The Eagle Has Left The Building is The Prudish Few’s debut, but some of the material has been kicking around since 2013. The members’ ties to underground rock in Middle Tennessee date back even further — about 25 years. Bassist Mike Shepherd and drummer Jay Leo Phillips arrived at MTSU’s recording industry program in the mid-’90s and spent formative nights watching bands at Exit/In, the legendary Lucy’s Record Shop and Indienet, a spot that followed in Lucy’s footsteps. In the early 2000s, Shepherd, Phillips and Prudish Few singer-songwriter Todd Kemp all wrote for the snarky, local scene-chronicling webzine nashvillezine.com, which inspired the Scene’s then-music editor Tracy Moore to launch this very blog.
From 1998 to 2010, Kemp sang and played drums in the power-pop combo The Carter Administration. Concurrently, Phillips fronted post-hardcore outfit Apollo Up! Shepherd played bass in Apollo Up!, and he's one of two bassists (along with his wife Sarah) in Tower Defense. Phillips has also played with local indie great Beth Cameron in Forget Cassettes, and did a two-year stint with onetime mega-buzz-band …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, appearing on the Texans’ 2009 album Century of Self.
In Prudish Few, Phillips moves behind the kit while Kemp switches over to guitar. Recorded by the reliable Jeremy Ferguson at Battle Tapes and issued on Michael Eades’ YK Records, Eagle’s 11 tunes are concise, angular and sneakily catchy for being mostly linear. Kemp, who teaches music theory at Belmont University, has called it “chamber pop,” but to me it’s more like if you put English mod heroes The Jam in Chapel Hill in the ’90s. Eades’s description, shared in an email, also works: “If They Might Be Giants and [D.C. math-pop trio] Faraquet got together.”
Ahead of Eagle’s release Friday — see their website and Bandcamp or your favorite local record store for a copy — I caught up with Kemp, Phillips and Shepherd (and Shepherd’s majestic 15-year-old cat Houdini) on an after-work Zoom call.
The band has been together longer than you would think for a band putting out its first full-length.
Jay Leo Phillips, drums: You’re exactly right.
Mike Shepherd, bass: For two years before Jay joined, Todd and I messed around in his attic with some songs.
Todd Kemp, guitar and vocals: More like, Mike kept his bass at my house for two years.
MS: We played together three or four times. We tried bringing in a drummer. It was fine. Then we didn’t practice again for another two years.
JLP: I’d been living in Germany, but moved back to Nashville.
MS: Todd reached out to me, said, “Do you want to try that again? Do you know any drummers?” I said, “Jay’s back in town.”
JLP: “And he knows some drummers!” [laughs] I was always a big fan of Todd’s drumming, so I was self-conscious at first. I’d never played anything that swung before.
TK: You’ve got two guys who are not playing instruments they’re naturally good at, so there was a learning curve. The songs are hard to play, and to remember.
What’s the oldest song on the LP?
TK: I wrote what became “Forms on Forms,” “Hot Under the Collar” and “Song Written on Shakespeare’s Birthday” before we really got started playing. After that I wrote “Deep Time” and was like “OK, this is what this band should sound like.”
How would you describe that sound?
TK: It comes from a power-pop place, but it goes a different way. I hate hearing the same thing twice.
MS: The songs are short, but don’t feel short when you’re playing them.
TK: We try to eschew any idea of prog. At all.
JLP: It’s definitely the hardest music I’ve ever had to learn to play. It’s not technically challenging, but it is compositionally.
TK: But it’s not avant-garde. It’s catchy music.
Where do you get your lyrical inspiration from, Todd?
MS: The progressive collapse of Western civilization?
TK: That’s it. Thanks, Mike.
Can you talk about your choice to donate some of the proceeds from the album to all-ages venue Drkmttr?
MS: I literally would not be talking to you tonight about rock ’n’ roll music if I didn’t have a DIY, all-ages space to play music at when I was a kid. There was a long period of time when an all-ages club that felt safe and welcoming didn’t exist in Nashville — really, from when Lucy’s closed in ’97 and after IndieNet closed in 2002, to when Drkmttr opened on Dickerson.
JLP: Apollo Up! played a lot at The Muse, which was next door to the world’s largest adult bookstore — not where you want to drop your kids. It never felt quite right.
MS: Having a place where anyone can show up and say “fuck Nazis,” or “I’m queer” or “I’m trans,” play weird music or normal music, speak their mind, speak their heart and be exposed to other people doing the same, is so fucking important.
