Ahead of Friday’s release of Intelligent Design Flaw, the second solo album from longtime Mock Orange bass player Zachary Thompson Grace, I dropped by Grace’s South Nashville home studio Self-Help International to chat about the LP, a 10-year labor of love for the 39-year-old musician and engineer. Asked if he thinks the record shares some musical DNA with Mock Orange — the Southwestern Indiana indie-rock long-haulers he’s played with since 2002 — Grace shoots a puzzled look from across the control room. “I think it couldn’t be further,” Grace says. “But I guess it’s in the same world.”
To untangle the band and Grace’s solo work, we rewind to his upbringing in pancake-flat Evansville, Ind., in the early 1990s. Across the street from his family’s house was a cow pasture; across the cow pasture lived Mock Orange main man Ryan Grisham. “If the light in his garage was on,” he says, “I’d go over there.”
That short walk would change Grace’s life. He was 12 at the time. Grisham and his bandmates, bassist Brandon Chappell and drummer Heath Metzger, were teenagers.
“When they played me Nirvana and Dinosaur Jr., it was like ‘game over,’ ” remembers Grace. “I got a guitar and a distortion pedal, and suddenly there was possibility.” He and some of the Orange-men’s younger brothers formed a band called Polly Fitzpatrick, practicing on their gear and opening their gigs. “We were too young to tour, but in Evansville there’s absolutely nothing to do, so we played. We didn’t see it as a gimmick — we felt like a legit band.”
While Mock Orange hit the road behind their 1998 emo-core classic Nines and Sixes and its 2000 follow-up The Record Play, Grace was earning his recording and touring stripes in The Dustin Change, an indie-rock combo. For their 2001 album Soundtrack to a Chessmatch, The Dustin Change sought out an old friend and fellow Hoosier — Newburgh, Ind., native Jeremy Ferguson. The LP was an early project for Ferguson’s then-fledgling Nashville studio Battle Tapes Recording.
That year, Chappell bowed out of Mock Orange to focus on his family. Grisham, Metzger and guitarist Joe Asher didn’t have to look far for a replacement. With Grace in the fold, the foursome put out a trio of LPs over the next decade: 2004’s knotty, epic Mind Is Not Brain, 2006’s Ferguson-recorded Captain Love and 2011’s Disguised as Ghosts, which Grace produced. The bassist also made his first solo foray in 2010 with A Name and a Shape, and had started work on a second.
Even as Grace was thriving creatively, he was out in the weeds personally. After a “horribly dark” year living with his now-ex-wife in Carbondale, Ill., he relocated to Nashville at the urging of another transplanted Evansvillian: Aaron Distler, then drummer for poppy alt-rockers Heypenny. (He’d later go on to be comic Ralphie May’s personal assistant, and after May’s death, launched pasta and baked-goods purveyor Mr. Aaron’s Goods.) Landing on his feet with a stint as Heypenny’s touring guitarist-keyboardist, Grace began building a résumé as an engineer. With Mock Orange slowing down, he filled the playing void by joining bands like the flannel-flying Efforts and ’70s-rock-inspired Shut Up.
Now an indie-rock legacy act, Mock Orange resurfaced in 2016 with its sixth LP Put the Kid on the Sleepy Horse, issued by San Diego’s Topshelf Records, and returned twice to Japan. They’ve enjoyed sustained popularity in Japan since their early years, not unlike how European tours have consistently helped Nashville collective Lambchop break even.
In between recording clients at Self-Help International — which spans the subterranean half of the split-level house where Grace lives with his wife L.E. (also Mock Orange’s manager) and ginger tabby cat Wallace — the musician-producer chipped away at the follow-up to A Name and a Shape he’d begun writing a decade earlier. Last year, under quarantine, he finally finished it.
“I was really grappling with what I was tying up here,” he explains. “When I started on [Intelligent Design Flaw] I lived in a different city. Had a different wife. Different jobs. Different lifestyle. And through all this change, my life was recorded.”
Revisiting the raw angst of Carbondale-era material like “Nothing at All” used to unnerve Grace, but now he leans into it. New songs like the LP’s first and last tracks “Canary Never Sang” and “Bathe in the Light of the Sun,” meanwhile, spilled right out. After four months of intensive mixing, the 11-song set developed its sonic identity.
“I wanted it to be a colorful guitar album,” Grace says. “Bright sound, bright artwork … psychedelic in a way that’s like … white-trash psychedelia.”
Intelligent Design Flaw satisfies those aims, swinging from cacophonous power pop (“Get Real,” which features soaring guitar-monies — and cowbell!) to nervy New Wave (“Never Had It So Good”) and lysergic alt-country (“Slapstick Tragedy”). A homespun collage of recorded and synthesized instruments, beats and textures, with Grace’s reedy vocals acting as the glue, it revels in being unburdened by deadlines. It communicates the familiarity of a home studio one can navigate blindfolded — and the relief in moving forward.
“I wrote a lot of this record while at odds with myself, so it felt freeing to complete it,” Grace says. “In bands, I’m a journeyman. I got into producing because I’m a facilitator. But I had to make something personal … which I guess I do every 10 years.”
