5 minute read
Everything Everywhere, Eventually
Everything Everywhere, Eventually
ALLEN EPLEY’S WARM SOLO DEBUT BELONGS BY THE CAMPFIRE
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By Nick Spacek
At the beginning of 2020, longtime Kansas City indie rockers Shiner released Schadenfreude, the band’s first new LP in nearly 20 years. At the same time, the band’s frontman, Allen Epley, was working on his first-ever solo album, Everything, which releases this month on Spartan Records. Given that the musician has been making music with Shiner, as well as The Life and Times, for nearly 30 years, it seems almost astonishing that it’s taken Epley this long to do a solo project, but here we are. The result is that songs collected on Everything bear the hallmarks of a project on which there was no rush.
“I didn’t have a purpose at first,” says Epley, speaking to us from his home in Evanston, Illinois. “It was like 2019, I started making some of my own drum tracks. I didn’t have songs, and I was putting down beats just to practice recording at home, with two mics on a kit, and then I came out and started kind of putting some things around it. It was a slow process.”
Amid the early pandemic, songs found stronger forms, and by the end of 2020, most of the album was completed. [The ‘23 release date mostly stems from vinyl production delays.] Those tracks, given time to grow from two mics and a drum kit, found their footing thanks partly to the lack of consistency in Epley’s home tracking. In playing the tracks for friends, the musician decided his songs deserved the addition of other performers.
One of those other people turned out to be Dan Dixon from Dropsonic and PLS PLS, who is also a producer in Atlanta as well as an old friend of Epley. Along with Dixon, Epley brought in drummers whom he thought would play empathically, such as Mike Myers, who was in the first version of The Life and Times, among other notable KC acts such as In The Pines and The String and Return, Chris Prescott of Pinback, and Mike Burns on play lap steel.
“That was the difference maker,” Epley explains. “The better drum tracks fleshed it out. It was like, ‘Oh shit, it’s really, really good,’ instead of just being a quirky, pretty cool basement record. If it’s gonna be good, it’s gotta be good next to, say, an Angel Olsen song. That was what I was shooting for.”
Angel Olsen is a good point of reference for what Epley has done on Everything, alongside something like Kacey Musgraves’s Golden Hour or Beck’s Sea Change. It’s the kind of record that sounds like AM Gold classics from another dimension, replete with warm tones and melodies.
“That record, Sea Change, is super im- portant to me,” Epley agrees. “I tried making something like that in the past, and it just didn’t translate. I have always been a huge fan, wondering if I could ever be a part of something like that.”
To make a solo record, Epley continues, seems so vain and silly and self-serving but also, he says, “It’s all me. I wrote all the shit, so it is what it is. I didn’t want to go into finding a new name.” He laughs while considering the folly of operating under a new moniker like “Octopus Heels.” In sincerity, the musician does acknowledge that the solo creative endeavor did manifest as a strange creative scenario.
“I’ve never been the total coordinator like that,” Epley continues. “I’ve always been the quarterback. There’s always everybody else on the team doing a lot. This was the first time I’ve been straight-up calling it.”
In terms of what shots were being called on Everything, Epley says that he’s a big country fan, running the channels when he’s driving between Kansas City and Chicago.
“I can hear new country stuff and tell the difference between a good song or pure Nashville trash,” Epley says of his highway listening habits. “That specific genre is highly produced now, somewhere between hip-hop, R&B, and country with a bit of fiddle thrown in, and while, of course, that doesn’t make it pure country, I’m open to exploring all of it.”
Epley lists the artists he digs, like Dwight Yoakam, Brandi Carlile, Kacey Musgraves, Angel Olsen, and Margo Price—the new album is born of their vibes.
“I don’t wanna put on certain bands early in the morning,” Epley clarifies. “I wanted to make a record that sounded really good first thing in the morning, or late at night, or middle afternoon. One of those records that might reward a good mushroom trip, you know?”
Everything is an attempt to make an “outdoors” record, according to the artist. Songs that sound good illuminated by firelight in the woods and material like The Life and Times or Shiner didn’t fit that mood.
“I wanted to make a record that was just kind of chill and sad, and you could of discern what was happening,” Epley concludes. “I think a lot of the lyrics with my other bands are—sometimes I know what’s happening in them, but I’m not sure the narrative is clear to everybody—and this was an opportunity to just kinda write a record that I felt like I have had in me a long time.”
Allen Epley’s Everything is out January 6 from Spartan Records.
