Ryan Davis’s Junk-Drawer Heart
On Easter Sunday, the Louisville-based singer-songwriter Ryan Davis opened a matinée show for Bill Callahan in the assembly room of a former Catholic school in Kingston, New York. Indoor concerts during daylight hours can feel uncanny, maybe more so on a holy day—the doors opened at 2 P.M., and someone, possibly Callahan, had nestled colored plastic eggs amid the rows of folding chairs—but the vibe in the room was convivial, loose. Davis usually tours with the six-piece Roadhouse Band, but that afternoon he performed solo with his guitar, a melodica, a Roland sampler, a drum machine, a couple of effects pedals, a mixer, and a bass sequencer. Davis is a magnetic front man, and the Roadhouse Band is an intoxicatingly raucous live outfit, but the constraints of the setup suited his new material, which is suffused with listlessness and yearning, dark jokes and wordy disquisitions on desire. Something about Davis’s onstage multitasking—cuing loops, switching between instruments—felt consonant with his discursive, country-tinged rock and roll, in which a lovely pedal-steel riff might be punctuated by a squall of synthesizer or a frantic breakbeat. Nothing is exactly where or what you expect it to be, and nothing stays still for very long.
This month, Davis releases “New Threats from the Soul,” his second solo album since the dissolution of State Champion, his former band; it’s a beautiful and wildly smart record about making do in an upside-down world. Davis is particularly adept at taking an overwhelming feeling—love, grief, existential duress—and diffusing it. “Perhaps the love we had was not what made the globe turn / But more akin in fact to what made the cows lay down,” he sings on “The Simple Joy,” one of my favorite tracks. When Davis performed the song in Kingston, his voice had a pleasant country wobble. “I learned that time was not my friend nor my foe / More like one of the guys from work,” he sang with a shrug. There’s something both funny and heartbreaking about gently defanging all of life’s unsolvable mysteries: “Are we getting any closer to me knowing what the point of this is? / The point of all these simple joys? / The point of all these simpler lonelinesses?”
Though Davis is frequently compared with both David Berman, the beloved late front man of Silver Jews and then Purple Mountains, and MJ Lenderman (Davis and the Roadhouse Band opened for much of Lenderman’s fall tour), his lyrics remind me most of the Southern novelist Larry Brown, who started publishing fiction in his early thirties while working as a firefighter in Oxford, Mississippi. Brown has a short story titled “The Apprentice,” from the collection “Big Bad Love.” It opens with a prayer, or perhaps more of a supplication: “This can’t be living. I drink too much Old Milwaukee and wake up in the morning and it tastes like old bread crusts in my mouth. All my underwear’s dirty, I can’t find my insurance policy.” The hard-luck narrators of “New Threats from the Soul” operate in a similar mode: antsy and desirous, pining for magic but imprisoned, like all of us, by the banal reality of what it takes to get through a Tuesday. Davis’s protagonists are haunted by a gnawing sense that, as Springsteen once sang, “there’s something happening somewhere.” But, until they find love, salvation, or a better job, they’re housing beers, cracking jokes, trying to suss out the profound from the pedestrian, the sacred from the profane. Listening to these songs, it’s hard to know whether to chuckle or to clutch your heart. On a nearly twelve-minute track called “Mutilation Springs,” Davis sings:
Earlier this spring, I met Davis at Strangelove, a dim and sticky dive bar situated, incongruously, in midtown Manhattan. It’s tempting to conflate Davis with the mournful antiheroes of his songs, in part because he delivers their down-and-out soliloquies with such convincing dolor. “Deciding to call this my name was sort of dangerous territory,” Davis said, laughing, as we stirred our drinks. “It is very much never written from the perspective of Ryan Davis the person. I keep it close to what I know, to what I could have potentially experienced. But I’m not necessarily writing about things that have happened to me.” The genuineness with which he occupies these songs has led to some confusion. On “Bluebirds Revisited,” a track from “Dancing on the Edge,” Davis’s first solo record, he sings, “I started out a butterfly detective / Then I became a teen-age alcoholic.” One night, over dinner, his dad tossed out a few sly questions. “He was asking me when I started drinking. I said, ‘Early college, whatever.’ And, later that night, I was, like, Oh, I see what he was doing. He was trying to crack whether I was secretly a teen-age alcoholic.”
Davis, who is forty, came of age going to hardcore concerts around Louisville. “That’s just what we did growing up,” he said. “Skateboarding, D.I.Y. shows.” He internalized a punk-rock ethos. “It was about making something out of nothing with your friends, and then going out there and seeing who you could meet from doing it,” he said. Davis started his solo project in 2020, soon after the pandemic hit. “I was working a job at a restaurant. I was just stuck,” he said. “I was feeling really disconnected from everything. I didn’t know what the path forward was. I started making these instrumental four-track tape recordings. I just wanted to read manuals all day and learn how to program a drum machine, or go to the pawnshop and buy keyboards.” The grimness of that period was ultimately generative. “Maybe it sort of established a narrative voice that was rooted in despair and introversion and confusion,” he said. “This lovable-loser sort of thing.”
“The humor really came through first for me,” MJ Lenderman told me recently. “Ryan’s way more articulate than I am, even when he’s talking about, like, Jet Skis.” Lenderman described their tour together as a joy: “Seeing him perform every night really lit us up, because he’s such a good performer. His stage presence blew my mind. It was like Jim Carrey in ‘The Mask’ or something.”
Davis’s songs make me laugh a lot, though sometimes it’s hard to tell what, exactly, is so funny. “I left my wallet in El Segundo / I left my true love in a West Lafayette escape room,” he warbles on the album’s title track. The line gets me every time. Money, love, hope—these things come, and then they go. Comedy and pathos are so close that it can feel impossible to know where one stops and the other begins. “There are a lot of slipping-on-a-banana-peel moments in these songs,” Davis said. “But I don’t think they’re ever milking self-hatred. Just trying to crack the case.”
Most of the tracks on “New Threats from the Soul” are north of seven minutes. Davis described writing lyrics as “virtually impossible.” He continued, “I think the reason that the songs are so long is because I just have to stay in it until I can’t get any more out of it. Because after that I have to figure out another way to come up with a song. It feels insurmountable most of the time. I’ve always envied people who can just come home from work and pick up a guitar and write a song, and it ends up being something people wanna hear. But I have to really drive myself to the brink of lunacy to make a chorus that works for me.” But maybe it all really does matter, I offered—a word, a syllable, the particular weight and balance of a line. Davis nodded. “If it doesn’t matter, then what are we doing?” he said. “That’s the whole thing.” ♦
