Styrofoam Winos technically began at Belmont University, where its three members met in 2011. But the project’s true birthplace was J.J.’s Market & Cafe, which was a magnet for eccentrics in the heart of Midtown Nashville for more than 40 years before the merciless forces of development caught up with it in 2018.
The Winos’ Lou Turner, Trevor Nikrant and Joe Kenkel all worked at J.J.’s on and off, and played their first show as a band there in 2015. A ceramic mug from the much-missed cafe features prominently in the collage on the cover of Styrofoam Winos, their debut full-length, out Friday on Louisville’s Sophomore Lounge Records. All three members are solo artists too, and on “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a song-poem from Turner’s 2020 LP Songs for John Venn, she references a tattoo of the J.J.’s sign on her thigh. They’ve all got the tat, the Scene learns in talking with the band over Zoom.
“We got them together, us and a couple others, when J.J.’s got torn down,” Nikrant says. “Chaotic in the best way” is how he’ll remember the place. “Lots of characters, weird shit happening, everything breaking, all the time. It was like a portal to a previous Nashville — the oldest building on the block.”
The Winos are a go-to opener for touring acts on shows thrown by local promoter Chris Davis’ adventurous FMRL enterprise. They’re descendants of a long lineage of eccentric Music City groups operating autonomously from the music biz who eschew rigid ideas about genre and what a band even is. Lambchop and The Cherry Blossoms come to mind as antecedents, along with honorary Nashvillians Yo La Tengo. Like YLT, the Winos are a creative union of a couple and their best friend. Nikrant and Turner are engaged.
Each member of the trio has released records under their own name in recent years. The act of sifting through this trove of material to discern where the solo work ends and the Winos begin gets a bit complicated. In addition to Turner’s John Venn, there’s Kenkel’s 2019 release Dream Creator, and Nikrant’s Living in the Kingdom LP, issued in early ’18. Turner’s tunes are the most distinct and immediate — wordy, sprightly and sneakily catchy. Nikrant serves up a pleasing mix of old-school soul and ’90s indie-troubadour stylings. Kenkel’s hazy streams-of-consciousness owe a debt to Bob Dylan vocally and Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks vibe-wise.
Sonically, the members’ solo output has more commonalities than differences. Turner shares one reason why: “We started releasing solo stuff at the same time we formed the Winos, with the idea that we would be each other’s backing bands.” She points out that while Nikrant did study bass in college, none of the Winos knew how to play drums until they joined forces. Now, all three are proficient behind the kit.
In the Venn diagram of the Winos’ influences, Dylan, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen and Smog’s Bill Callahan occupy the middle. As for the outer circles, Kenkel recently started making sample-based music under the alter ego Glam Campbell, which he calls “an outlet for random electronic excursions.” Vintage post-punk like The Raincoats, free jazz, poetry and spoken word are Turner’s other loves; Vegetarian Alcoholic Press out of Milwaukee recently published Shape Note Singing, her latest collection of poems. Nikrant, a Brazilian music aficionado, has been inspired during quarantine to buy “a Brazilian guitar made with rosewood, which they aren’t allowed to make anymore.” “It’s kind of environmentally dubious, but it sounds really good,” he says with a laugh.
The trio’s first batch of tunes written collaboratively as a band, Styrofoam Winos abounds with wry lyrical observations and hooks as unusual as they are undeniable. The punchy and playful “Stuck in a Museum,” sublimely wistful “Once” and soaring, ecstatic “Roygbiv” are fully formed songs, thoughtfully arranged and texturally rich. Other moments feel more off-the-cuff, like the plunky, dissonant instrumental “Open Mic” and scathing gentrification treatise “Skyline Top Removal,” in which Turner sings: “I want to tell you all about my space / It was built on the backs of the underpaid / Isn’t it minimal? / Isn’t it great?”
It’s never entirely clear who wrote what or who’s playing which instrument, which seems by design for the band crowned Best Rock Democracy in the Scene’s 2019 Best of Nashville issue. Wide-ranging yet bizarrely cohesive, Styrofoam Winos is musical osmosis at its purest.
The winds of change in Nashville might’ve felled their old home base of J.J.’s, but the Winos are optimistic that what they’re building here is meant to last. “I would say Nashville is home forever,” Kenkel says, the others nodding in agreement. “We’re always talking about how it would be great to own a venue here one day … to, at an old age, still be a part of this city and fostering some sort of sense of community. I dream of playing at Betty’s in my 70s.”
