Nashville Pop Master R. Stevie Moore Imagines the Future on Afterlife

If you’re the sort of pop fan who likes to hunt for allusions and influences on records, you’ll find plenty of both in Nashville singer and songwriter R. Stevie Moore’s new full-length Afterlife. 

It’s a compendium of everything that Moore — who began releasing his now-famous lo-fi, home-recorded music inspired by British Invasion and late-’60s experimental rock in Nashville a half-century ago — seems to love. 

But Moore is now 67 and, he tells the Scene via email, in less-than-perfect health. He won’t be promoting or touring for Afterlife, a record that ends with the gloomy pronouncement, “The future seems dreadful.” That may well be, but Afterlife is the super-prolific Moore’s best record to date, a fact that anyone interested in rock ’n’ roll would do well to ponder.

Afterlife sums up Moore’s career, which stretches back to 1969, when he released a collection titled On Graycroft. He cut his early work in his native Music City before moving to New Jersey in 1978. An adept of the recordings of Frank Zappa and the one-man-band pastiches of English rocker Roy Wood (whose 1973 album Boulders sports the greatest Everly Brothers imitation ever recorded), Moore hasn’t become a star. Unlike fellow British Invasion obsessives Chris Bell and Marshall Crenshaw, Moore hasn’t recorded a song that encapsulates his talents in a three-minute form, so there’s no “I Am the Cosmos” or “Someday, Someway” in his oeuvre. 

What Moore has done, however, is perfect the delicate art of homage. Despite critical acclaim, popularity has eluded him partly because he loves the music he imitates too much — which doesn’t mean he hasn’t added to the vocabulary created by Zappa, The Beatles, The Beach Boys and half-forgotten oddballs like Soft Machine vocalist Kevin Ayers. 

Compiled by producer, disc jockey and writer Irwin Chusid, who first met Moore in 1978, Afterlife was recorded between 2006 and 2013, mostly in professional studios. “The songs themselves are from various eras, stretching over 40 years,” says Moore. “And yet most are all-new remakes of the oldest ones.” It’s a set of homages that are as deeply affecting as the most melancholy artifacts of the 1960s and early ’70s.

Every song on Afterlife works, but Moore achieves pop satori on “Here Comes Summer Again,” a brilliant Beach Boys-style confection. For Moore, who has obviously absorbed Beach Boys records like 1977’s half-crazed Love You, bliss evaporates like the Old Milwaukee beer he mentions in the song. He remembers girls who lie in the sand and what it felt like to listen to AM radio. He gets the musical and verbal details just right, as he does throughout Afterlife.

Elsewhere, Moore subtly alludes to The Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society in “What Do I Do With the Rest of My Life?” which features the seemingly nonsensical lyrics, “Delores / Are you a Taurus / Wake Forest / Pianosaurus.” Like Roy Wood’s similarly evasive work on Boulders, the song is both gnomic and substantial. 

Afterlife is full of longing for endless summers and the utopian pop of 1967. Yet Moore, who returned home to Nashville in 2010 after spending decades in New Jersey, didn’t intend to make a thematic statement about the passage of time. A pragmatic artist, he set out to make a straightforward pop album he could feel good about.

“The final album playlist was purposefully kept safe, clean and more hi-fi mainstreamy,” he says, “without my usual quirky left turns and lo-fi inserts.”