Copyright The Austin Chronicle
He doesn’t mean to brag, Ryan Davis says, mussing his hair thoughtfully, but he found the DIY ethos early in life. Maybe it’s those deeply planted roots that explain the resonance his music has found with audiences now, three decades later. A rush of profile pieces and reviews of his July LP with the Roadhouse Band, New Threats From the Soul, have propelled his largely underground career to the indie limelight this year. “I objectively was a very young person when I started listening to alternative music. I was probably in fourth grade, which would have been like 1994, when I started actively listening to bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden,” Davis says. He remembers stumbling upon grunge gateway acts and discovering outsider artists like Daniel Johnston and erratic punk bands like Flipper through Kurt Cobain’s T-shirts on MTV. “I was clocking that sort of artwork and that sort of countercultural imagery and ethos at a very young age.” Born in Kentucky and now based in Indiana, Davis wrote and played with Chicago-based State Champion for a decade until the group disbanded shortly after releasing their 2018 album Send Flowers. Certified Best New Music by Pitchfork, New Threats From the Soul is his second release under his own name, a seven-track collection of expansive, idiosyncratic folk instrumentation directed by the cleverly comparative, often humorous imagery that’s earned the songwriter a David Berman comparison more than a few times – and a 2018 shoutout from the late Silver Jews indie darling. “For lately love has made a business out of you and me/ I’m skimming hundreds from the drawer just to spend them in the company store/ A testament to the fact that I love you more and more,” he sings in “Monte Carlo / No Limits,” a pseudo-love song about parked cars and pushed limits, punctuated by violin-led drum-machine breakdowns, that could easily be reinterpreted as a skipping meditation on his 2025 rollercoaster year. Davis picked up a guitar in middle school and tooled around in a high school pop-punk band, but it wasn’t until college, nearly 20 years ago now, that he wrote the first batch of songs that set him on the track to his current poetically incisive, melody-following style. Stylistically, it’s far from Nirvana, but the traces of that scrappy grandeur and motivated trust-the-art mentality are everywhere in the busy artist’s world, from his visual artwork and his singlehandedly managed record label, Sophomore Lounge, to his songwriting in State Champion and, now, as Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band. “That stuff is permanently imprinted in my DNA. I’ve just been such a fanboy of music my whole life. To be getting to make [music] full time now is not something I had envisioned or something that I’ve ever even wanted,” he admits. “I wake up every day and my motor is just running. I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes [because] I can’t stop thinking about all the shit that I do, but where it goes is never really the point.” The musician chats from his Jefferson home on a brief break between tours. He’s spending the day dealing with a shipment of damaged vinyl jackets for one of his friends and signees, Shutaro Noguchi. “There’s been some growing pains recently,” Davis admits, appearing exhausted and earnest in the Zoom rectangle. He muses openly, curious and lightly confounded, on the burst of attention his music’s garnered, but the multi-talented artist is rooted in his determination to keep Sophomore Lounge running. “I want to do it forever because I love doing it,” he says, but even as a small-run label, juggling the one-man operation largely from the back of a van is taking its toll. “I’m trying to figure [it] out in real time.” Since 2007, Davis has managed Sophomore Lounge while zig-zagging across the country with drummer Sal Cassato, bassist Mikie Poland, and violinist Sabrina Rush, playing boisterous, cowpunk-influenced alt-country tracks as State Champion, a more traditional rock outfit that became like a family to its members. “We drove ourselves into the ground in a way that was really passionate and romantic and fun,” says Davis. “We were just kids making noisy rock music in basements and art galleries and party houses, and it was this exciting thing that we did, mainly just to see the world through that lens.” After years of maintaining that local rock & roller spirit, and consequentially creating a cohesion converging on stasis, Davis reluctantly dissolved the group. Shortly thereafter, the multi-hyphenated composer found himself, like so many musicians, reconsidering his musicianship from within the pandemic lockdown. The Roadhouse Band, a more freewheeling, experimentally multi-instrumental group, was born of that thinking. “If any idea is good, it doesn’t matter who has it – we go forward with the idea,” Davis says of their collaboration. He still writes and structurally composes the project’s songs, but how they make it on the record and on the stage comes together through practiced revision. “It’s a lot of creative work and a lot of cooperation, but I think we’re all pretty happy with how it’s going.” The crowds seem to be pretty happy with how it’s going too. Evidently, appearances alongside the similarly rooted alt-country it-boy MJ Lenderman and his band the Wind on their fall 2024 tour are partially to thank. Davis suspects his, and his bandmates’, time spent circling the country, collaborating with Midwestern and Southeastern songwriters like Angel Olsen and Freakwater’s Catherine Irwin helped too. “It’s a weird cocktail of cosmic swirling that’s led us here,” he chuckles, sounding a little mystified. “Obviously I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why this is all rolling out the way that it has, and I don’t have a super simple answer – other than that I’ve been doing it for so long now and touring a lot with my old band and with this band and planting the seeds with people in different communities across America and Europe and the UK.” He’ll take it – the increased attention and concert attendance – of course, but it’s never really been Davis’ goal. New Threats From The Soul and whatever works come after are the songwriter putting one foot in front of the other, following his own curiosity. “I try to continue to grow and I think these last couple records have been pretty exemplary records that I have always wanted to make, but never really knew how to,” he says. Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band play two sets at Chess Club on Oct. 25 at 7:30 and 11:15pm.
