Rock Eupora’s Clayton Waller
“What has set Rock Eupora aside is the idea that it’s sort of a one-man band, but it’s designed to be played by a band,” says singer and songwriter Clayton Waller, speaking from his Nashville home about his project’s new album Rev. Waller recorded Rev, out March 5, on his own after revising arrangements he’d made earlier to take his live band into the studio. He tells the Scene he even upended the natural order of tracking when he cut it.
“It seems fitting, making this record, the drums would be last, not first,” he says. “The plans for this album drastically changed, and it’s fitting thematically that that was the case.” As he’d done for previous Rock Eupora albums like 2022’s Pick at the Scab and its eponymous 2018 release, Waller made demo recordings. But when it came time to complete Rev, he overdubbed other instruments instead of starting fresh.
Waller, who grew up in Jackson, Miss., and recorded the first Rock Eupora album in 2013 while he was a student at Mississippi State University in Starkville, Miss., has lived in Nashville since 2014. He moved to a new place in East Nashville in early 2024, and he tells me Rev is the product of an era of changes in his life.
“Being a gay person is a tricky thing with faith and religion,” Waller says. “I had a falling-out with the church I went to for a long time.” Like Pick at the Scab, which sometimes recalled the complex, Christian-themed rock of Big Star’s Chris Bell, Rev takes a hard look at the way love — and the concept of commitment — can be both beneficial and challenging.
Although Waller, who was born in 1991, says he discovered power pop later in his career, his work recalls the music of bands like Fountains of Wayne and The New Pornographers. Rev begins with a superb burst of power pop titled “Fell in Love for the First Time” and continues with “Railroad (The Show Is the Show),” which rides on a Richard Lloyd-style riff.
Rev is a richly detailed listening experience. Waller’s ingenuity with chord changes and stop-and-start rhythms supports the songwriting, which is first-rate. His songs are suited to the post-Beatles treatment he gives them, but you get the sense they would be equally effective done with an acoustic guitar or a piano. If one of the great power-pop subjects is dealing with the inevitable discontents of romantic love, Rev represents the modernistic side of the genre as well as, say, recent music by The Lemon Twigs or Sheer Mag.
Waller self-released Rev after working with the Florence, Ala., label Single Lock Records on Pick at the Scab. He praises the label for their belief in him, but it could be Waller is another talented Nashville artist whose work sits adjacent to the mainstream while remaining pop-friendly. “I’ve never felt like I was a part of the Nashville music scene,” he tells me.
With help from Angela’s Headache and The Prescriptions, the Pick at the Scab release celebration was a masterful display of power pop
There’s nothing Americana-esque about Waller’s music, which might have hindered the reception of Pick at the Scab. “It was a mixed bag, but ultimately the reason I didn’t return to Single Lock is that it didn’t feel like it changed much,” he says. “It did always feel like they didn’t know what to do with me.”
The Rock Eupora show I saw in 2022 at The East Room, celebrating the release of Pick at the Scab, belied any notion Waller’s work was inward-looking or arcane. Waller’s guitar navigated his tricky changes perfectly, and the band rocked. He says new guitarist Taylor Wafford and new drummer Corey Dill will join him and longtime bassist Matt Wyman for the Rev release show Friday at Drkmttr, which will feature the full-band concept this bandleader has had in his head all along.
