The Lees of Memory in the studio
A moon shot, a no-doubter, a goner, a deep drive — for those not up on their baseball lingo, these are all terms for a ball hit extraordinarily far. We’re not talking merely over the fence, but to the upper deck or out of the park entirely. Moon Shot is also the title of the fourth full-length album from The Lees of Memory, the Volunteer State alt-rock trio featuring Superdrag co-founders John Davis and Brandon Fisher along with drummer Nick Slack.
“I guess it’s kinda cocky, huh?” says Davis. “Like calling your shot.” The singer-songwriter-guitarist is an avowed fan of the San Francisco Giants and, during a normal summer, a regular at Nashville Sounds games.
With Moon Shot, Davis came to play. The last album from the veteran tunesmith that sounded this hi-fi was Superdrag catalog standout In the Valley of Dying Stars, released 20 years ago. The common denominator: producer-mixer Nick Raskulinecz, a Grammy winner for his work on Foo Fighters’ 2002 LP One by One. Moon Shot was recorded partially in Davis’ Inglewood jam room and partially at Rock Falcon off Music Row. Davis calls it the first true instance in his career “where my home studio and the big studio got together.” Metro Nashville’s stay-at-home order, which was issued back in March, meant that Raskulinecz was unable to meet the band in person for mixing sessions. Amazingly, he mixed the entire record at his dining-room table.
Power pop, in a nutshell, is sad sentiments in happy packages, and Moon Shot is a reminder of Davis’ mastery of the form. The Superdrag-Lees continuum is full of honest, heartfelt, hard-rocking tunes, but the new ones pack an emotional wallop in the traumatic current moment.
“I’m lonely all the time,” Davis declares on Moon Shot’s soaring opening salvo “Lonely Everywhere.” Via phone from his home in Knoxville, Fisher tells the Scene that “Lonely” set the tone for the entire process of making the record “from the recording to the guitar sounds.”
From the new album Moon Shot, produced by Nick Raskulinecz & John Davis.
Directed & Edited by Adam Jones.
A total of 30 songs were written, and the trio settled on 10 to record. The ones that made the cut dial back the retro-psych trappings of the last Lees record, 2017’s long-form The Blinding White of Nothing at All, with a higher percentage of co-writes. There are flirtations with New Wave punk (“Live Without”), Beatles-esque bops (“Free and Easy”) and even Prince-inspired funk-rock (“Far Beyond”). It is eclectic yet cohesive. When Davis penned two of the album’s centerpieces — the dreamy “No Floor No Ceiling” and the rousing “Crocodile Tears” — on back-to-back days, a lyrical through line began to emerge.
“There’s a lot of really sad songs on this record, which ended up being finished at a pretty sad time in history,” Davis says. “I definitely didn’t mean for it to be a downer, but that’s just what spilled out. ‘No Floor No Ceiling’ I don’t think I spent more than 15 minutes on. It’s close to the surface sometimes.”
A powerful marriage of blurry shoegaze guitars and sunny multipart harmonies, “Crocodile Tears” is an ode to finding healing via music in times of grief. As the chorus goes: “The radio might help when you feel blue / That’s what rock ’n’ roll’s supposed to do / Records lift me up when I can’t move / That’s what rock ’n’ roll’s supposed to prove.”
“That could be the corniest line of all time or the most triumphant line of all time, I’m not sure,” says Davis. “I just wanted to sing it like Robert Pollard would.”
With Davis in Nashville and Fisher in Knoxville, exchanging drafts of songs and rewriting sections as they saw fit — as opposed to making real-time suggestions and edits — allowed for material to evolve in surprising ways. The plangent, Teenage Fanclub-esque verse of “Drift Into a Dream,” for example, is Fisher; the bridge — a baroque, psychedelic vocal mélange — is all Davis. “It comes out of nowhere, but it’s intentional,” Fisher says. “Transport the listener somewhere, then come back.”
Cover art: The Lees of Memory, 'Moon Shot'
One would be remiss not to mention Moon Shot’s attention-grabbing artwork. It was drawn by illustrator and friend-of-the-band Stirling Snow, with an assist from DC Comics colorist Mark H. Roberts. Inspired by Thin Lizzy’s iconic Jailbreak and RZA’s Bobby Digital in Stereo album art (both by comic-book artists), it could easily pass for a vintage hip-hop album cover or sci-fi movie poster. Fans will want to own it on vinyl. Speaking of which, the physical LP of Moon Shot is still in the works at the pressing plant, but the band fast-tracked the release to streaming platforms — you’ll be able to hear and preorder it via Bandcamp on Friday.
“We always seem to release records at a terrible time, no matter what we do,” says Davis with a laugh, remembering how Superdrag dropped its 2009 swan song Industry Giants at the nadir of the last global recession. “This time, I have no idea what to expect. But I just feel like it would be a mistake to just sit on it and wait for a good time to put it out. I don’t know if that’s coming.”
