After life brought Stamey full circle back to Chapel Hill, his studio work brought him full circle back to the artist’s chair. Developing relationships with a number of musicians made him eager to apply their talents to his own songs. As someone who writes to the project rather than having a backlog of material lying around, he composed a bunch of new songs, some of which he shelved in favor of older fare (“14 Shades Of Green”, “Alive”) that he’d previously recorded in very different arrangements.
Despite the southern spin of both the title and the musicianship, standout tracks such as “14 Shades Of Green” and “Ride” have all the pop ebullience of his dB’s work, while “The Sound You Hear” (with Ryan Adams) and “In Spanish Harlem” (with Tift Merritt) reflect his maturation as a songwriter who extends the inspiration he draws from the ’60s rather than simply recycling it.
In the latter song, Stamey namechecks the Ben E. King/Phil Spector classic to evoke a mythic soundscape and the wonder it elicits within a couple of kids committed to exploring it. “I think that song is about the way that pop music can totally inspire you to chase your dreams, be they realistic or not,” says Merritt.
“I knew the feeling I had when I went to New York, and my eyes were so wide to be there,” says Stamey. “So I wrote it about that feeling, but from the point of view of two kids who I think are from Brazil. They think Phil Spector is in New York; they think Kenny Burrell played on the record — he didn’t. And the Shirelles didn’t play with Phil Spector, so there are a lot of things in the song that are wrong, but it doesn’t matter. They’re in the land of Spanish Harlem, and the way the reverb sounds on that record is the place they want to be.”
Despite his decades of experience in the studio, Stamey maintains that the biggest problem with Travels In The South is its lack of a producer (none is credited). Where lawyers insist that an attorney who represents himself has a fool for a client, Stamey apparently feels the same applies to musicians, though fans will have trouble finding any flaws in the production.
“There definitely was no pilot on this record,” he says. “We would play, but there wasn’t even an engineer. My friends tried to help, but the sessions were rudderless. And then, Jefferson Holt, whom I’d known from the R.E.M. days [when Holt managed that band], happened to hear what we’d been doing and really liked it, even though it was in an unfinished state. And he jumped in and was very clear. He put it all together and became like the producer right at the end, even though he didn’t have that credit.”
While Stamey points with some pride to “Kierkegaard” and “Ride” as tracks he felt good about, he seems even more excited about his subsequent instrumental remix project, “The Speed Of Sound”, a four-movement “pop suite.” It’s available as a limited-edition bonus disc with the first run of Travels In The South.
“I was going to do like a Stack O’ Tracks version of Travels In The South,” he says, in reference to the Beach Boys curiosity from the late ’60s, “where you just cut off all the vocals, and then I started redoing a lot of the instrumental parts. So it’s like a remix, but not in a DJ Spooky kind of way. It’s kinda Muzak, very satisfying and so different from the regular record that I’m really enjoying it. I think it’s kinda great.”
In that Beach Boys’ vein, let’s end with this coda emailed to me by my editor and friend Peter Blackstock, who has been monitoring Stamey’s music while living in North Carolina:
“Recently there’s been this kind of weird cross-breed going on between Thad Cockrell and a young indie-pop band Roman Candle that Chris is producing for Hollywood Records; a strangely fruitful meeting-of-the-genres partnership that in some ways personifies Stamey’s aesthetic and ear for good music. They had a collaborative three-night live-recording project that Stamey organized last month at a little bar in Carrboro called Tyler’s, where they each did some of their own material and collaborated on a few covers.
“There was a real defining Stamey moment for me during those shows. Roman Candle and Thad had worked up a version of ‘God Only Knows’, and they went through it a few times trying to get all those weird chord and time changes right. As it got to the end of the song, they would signal to the crowd of 40-50 people to sing along. The band motioned for the crowd to gradually fade out their singing, and brought their instrumental volume down as well. And then, strikingly, with all the instruments and all the crowd’s singing faded away, came this one voice, loud and clear: ‘God only knows what I’d be without you.’
“We all turned around and it was Stamey, there at the mixing board. It was almost as if he was so taken by the moment that he had to let it ring out just one more time.”
Through the 1970s, ND senior editor Don McLeese owned Johnny B. Goode Records in suburban Chicago — part of that “really cool little club” which sold Sneakers and Chris Stamey records.
