THE RECORD COMPANY - Roll With It Tour

When The Record Company pick up their instruments, the members—Chris Vos [guitar, lead vocals, harmonica], Alex Stiff [bass, backing vocals], and Marc Cazorla [drums, backing vocals]—participate in a musical back-and-forth akin to a formative and supportive conversation among siblings. The nuances of their personalities seep through loose, bluesy guitar leads, airtight drum grooves, thick bass, and vividly evocative lyrics. With such fluidity, the musicians respond to one another so instinctually you’d swear they were telepathically linked. However, there’s no such superpower necessary when you’ve got the closest thing to a brotherhood that three musicians unrelated by blood can share… 

The GRAMMY® Award-nominated trio only amplify the power of this bond on their fourth full-length offering and 2023 debut for Round Hill Records.

“We know each other’s personalities on the instruments, so we reconnected with one another and really found that brotherhood again,” explains Chris. “It's      always been there, but we got back into a room where it was like a circle of stone. We’re creating something that will go out into the world. We all stand behind it equally, and we’re willing to put our lives and love into it. When you put your career, your future, and your art into another person’s hands and you know they’re doing the same for you, there’s a different level of trust. That’s been our secret since day one. When it’s challenging, we’re all trying to figure out the challenge. When it’s good, we’re all experiencing it together.”

They’ve experienced everything as a family since forming back in 2011. Along the way, they served up a tested-and-proven      epic in the form of their 2016 debut, Give It Back To You. The release      earned a GRAMMY® Award nomination in the category of “Best Contemporary Blues Album” and spawned “Off The Ground,” which reached #1 at AAA Radio and tallied nearly 40 million total streams and counting. Beyond a string of stunning late-night television appearances, they performed on CBS This Morning, at Bonnaroo, and on an extensive tour with John Mayer in addition to headlining coast-to-coast. They      maintained this momentum with All Of This Life [2018] and Play Loud [2021]. On top of       praise from American Songwriter, Classic Rock, and more, NPR hailed the latter as “the band’s biggest and most dynamic record to date.”

In 2021, the guys hunkered down and commenced creating what would become their fourth LP. Working out of an intimate home studio in Beachwood Canyon, they wrote, recorded, and self-produced the music. Outside of cutting drums at the legendary Sunset Sound, it proved to be a homegrown affair through and through. 

“We got back to our old perspective, which is to trust the idea, get out of the way, make something, listen, and respond to it,” affirms Chris. 

Alex elaborates, “We decided to record the organic thing that got us really excited to play music as a band in the first place. That was the general theme of this record. Keep it as close to a three-piece sound as possible. Keep the music raw. It’s a return to form in a way, but we’re still growing.”

“We’ve been doing this for a while     ,” adds Marc. “As long as we sound like us, we can be proud of it. It’s not going to be for everybody, but we’ve never been prouder of what we’re doing.”

The Record Company kicks off their next era with the single “Dance On Mondays.” Guitar cries through a hypnotically hummable bassline and head-nodding beat. Meanwhile, a chantable hook instantly takes hold with grit and gusto as Chris affirms     , “I don’t dance on Mondays.”

“Somebody asked me to go see a band on a Monday night, and I just said, ‘I don’t dance on Mondays’,” Alex recalls. “I wrote it down in my phone. The phrase signifies, ‘I’m taking my life back, and I’m not going to dance for anybody’. It goes back to where we are as a band and us being The Record Company.”

Then, there’s “Talk To Me.” Bass practically dances atop a simmering groove punctuated by tambourine before guitar kicks back in as Chris urges, “So, why don’t you talk to me?” Marc goes on, “It reminds me of one of those rare Blue Note groove records with a chill vibe.”

Launching into toe-tapping bounce, harmonica wails on “Darkest Days” as the stomp and 12-string guitar underline a soulful vocal. “Highway Lady” shines with a Laurel Canyon meditation      in the glow of swooning slide guitar.

“We wanted to make music you could listen to “Highway Lady” on a road trip in the car with the city’s lights behind you,” Alex says. “This song     had this big vibe of feeling good both musically and spiritually.”

“Lyrically, it’s my favorite,” adds Marc. “It could be about so many different things. I moved into this house with a little pool, which I’d always wanted in Southern California. When it’s hot as shit out, you naturally develop all of these new friends during the summer. You make a pool playlist, and I wanted one of our tunes to be a contender. To me, this is one.”

In the end, The Record Company  are stronger than ever as a band and, more importantly, as brothers.

“I’d love for people to hear this record and feel like they’re in the house with us making it,” Alex leaves off. “I want them to feel like they’re part of this unpolished and homemade thing, because that’s what we were trying to get back to.”

“We’re a trio, and that’s the completion of this circle,” Marc concludes. “The fourth member of this group is the space between us. We embrace that space as part of the raw element. That’s what we explored on this album, and it’s beautiful. We can’t wait to bring it on the road.

therecordcompany.net

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TRAPPER SCHOEPP

Start time: 08:00 PM

“What’s most important to me is to be a link in the chain of folks singers before and after my time,” Trapper Schoepp says in light of his forthcoming album, Siren Songs. Recorded at Johnny Cash’s Cash Cabin in Hendersonville, TN, Trapper continues down the trail trod by his musical heroes. In 2019, the Milwaukee singer-songwriter published a long lost song with Bob Dylan called “On, Wisconsin” – making him the youngest musician to share a co-writing credit with the Nobel Prize laureate. The song led to a #1 trending article in Rolling Stone and over a hundred tour dates worldwide.

Most recently, Trapper is featured on the Siren Songs album cover posing in the same pond where Johnny Cash would read and dispose of letters sent to him by Bob Dylan, protecting a private correspondence and kinship that started in the sixties. At these storied grounds, Trapper recorded his strongest collection of songs steeped in traditional American and Irish folk music – aided by producers John Jackson (Jayhawks, Ray Davies) and Patrick Sansone (Wilco).

Siren Songs is an apt title for an album filled with folklore and nautical imagery. In Greek mythology, sirens are enchanting half-bird maidens who sing to entice sailors off their ships, and ultimately to their doom.

Trapper conjures nautical tales in songs like “Secrets of the Breeze” inspired by his own brushes of danger in Lake Michigan: “I felt the waves come crashing down / And I was so deep, so deep I might have drown / But I held my breath and the tide pushed me / No more do I explore the secrets of the breeze.”

“Queen of the Mist” is a jaunty tune with cruising congas and harmonica hooks that recounts Annie Edson Taylor’s harrowing trip over Niagara Falls inside a wooden barrel in 1901. In the swamp rocking “Devil’s Kettle,” Trapper sings of a mysterious rock formation and waterfall he encountered along Highway 61. A river splits below the falls, with one tributary to Lake Superior and the other flowing underground to an unknown location. It is said gangsters like Al Capone and his men would head across the northern state border to dispose of the evidence in the natural phenomenon called the Devil’s Kettle.

Sirens are seen across the album and in works that inspire Schoepp, most notably in the Coen Brothers’ O’Brother Where Art Tho.  In a fortunate stroke of serendipity, Trapper is joined on two tracks by Sarah Peasall McGuffey, who famously lent her vocal talents to the aforementioned film. Trapper sings alongside his brother and bassist, Tanner Schoepp, with characteristic blood harmony, the unique blend of sibling singers. The studio band included drummer Jon Radford (Justin Townes Earle), John Jackson on mandolin and violin, Patrick Sansone on keys, Quinn Scharber on Nashville tuned guitar, and Jim Hoke (Dolly Parton, Paul McCartney) on tin whistle and accordion.

The influence of Irish music on Siren Songs can be heard in Trapper’s open tuned acoustic guitar, the traditional feeling ballads, lyrical themes of the sea, war and unrequited love, as well as the instrumentation. “Irish folk music really helped me during the pandemic,” Schoepp says. “There’s an uplifting  quality in this tradition that can break your heart and make you laugh at the same time.”

Trapper notes the Clancy Brothers, The Chieftains and Paul Brady as key inspirations on Siren Songs. “If it weren’t for the song ‘Arthur McBride’ by Paul Brady, this album probably wouldn’t exist,” Trapper posits. So struck by the song, he tuned his guitar to open D like Brady and learned new chord shapes by watching YouTube videos of him performing. “It was a complete revelation,” Trapper says of the open D tuning, which is utilized by artists like Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.

The historic Cash Cabin was an inspiring and homey environment to record 14 songs in one week’s time. What was initially Johnny’s private rustic sanctuary to recharge—cooking, movies, leathercraft—later evolved into his working studio. “Everyone from Dolly Parton to Snoop Dog has visited the Cabin, and it was an unforgettable experience I am eternally grateful for, ” Trapper says.

Trapper and band recorded the tracks live together, forgoing click track technology to allow the ebb and flow of a live performance. “By the fourth or fifth take, we’d have most of what you hear,” Trapper says of this approach. “There’s an intensity and joy to being in that shared moment, especially after going through the isolation of the pandemic.”

The opportunity to play instruments like Cash’s 1930s “shitkicker” Martin guitarand June Carter Cash’s Steinway piano certainly helped inspire the players. A fold-up harmonium organ caught the ears of Pat and Trapper. “This kind of organ was once used by military chaplains to hold services on battlefields, and it’s remarkable that it is still sharing stories in 2022,” Trapper says. “There’s a power in well-used instruments like this that can be really effective in the right hands in the right song.”

Producer Patrick Sansone plays said organ on “Good Graces,” a romantic lament of lovers hitting a crossroads. The song has throughlines and characters in common with “In Returning” and “Eliza,” the latter is a story of a woman who moves to be with her mother after her father is lost at sea, leaving the narrator behind to sing a siren of his own.

Schoepp depicts characters reaching crossroads in “Cliffs of Dovers,” a narrative of a soldier struggling with PTSD after returning from Iraq. On “Silk and Satin,” Trapper uses maritime jive to discuss a person living out a double life as a businessman by day and drag queen by night. He adds, “In a different kind of undercover drag, I heard of sailor wives who who would crossdress as men to be with their husbands at sea,” Trapper says. “I think such an extraordinary risk is romantic.”

The album art photography was taken on the studio grounds by Joseph Cash, who also directed a music video for “Cliffs of Dover.” Musically, Cash contributed Dobro on “Devil’s Kettle” and vocals on “Diocese.” The music video finds Trapper and band recording the song and exploring the Cabin grounds.

After having spent the last decade performing countless live dates and sharing stages with such like-minded Americana mainstays as The Wallflowers, The Jayhawks, Frank Turner and Old 97’s, Schoepp will take to the road again with Siren Songs in 2023. “This kind of folk music is a living, breathing artform that really comes to life when shared,” Trapper says. “I can’t wait to take these songs to the people.”

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