Last week I was able to catch up with Ryan Davis. He has a lot on his plate lately as he fronts his band State Champion, runs his record label Sophomore Lounge, and also is the man behind the highly anticipated upcoming Cropped Out 2011 festival. We had a lot to catch up on:
Never Nervous: You may currently be the busiest person I know. How do you manage to juggle a band, a record label, and a major upcoming festival?
Ryan Davis: It's a lot of stress, to be honest. Often with little or no reward beyond the hope that eventually people will care and be touched or helped by something that my friends and I have done. I'm kind of always on the verge of totally losing my shit, but I think one thing sort of fuels the next, or maybe one thing gets done in the process of putting off another thing. There's some sort of yin and yang to it all that I can't really explain, but usually everything I do -- be it booking a tour or releasing a record or whatever -- ends up somehow working out at the very last minute. Not a great way to operate, but there are only so many hours in a day. I complain about having too much to do, but there is nothing more abysmal to me than the thought of having nothing to do. When you work at a construction site or a law firm from 9 to 5, you come home and watch TV or play video games or smoke weed or whatever one does to relax. But when you exist within that "real world" as little as possible, just enough to fuel your creative aspirations, then the second you're home from work, you're back at work. E-mailing or making calls or fixing something or pulling your hair out. Never a dull moment.
NN: A lot of people including myself are excited about Cropped Out 2011. Do any of the bands on the lineup excite you more than others?
RD: It's all so exciting to me, man. It really is. Of course, Scratch Acid is the obvious answer to your question. I can't even begin to imagine what it'll be like, and I won't be able to until I see it in front of me. And maybe not even then… but there are so many others. Human Eye, in particular. We've been listening to Timmy's music (Human Eye, Clone Defects, Timmy's Organism, etc.) for a while now, but have yet to see him live, which, from what I've been told, is what it's all about. So that's super exciting. Also, our friends Last Year's Men, sort of a Reigning Sound-style rock 'n' roll band from Chapel Hill. Shit & Shine should be a highlight. Natural Child from Nashville are always incredible. Bill Orcutt of Harry Pussy is playing. Those solo guitar records are incredible. It's all going to be a lot of fun.
NN: What made you decide to get involved in booking and promoting shows?
RD: Out of necessity. I never had any interest in becoming a "promoter." I still don't, to be honest. James (Ardery, Cropped Out co-founder) is a promoter. That's his bag. I write songs and put out my friends' records. That's what I love to, but it reached a point where it wasn't so simple. In order to make everything kind of come together in some sort of cohesive way, there was no way around it other than to start booking our own shows. If a friend's band comes through town, or a band whom I owe a favor, or my own band needs a show, chances are, I'm going to be the one who has to deal with it. And the bottom line with any of this shit -- putting out records, organizing a music festival, curating an art show, whatever it is you do - is that if you want something done, do it yourself. If people are there to help along the way, awesome. If not, do it anyway, and chances are, there eventually will be.
NN: Your record label Sophomore Lounge has an impressive roster with a growing catalogue. How do you recruit new bands or artists? Do you actively pursue them, or do they come to you?
RD: It's just friends, really. Friends and bands we meet on tour, that eventually become friends. Occasionally, we'll reach out to someone with whom we haven't had some sort of personal exchange. But the Sophomore Lounge label started as a way to catalogue the (often excessive) creative output of those around me. We were all in bands growing up, going to shows, skateboarding, writing, drawing, making fliers, hanging out, staying productive. It was always sort of inconsequential to some extent, you know. At least it seemed that way. But the longer we did it, the more seriously we took it, while at the same time, the more we invested in it, the more realistically we were able to think about it. When you're a 16-year-old kid, you pick up a guitar and think, "We'll make a record, and then we'll send it to our favorite labels, and if we send it to enough people who could potentially help us, one of them will probably like it and sign us." You don't understand that the demo you sent to Sub Pop or Matador or whoever probably never made it out of the mailer. Then you get a little older and realize how many fucking bands there are in the world, and that even if a label were to potentially be interested in your music, the chances that they would actually be able to invest their time, attention, and money into your songs, is very slim. So you have this record you made, and you give it out to a few friends, make a few fans if you're lucky, and that's it. The band breaks up for whatever reason and no one really remembers what happened. I guess the point of starting Sophomore Lounge was just to document those projects as they related to my friends, and do everything in my power, both at the time of existence and beyond, to make sure people had access to those ideas. I have always surrounded myself with people whom I respect creatively and whom inspire my own creative processes on a day-to-day basis, so to wrangle all those people together in some sort of unified fashion by writing "Sophomore Lounge" on the burnt CD-Rs we were selling at shows seemed like a cool idea. Now, it's the same basic idea, just with more of an emphasis on vinyl records.
NN: Tell me about some of the upcoming releases from SL.
RD: Well, we've had a super busy release schedule this year. In the past twelve months, we've put out like 12 different records. Most recently, Fat History Month's Fucking Despair 12" LP, a split Geffika/Skimask 12", and Wishgift's Folk Twain 12" EP, all of which I'm very proud to have released. We have some things in the planning process for early 2012 that I'm super excited about, and I think we're doing a Life Partner cassette at some point before the year is over, but beyond that, I'm going to spend the rest of the year focusing on and recovering from everything else at hand. I have a terrible habit of biting off more than I can chew.
NN: Your band State Champion has gone through several member changes. What is the current lineup?
RD: The current line-up is me (Ryan Davis) on vocals and guitar, Mikie Poland on bass guitar, Sabrina Rush on violin, and Salvatore Cassato on drums. Angel Olsen (of Bonnie "Prince" Billy and The Cairo Gang) and some other friends are on the new record, but the four of us, that's the touring line-up. Those are the people sitting next to me in the van right now.
NN: You guys have been pretty active touring, constantly writing new material, and putting out new records. What can you say about your latest record Deep Shit? With your new lineup, have there been any changes to the songwriting or musical stylings?
RD: I think it's a little different, sure. It's definitely not Stale Champagne II, but it's clearly the same band, you know. We didn't pull a 180 on anyone. I'm still writing songs the same way I've always written them. Touring has been a lot of fun, but it can be really hard work and, sadly, it hasn't gotten any easier as far as booking our own shows. Sometimes I can't even imagine how awesome it would be to have a booking agent doing all this shit for you, but then I think it's easy to think of that as the answer to all your problems. At the end of the day, it's your own job to sell yourself to people. To sell your songs, to make people believe in you as a songwriter and as a band.
NN: Before you go, tell me about a record that you are really into currently.
RD: I’ve been on a huge Warren Zevon kick, most recently his Stand In The Fire live record from the early ‘80s. I found a cassette copy of it for 99 cents in Burlington, VT on this tour. Those studio records -- S/T, Excitable Boy, Sentimental Hygiene, etc. – are some of my favorite records, but they’re all very polished. On Stand In The Fire, he and the band are KILLING it on stage, hootin’ and hollerin’ and just playing the fuck out of those songs. Solos where they shouldn’t necessarily be, instinctual screaming and lyric revisions throughout. It’s such a fun listen, and serves as a pretty decent point of entry for those who are less familiar with his roller coaster ride of a career. I recently finished I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead as well, which is his life story as told through journal entries, interviews, and the narration of his ex-wife Crystal Zevon. Highly recommended!
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