The conversation had, of course, turned to Shelby Hills. It was the second week of November and there was no avoiding it. The parade of tone-deaf PR about East Nashville's latest Pottery Barn-catalog-turned-subdivision was an easy and appropriate topic. The fate of New Nashville has made many longtime locals tense and riled up, but Joey Kneiser, the Glossary frontman-turned-solo-artist, who's releasing The Wildness this week with appearances at Grimey's and The 5 Spot, just laughs it off.
"There was a reason everybody used to stay in Murfreesboro," Kneiser tells the Scene. "[Nashville] was a fucking dump."
You can hear an immense pride of place in his laugh as he thinks back on Old Nashville. The singer, an East Tennessee native best known for his decade-and-a-half-spanning seven-album discography with archetypal Murfreesboro indie-rockers Glossary, has seen Music City morph from oddball outlier to fashion-forward phenomenon in the two decades since he landed in the center of the state. He was here long before the cranes took over the skyline, before the Battle of Shelby Hills, back when nobody thought Nashville was cool.
"I remember the first time I went to a show at Lucy's Record Shop," he recalls. "It was the first night I was ever in Murfreesboro. We drove to see a show at Lucy's and we brought [my sister], a super just plain-Jane kind of girl. We're leaving the show and somebody did a drive-by pellet-gun shooting and she got hit in the side of the head. We took her to the doctor, and I was, like, damn Nashville is a rough place. Like, goddamn, Nashville is crazy.
"Nowadays it's all hipster beard kids making artisanal spheres of mayonnaise."
You can hear echoes of old, uncool Nashville in the jangle and strum of The Wildness, and you can see its weirdo characters remembered in Kneiser's tales of lovable losers making their way through a callous, uncaring world. The singer boldly declares, "You ain't no one in this town until someone wants you dead" — the first line from album opener "Run Like Hell" — but he does so with an affection and fondness that belies the undercurrent of doom.
On tracks like "Heaven Only Wants Us When We're Dead" and "The Heart Ever Breaking," Kneiser wrestles with the pitfalls of small-town living, the need to escape and the need for self-definition in a place where people prefer you'd stay in your lane. Recorded and produced entirely by the singer himself, with harmonies from longtime bandmate and collaborator Kelly Smith, the album offers a loose, lived-in set of songs that feel as warm and fuzzy as the first fall day you turn on your radiators. It is an album as much rooted in The Band's earthy Americana as it is the playful, philosophical slack-rock of Pavement.
"You know me," Kneiser says. "I'm a music junkie just like everybody else. I listen to everything. I never really had a genre, which was kind of my problem when I was younger — I wanted to do too many things; I wanted to be in all kinds of different bands. I'd be like, 'Ah, man, I want to have a punk band,' and then I'd get into R&B and I'd be like, [lowers voice] 'I need to start an R&B band,' you know?"
And while that might have made the singer's early musical endeavors tough to peg, Glossary spent years in a subliminal space between the indie and alt-country communities before taking its current hiatus. Kneiser's voracious musical appetite has made his more mature works a robust and vibrant listen. While The Wildness maintains the languid shuffle and buttery harmonies that made Glossary one of the area's most enduring stalwarts, the album has a distinct feeling that's distinct from the Glossary oeuvre.
"When Glossary went on hiatus, me and [wife] Jolene moved to Donelson, and I built a little studio in my house and just started recording," Kneiser recalls. "[We] spent two years just recording and making videos of each other. I did so many records, and then I was like, 'I need to put out a record, I haven't put out a record in the longest gap of time.' ... It had been three years since I released anything."
The result is a record that feels more personal and more honest than any of his prior work. Which is impressive, as his work was pretty fucking honest to begin with. When he sings, "Go find what you love / and let it kill you, boy" on The Wildness' woozy, soulful "To My Younger Self," it's tough to shake the feeling that the losers won. But when it all shakes out, the folks who put their chips on a small town with a slim chance of being cool would come out ahead of the game.
"The whole idea was to get back, back to the beginning, what got me into music in the first place," Kneiser says. "Just make some shit for me."
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