A musician of noble visage and infinite cool, Nashville singer, songwriter and guitarist Steve Poulton carries himself like a natural star. But that’s just one of the many things he is. If you’ve caught Poulton on a night when he leads his avant-soul band Altered Statesman thorough a set of his elegant, post-Curtis Mayfield songs, or seen him sitting in on bass or guitar with progressive Nashville musicians like Spodee Boy or Eve Maret, you’ve witnessed an artist doing his work in his chosen element. Poulton, who lives on Nashville’s West Side, is also a soul performer — a poet of the blues whose music describes a gritty, louche Nashville that isn’t likely to cater to tourists.
Poulton has just released the six-song cassette Tried as Adults with Altered Statesman. Most of the band’s music hasn’t been widely available for years. Poulton is nearing completion of a Bandcamp page that includes Tried along with much of the group’s back catalog, and they will mark the occasion with a set at The Basement on Wednesday.
Like many great Nashville artists, Poulton juggles several roles, and he might be that stock character in Nashville mythology — the musician who is underappreciated both at home and elsewhere. Lately, though, Altered Statesman seems to be coming into its own. In March, the band played a well-received set at Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival, and they’ve been recording new music at a speedy rate. Poulton sounds fresh for someone who has put together various lineups of Altered Statesman since 1998. Tried as Adults is Poulton all grown up, and the record captures the approach of a band that honors Detroit soul, Memphis blues and Nashville sleaze.
In his 30-year career, Poulton has worked with great players from Nashville and elsewhere, but the current edition of Altered Statesman favors an elastic groove that travels into Delta blues territory and post-blaxploitation space. The rhythm section — drummer Robert Crawford and bassist Ron Eoff — create the groove, while Poulton, guitarist T.J. Larkin and multi-instrumentalist Jason Goforth make it signify. Tried as Adults feels unstudied even when the group’s arrangements fuse late Motown and various post-trip-hop experiments. Their style is the result of the band’s real-time practice, as Poulton tells us.
“What is cool is, all the elements I hear that would be involved, there are people around me who are totally capable [of realizing them],” Poulton says, speaking at his home, where we’ve been listening to the soul, funk and ’80s and ’90s hip-hop records he favors. “These motherfuckers have shit going on I can’t even do. I like things to be kind of broke down — and I like jazz and blues and folk music, and early R&B and early hip-hop music.”
Poulton was born in Cedar City, Utah, on April 27, 1970. He moved with his family to Montana and then East Lansing, Mich., where his father finished his teaching degree. They relocated to Nashville in 1975, and Poulton enrolled at Belmont University after he graduated from high school. He met a group of Belmont students who had come to Nashville from Lexington, Ky., and they formed a band that generated enough traction to get signed to SBK Records, a label with an international footprint. The project fizzled out, but it got Poulton out of Nashville.
“Richard Gottehrer came to visit us at what was called Elliston Square at the time,” says Poulton. The venue he’s referring to later became The End. Gottehrer is a hit pop songwriter, co-founder of Sire Records and entertainment distribution company The Orchard, and a producer known for his work with Blondie and others. “So we all dropped out of music school, and those dudes were from Kentucky, and I moved up there.”
Eventually, Poulton landed in Dayton, Ohio. He began playing solo shows, and formed the first version of Altered Statesman in 1998 with drummer Matt Espy and other Dayton musicians. After Poulton moved back to Nashville in 2001, Altered Statesman recorded and released a string of superb EPs and singles. On the 2002 Listen & Feel track “Favorite Phrase,” Poulton’s legato vocals evoke Elvis Costello’s, and the song itself is a Costello-like reworking of soul.
By the time I caught up with Poulton to write about Altered Statesman’s 2008 self-titled full-length for the Scene, I had become an admirer of the band. I saw Poulton & Co. as one of the best of the post-indie wave of Nashville bands like Silver Jews and Lambchop (whose keyboardist Tony Crow played on Altered Statesman), combining Chicago-style post-rock with Nashville post-rock — which tended more toward country and R&B. The record featured producer and guitarist Joe V. McMahan, who has cut albums with Kevin Gordon, another R&B-influenced Nashville singer-songwriter.
Most of the sessions for Tried as Adults took place at Nashville’s Sundog Studios with producer and engineer Michael Esser, whose expertise the band praises. (Some of the record was also cut at another studio called Strange Bird, as well as at Poulton’s house, dubbed The Den of Ubiquity.) Tried is both old-fashioned and bracingly post-post-modern, as the album’s opener, “All of the Guns on West 3rd Street,” demonstrates. The song is modified Delta blues, paying homage to Robert Johnson, Johnny Shines and Captain Beefheart circa Strictly Personal. The band swings through its changes, with Crawford driving the song’s shuffle rhythm.
“Everybody in this band — numerous times — has said that when they come to this band, if it’s a new tune or if it’s an old tune, they can play whatever they think should be played, from inside,” Crawford says. He meshes effortlessly with Eoff on another recent track, “Sidney,” a brilliant slice of futuristic soul that isn’t on Tried as Adults.
Eoff toured and recorded with The Cate Brothers Band, Arkansas rockers who played in a style similar to The Band’s. He left them to move to Nashville in 1988, when he began backing Louisiana-born singer and accordionist Jo-El Sonnier. As Eoff says, Poulton takes a democratic approach to recording: “He’ll present it, and we’ll start messin’ with it. We start to come up with something, and Steve says, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’ We stir up the pot, and then we see what it tastes like.”
Tried as Adults also features Larkin’s guitars and Goforth’s blues harmonica licks, plus woodwinds by JayVe Montgomery and Randy Leago and keys by Jimmy Matt Rowland. Live, the band commands a groove that reaches into R&B’s past. Poulton has been including George Clinton’s 1967 Parliaments tune “All Your Goodies Are Gone” in his sets for years, and he sings it like he understands the song’s message. “All Your Goodies” is fatalistic wisdom — and also a song that quotes and updates Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.”
The name Altered Statesman is fitting: Poulton has turned blues and soul to his own purposes, and his music represents a Nashville sensibility that resists the pull of conventional Americana, singer-songwriter worship and retro-soul. You might not find Altered Statesman’s name in the materials the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp. distributes. In fact, he’s not wedded to the name and the images it evokes.
“I really kind of want to retire that name, actually,” he says. “Honestly, I want to start a new band with those same people, and call it something else.”
