Back row from left: Michael Eades, Jason Bullock, Jeremy Ferguson, Dave Paulson, Keith Lowen
Front: Rollum Haas, Ryan Norris
The Privates never made the sort of music one might associate with a greatest hits album. For one thing, they didn’t really have any hits. During their initial run from 2003 to 2010, the quartet of singer-guitarist and songwriter Dave Paulson, keyboardist and guitarist Ryan Norris, bassist Keith Lowen and drummer Rollum Haas released a pair of albums and two five-track EPs. They never toured, and their impact was mostly confined to Nashville. But during a formative period in local rock, they built a devoted fan base in Music City around a catalog that deserves to be celebrated.
“I listen to those records and I’m like, ‘Nothing’s missing,’” Paulson says. Talking with me during recent separate interviews with three-quarters of the band, he has no regrets about their relatively brief tenure. “This is exactly how it was supposed to play out.”
What started as a notion to observe the group’s 20th anniversary led to We Are Really Rocking Now, Haven’t We?, a collection featuring 12 of The Privates’ best studio tracks bookended by two new songs that fit right alongside classics like “You Never Take Me Dancing” and “Pocari Sweat.” Michael Eades’ stalwart Nashville indie YK Records released the LP in August. The band will reunite Saturday for their first show since a one-off in 2013 at The Stone Fox that marked their 10th anniversary. It’ll be at The Basement, where The Privates played in 2008 with New York indie-rock legends The Walkmen, the band they’ve been compared to the most.
The Privates belong to a class of musicians who saw the opportunity to fold and bend the conventions and limitations of rock ’n’ roll to fabricate something simultaneously familiar and fresh. They’re pop weirdos in the spiritual lineage of bands like The Kinks, The Feelies and The Strokes — and, yes, The Walkmen — who are skilled at catching listeners off guard with unexpected key changes and twists in the song structure, whose risks somehow always pay off.
“Every group I’ve been a part of has its idiosyncrasies, but The Privates were the group where everyone’s individualities were at their most amplified and over-the-top,” says Haas. “Dave’s writing is very interesting to me, and I never knew what he was going to bring in. Ryan would always screw with the song in the best way possible. Keith is maybe the most melodic bass player I’ve ever been in a band with, and he has a preternatural ability to write melodies within the song and accent the rhythm.”
There’s also a quality to Paulson & Co.’s ringing riffs that feels like they drank just a bit too much coffee on an empty stomach: anxious, angsty and jerky, shifting around to alleviate their uneasiness and occasionally exploding from the tension into a cathartic blast of noise. It branded the band with a reputation for intensity onstage.
“Not meaning to flex, but our live shows were always great, in my recollection,” says Haas. “We had this weird frantic energy that seemed to translate well live.”
“I have a memory of Rollum vomiting in the middle of a song while never missing a beat,” recalls Norris. “Our performances were pretty strenuous and high-energy.”
In high school around the turn of the millennium, Paulson fronted his ultra-melodic band Esposito. Lowen was in Lifeboy, another rock outfit that was playing the same all-ages rooms around the same time. Close to the time The Privates came together, Paulson formed Character, an instrumental avant-garde project that included Norris on keyboards; meanwhile, Haas was recording and touring with Murfreesboro dynamos The Features. (Word to the wise: Features frontman Matt Pelham’s new project Matt and the Watt Gives opens Saturday’s show.) Norris points out that his Privates bandmates all came from groups Paulson greatly admired, whom he liked as well. “I guess he was a fan of what I did in Character,” Norris says with a chuckle.
“I obviously chose the band I did because of the things I value,” Paulson says. “I did not choose guys who could just get in a band with me and follow directions so I could pursue my dreams. I chose my friends that I liked being around, who inspired me and were just straight-up the best people I knew for the job. And I felt really blessed to have that, you know?”
The group was active during a time when it was common for Nashville rockers to hop bands or play with multiple acts simultaneously. From The Privates’ inception to their amicable decision to quietly wind down, members were spread out across other active commitments including Lambchop, The Pink Spiders and Stone Jack Jones, which interfered with The Privates’ ability to be any member’s main gig.
“With The Privates always kind of being a sporadic, side-project kind of thing — not ever a full-time thing — my mentality was always kind of like we never really broke up,” says Paulson. “Just every once in a while, we can check in and do it again.”
“What I most wanted out of this whole thing was the new songs and to do some new music,” Paulson continues. “Like your classic greatest hits album from back when we were kids. It would be like, ‘Here’s all the songs, plus one new one to make you buy it.’”
The collage on the cover of We Are Really Rocking Now shares a distinct look with The Beatles’ 1990s Anthology sets. And similar to the way the remaining three of the Fab Four fleshed out John Lennon’s demos “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” for those releases, The Privates booked time at frequent collaborator Jeremy Ferguson’s Battle Tapes and tracked the ripper “Don’t Take It Out on Me” and the appropriately nostalgic “Old Times.”
I asked Paulson, now a middle-aged father of two, what it’s like reliving emotions he had and lyrics he wrote nearly half a lifetime ago.
“That’s harder to muster up in your 40s,” Paulson says. “You want to grow and change and evolve. But this was a specific thing that you’re trying to preserve — but also not rehash. It’s tricky.”
There are no plans for more Privates shows after Saturday, but they still aren’t calling it quits.
“We’re like cicadas,” says Paulson. “We basically come back and do the same thing. I assume when all those cicadas get out of the ground, they’re like, ‘Ah, we still got it. Nothing’s changed.’”
