harrison has led one of Nashville’s finest bands, Snakehips, for more than three decades, and his new solo album Way Out!, credited to Mark Harrison and the Happy Tramps, combines R&B grooves with post-1960s songwriting. Like his work with Snakehips, Way Out! takes you down the highway toward Memphis, but you might end up making a few unplanned stops.
Harrison began recording Way Out! in late 2016, early in the Trump era. As he says via phone from his Nashville home, he didn’t set out to make an overtly political album. Way Out! doesn’t come across that way, but some of Harrison’s music — Snakehips’ 2012 song “Tennessee,” for example — seems political in its analysis of the effects of capitalism on culture.
“We did a session in December, and Trump had just gotten elected,” Harrison says. “Suffice to say, after that, I kind of, like, was depressed. I thought, ‘This is not gonna be good.’ ” Harrison cut the initial tracks for Way Out! in Memphis with producer and guitarist Doug Easley, whose credits include albums by Pavement and Sonic Youth. Harrison resumed work on the record in 2020, collaborating long-distance with Easley. Some of the tracks were recorded at Harrison’s home and then sent to Easley for additional work. Harrison also recorded at Silver Space, a Nashville studio owned by his brother Price Harrison, himself a power popper who plays guitar in Snakehips and leads his own band, Sour Ops.
As Mark Harrison tells me, Easley’s contributions to Way Out! proved essential to the process of making the record. Their relationship goes back to Harrison’s days in Memphis in the 1980s, when he learned from the likes of Alex Chilton and Tav Falco, who were playing around town in the avant-rockabilly band Tav Falco’s Panther Burns. Harrison, who grew up in Murfreesboro, went to Memphis in 1981 to attend Southwestern at Memphis, now called Rhodes College, and he says he got the kind of musical education that would be inconceivable in Nashville — or just about anywhere else on the planet.
Playing guitar on a track that would end up on the Panther Burns’ 1984 full-length Now!, Harrison got introduced to a wild new way of making records. “The thing that I played on [for Now!] was done live at the Antenna Club, and we just went down there one night and did it, and Doug recorded it,” Harrison recalls. “That’s the first time I ever met Doug, and I had never heard the songs before.”
Harrison formed the first version of Snakehips in the late ’80s during a brief sojourn in Nashville. As he told Memphis Flyer writer John Floyd in 1994, shortly after the release of Snakehips’ first album Lit: “Nashville was becoming very cheesy. … The bands up there at that time were all concerned with getting signed, as opposed to making music. And that’s not really where we were coming from; we just liked bashing out stuff.”
Harrison moved back to Memphis in 1989, and returned to Nashville in 1997. After he made the move to Nashville, Harrison and Snakehips released a series of albums that includes 2012’s Must Be Present to Win and 2015’s Left for Dead. On songs like Left for Dead’s “Break Me,” Harrison & Co. achieve a concise style that derives from the work of Hoehn and Big Star founder Chris Bell, complete with Harrison’s terse guitar licks and allusive lyrics.
Way Out! continues in the vein of the Snakehips records, and Harrison and Easley play guitar in the broken-up, rhythm-oriented style of Memphis axmen on the order of Chilton and Steve Cropper. “Believe It or Not” is modified blues that chugs along like something off of guitarist Richard Lloyd’s underrated 2016 album Rosedale. Meanwhile, “El Elle” subtly subverts the familiar chord changes of British Invasion rock. Harrison’s music respects the rhythmic space of Memphis music, and Way Out! registers as power pop that never gets saccharine.
Way Out! shows off Harrison’s songwriting chops, but as you might expect, he doesn’t think like a typical Nashville songwriter. “I don’t really try to write songs,” he says. “Usually, something will just come to me, and then maybe it’ll become a song. I’m not one of these Nashville people. I don’t ever tell people I’m a songwriter. I don’t want to say it.”
