Playlist: A Beech House Retrospective

After studying audio engineering at Florida’s Full Sail University, Mark Nevers moved to Nashville in 1986 and promptly landed an apprenticeship at Franklin, Tenn., recording studio The Castle, where he would later work on hits by such luminaries as George Jones and Alan Jackson. Nevers commenced making his own post-punk, post-country sounds in a 1940s bungalow at 2021 Beech Avenue, not very far from Music Row. Earlier this month, Nevers closed Beech House and moved his family to Pawleys Island, S.C.

“It had been a cassette recording, eight-track recording studio forever, since ’86,” he tells the Scene. Obtaining an MCI 16-track, 2-inch tape machine in 1996, he gradually perfected the warm sound Beech House would become known for (“I would say it’s kind of woody and trashy — trashy wood,” he laughs), and the addition a few years later of a vintage Sphere Eclipse 28-channel mixing desk further enhanced his sonic options. Although these days he’s an in-demand mixer and producer, Nevers’ first mixing job was for English soul singer Beverley Knight’s 2007 Music City Soul, a Beech House production.

This list compiles 15 classic Beech House productions recorded from 1989 through 2014. Nevers cut over 400 albums at Beech House Recording, including fine full-lengths by Knight, Mississippi-born soul singer George Soulé, roots rocker Mando Saenz and Nashville singer-songwriter and Joni Mitchell disciple Caroline Peyton. Among his unreleased productions is what he describes as a “real big and real quadraphonic” record he cut a couple of years ago with Alabama rockers Dexateens. For that matter, the work Nevers did with his various bands — Marky and the Unexplained Stains, The Meateaters, CYOD and The Dowsers — deserves a retrospective, and as Nashville enters a new era of rock that Nevers helped create, maybe his ’80s and ’90s recordings will see the light of day.

1. Marky and the Unexplained Stains, “My Dear,” from Marky and the Unexplained Stains, Carlyle, 1990.

Featuring Nevers writing the band’s name in mustard on Beech House’s porch, “My Dear” documents the neurotic state of Old Nashville in its death throes. Marky and the Unexplained Stains flirted with success, but this Ramones-style band failed to storm the charts.

2. The Dowsers, “Phantom of the Opry,” unreleased, 1995.

Moving on from Marky and the Unexplained Stains, which released two full-lengths in the early ’90s, Nevers formed The Dowsers, a band which seems to have played exactly one show, in 1995 at Nashville club 12th and Porter. The Dowsers featured the contributions of Kansas City-born keyboardist Tony Crow, who would go on to be a member of Lambchop and an essential Nevers collaborator. Crow describes The Dowsers as “this weird guitar orchestra that was a lot more country, and designed to show off some of Mark's late-night poetry."

In the band’s “Phantom of the Opry,” Nevers sings about a Kentucky-born Hank Williams acolyte named Jerry Dean, whose rejection by Nashville’s country music business drives him to set fire to a CMA Awards show in order to set free Williams’ tortured spirit. “The flames ripped through the theater, and panic was everywhere,” Nevers sings sarcastically. “No one seemed ready to die for country music tonight. Then Hank’s ghost appeared.”

3. Vic Chesnutt, “Replenished,” from The Salesman and Bernadette, Fiction, 1998.

Backed by Nashville alt-country band Lambchop, the Florida-born singer-songwriter deals in innovative songcraft that makes its own rules.

4. Lambchop, “Up With People,” from Nixon, Merge, 2000.

Nevers cites this as the first true Beech House production, and it may be Lambchop’s definitive recording. Nevers also helmed Lambchop’s superb 2012 full-length Mr. M, which may be the band’s most thematically satisfying release.

5. Andrew Bird, “Lull,” from Weather Systems, Righteous Babe, 2003.

Nevers’ airy production gave Bird’s oddball pop confections breathing room, and this superb tune is Bird at his breeziest and most compelling.

6. Bonnie Prince Billy, “New Partner,” from Sings Greatest Palace Music, Drag City, 2004.

“That was a strange period of time, when those guys were are still doin’ it, and they were affordable,” Nevers says about the famed Nashville session cats who played on Will Oldham’s foray into straight Music Row country, Sings Greatest Palace Music, which Oldham recorded under his Bonnie Prince Billy sobriquet. Pianist Hargus Robbins and drummer Eddie Bayers help recast previously recorded Oldham tunes in a manner Nevers remembered well from his days at The Castle.

7. Bobby Bare Sr., “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,” from The Moon Was Blue, Dualtone, 2005.

I saw Nevers play psychedelic guitar on stage with the great country singer during a 2005 performance of this song. Nevers’ production of Bare’s The Moon Was Blue examplifies his post-countrypolitan aesthetic, and this version of a classic Shel Silverstein tune is one of my favorite Beech House recordings.

8. Lone Official, “Le Coq Sportif,” from Tuckassee Take, Honest Jon's, 2006.

Led by Kentucky-born songwriter Matt Button, Lone Official recorded an interesting debut before coming back with this masterful Television-meets-Nashville collection of songs about horse racing and bar fights.

9. Imaad Wasif, “Fade in Me,” from Imaad Wasif, Kill Rock Stars, 2006.

Nevers’ masterful use of the characteristics of Beech House make this track by Canadian-born singer-songwriter a superb example of his recording aesthetic, which makes allowances for the physical space musicians need to do their best work. “I think they didn’t care that humans were in this perfect space,” he says about designers of conventional studio setups. “They didn’t take in the aesthetics of what a person’s emotions are, so you’d be in this dark, fucked-up place you didn’t feel like being creative in, even though it’s acoustically perfect.”

10. Simone White, "Mary Jane," I Am the Man, Honest Jon's, 2007.

This spare, haunted song by Hawaiian-born singer-songwriter Simone White stands as a shimmering moment in the annals of Beech House.

11. Charlie Louvin, “Darling Corey,” from Sings Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs, Tompkins Square, 2008.

After cutting 2007's acclaimed Charlie Louvin at Beech House, the great country singer returned to record a superb collection of doom-laden tunes that were perfect for his hard-bitten persona.

12. The Clientele, “Bookshop Casanova,” from God Save the Clientele, Merge, 2007.

One of Beech House's few forays into British Invasion-style rock, God Save the Clientele is one of the most overtly pop records Nevers cut at the studio.

13. Silver Jews, “What Is Not but Could Be If,” from Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, Drag City, 2008.

Working with head Silver Jew David Berman was a fascinating experience, as Nevers remembers. "He's such a faucet of creativity that it's never done," he says. "You can't convince him that that line's fine: 'You don't need to do it again.' And actually, during the sordid years of drugs and cocaine, it was actually easier to work with him than it was with the cleaned-up Berman."

14. Candi Staton, "I Feel the Same," from Who's Hurting Now?, Honest Jon's, 2009.

Staton recorded her critically acclaimed 2006 full-length His Hands at Beech House and returned three years later to cut this fine follow-up. Roy Agee's crisp horn arrangement enhances Staton's reading of a classic tune by folk-blues singer Chris Smither.

15. Laura Cantrell, "Driving Down Your Street," from No Way There From Here, Thrift Shop Recording, 2014.

Nashville-born country singer-songwriter Laura Cantrell cut her 2011 full-length Kitty Wells Dresses: The Songs of the Queen of Country Music and this superb 2014 album with Nevers, who had met Cantrell while touring with Lambchop. "I've known her since the early days of Lambchop, ’cause we'd always meet up with her in New York when we were on tour," Nevers told me in 2011. "You know how ignorant and stupid I am — I saw her play at a bar there in New York, and I was like, 'Damn, that doesn't sound like Yankee country.' She said, 'Well, I'm not from here,' and told me she was from Nashville. It made sense."