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Ryan Davis has a way with words, and the direction they take often yields strangely insightful surprises. Vocally, he gets a lot of comparisons to the late David Berman of Silver Jews and Purple Mountains, and when Davis sings in his burly drawl, it’s hard not to hear it.
While Davis shares Berman’s knack for burrowing into sadness with darkly humorous twists, his captivating, unhurried writing style shares some similarities with those of outsider-folk heroes like Bill Callahan, Will Oldham, and Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner.
Davis is a scrappy DIY artist from Louisville, Kentucky, who spent more than a decade playing in the twang-punk dive-bar band State Champion. He’s a low-key entrepreneurial creative who started the independent record label Sophomore Lounge, as well as an experimental multi-genre festival called Cropped Out. But, at 41, he’s finally getting his due beyond a regional scene with his latest outfit, Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band.
Last year Davis released the project’s second album, New Threats from the Soul, a record of idiosyncratic country songs that shuffle along like a train in no rush to reach its destination. A few of the album’s seven tracks hover around the 10-minute mark, and the shortest comes in at just under six. That might seem excessive, but Davis and his band stretch out with a venturesome ease, coloring the songwriter’s weird and witty Americana tunes with a toolshed array of instruments—fiddle, pedal steel, tuba, flute, and even some synths and electronic loops.
The main draw, though, is Davis’ dexterity as a tunesmith. There’s a reason Berman once called him the “best lyricist going who’s not a rapper.” His dense, extended verses—rich with equal parts pathos, comedy, and melancholy—unravel through a heady mix of cosmic pondering, observational barfly poetry, and narrative laments on self-doubt among the disorienting nature of modern times. Where he’s going with his message is sometimes hard to follow, but listening to Davis string sentences together is always a fascinating trip—much like an arthouse film that’s open to interpretation.
“If we put our two heads together on this sad sack of feathers / Could we remember what the memory foam forgot?” he sings in “Mutilation Springs,” a spacious, slow-burning epic about good-time excess gone wrong that also includes references to “sarcophagus mornings” and “daffodils dying in a theme park pint glass.” The New Threats title track gets deeper into the existential mire, as Davis lets his mind ramble toward the afterlife with the wisdom of a blue-collar scribe: “You can see the kingdom from the tailgate if you stack a couple coolers / But you’re never gonna see it from the front of the line.”
Davis sounds more resigned to terrestrial absurdity in “The Simple Joy,” where he inhabits a character who keeps “busy in the daytime charging glowworms.” The atmospheric folk song features an upbeat sing-along chorus with guest harmonies from Oldham.
Since releasing the record, Davis has been busy on the road, touring in the States and abroad—along the way opening for MJ Lenderman and Kurt Vile and performing at notable festivals like Wilco’s Solid Sound.
Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band play The Southern Café & Music Hall on September 30.
