Not that long ago, Ryan Davis was “stuck in this rut of being in this noisy, drunk basement rock band.” He says this while discussing his unlikely path to “rising star” status at the age of 40 before the release of New Threats From The Soul, the excellent forthcoming album (due July 25) with his stalwart backing group, The Roadhouse Band. When I caught up with him over Zoom, the Louisville-based singer-songwriter was staying at a family cabin in Kentucky, enjoying some seclusion before the record drops. Only I was interrupting his idyll. An indie-rock lifer, Davis for years has been an obscure cult figure with a small following drawn to his witty, wordy, and wandering country-rock songs. But these days, he’s talking to more and more people like me, a confirmation of his newfound “critics’ darling” status.
Things were different during his “noisy, drunk basement rock band” era in the 2010s. Back then, he fronted State Champion, an outfit whose fan base was much richer in quality than quantity. One supporter was David Berman, the late great Silver Jews frontman, who declared that Davis was “the best lyricist who’s not a rapper going.” Davis, a Berman devotee who runs his own record label called Sophomore Lounge, put that quote on a promotional sticker and stuck it on State Champion’s album covers. (It was the beginning of constant Berman comparisons that he now regards with serious ambivalence. More on that later.)
Another fan was a teenaged aspiring musician named Jake Lenderman, who haunted State Champion shows and solicited Davis for songwriting advice. “I was first introduced to Ryan’s music when I was probably 17 or 18,” Lenderman recalls now. He opened for State Champion a year later, and remained a loyal Davis acolyte. “At first the words stuck out to me, like ‘Jeff Foxworthy in a serious role,” he says, quoting the 2018 song “Lifetime Sentence.” “I knew that even though I didn’t quite understand what the song was about at the time, I could learn a lot from him.”
Several years later, after Lenderman started calling himself MJ on the way to becoming indie-famous, he paid it forward and invited Davis and his band to open shows on 2024’s Manning Fireworks tour. Suddenly, for this audience, he was a “new” artist. Davis’ big break, as it were, coincided with him disbanding State Champion and taking up with the Roadhouse crew, a move that he says has allowed for greater experimentation with sounds beyond the usual indie-Americana wheelhouse. A former teenaged skate punk who attended art college in Chicago, Davis grew up listening to “MC Hammer and Kris Kross and whatever was on mainstream hip-hop radio or MTV.” He eventually pivoted to George Jones and Johnny Paycheck records in his 20s, but his hip-hop past is still detectable on New Threats From The Soul, which includes at least one lyrical reference to A Tribe Called Quest song and a shockingly logical drum-and-bass breakdown played on guitars and fiddles.
“I just didn’t want there to be any rules,” he explains. “If there is anything I have succeeded at with this new project, it’s been that. The freedom of it has been really liberating and really satisfying.”
Even when Davis appears to work with more traditional song forms, like the rousing New Soul highlight “The Simple Joy” (which has backing vocals by Will Oldham, the Adam Duritz to Davis’ Jakob Dylan), his songs frequently surprise with sly one liners that smuggle pathos inside jokey Trojan horses. “My skull was a dunk tank clown for some schoolyard lass to chastise,” he drawls in one line. “I learned that time was not my friend or foe / more like one of the guys from work,” goes another.
Davis’ songs go on (and on) like that, like an extended serio-comic monologue accented by occasional pedal-steel licks. The shortest track on New Threats is just under six minutes; the longest is nearly 12. That one is called “Mutilation Springs,” and it includes references to “sarcophagus mornings,” “hair metal afternoons,” and “forsaken punks” who “flip for police force work and worse.” He might come off like a show-off if the songs weren’t so authentically conversational or genuinely, pleasingly weird. The lyrics frequently address the challenges of standing up to omnipresent loneliness and discouragement while searching for rare moments of grace. But they’re also about how our malfunctioning brains process the world around us in real time, as a series of warped similes and counterintuitive metaphors that are simultaneously funny and tragic. He’s like John Prine if John Prine had tried to write “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands” each time he picked up a guitar.
During our interview, Davis showed me a journal where he puts lyrics as they come to him. “I don’t write songs over the course of years and then say, ‘Oh, this one will work for the record,” he explains. “I say, ‘I need to make a new record,’ and then I sit down and I start playing chords and I say, ‘Okay, I really like this line.’” It’s an obsessive, uneasy process that involves color coding certain phases as he stitches his Frankenstein compositions together.
“I was jokingly describing it to someone recently,” he says, “as the scene in the movie where the FBI agent has all the tack boards and he’s got maps and clues and photos and rants of notes, and there’s a red string. That’s literally how writing songs is for me”
In our interview, we talked about songwriting, country music, being compared to David Berman, and whether he can live up to his own press release.
I am pro-wordy songs, but it’s rare for someone now to write an 11- or 12-minute song with as many verses as your songs have. There are seven tracks on this record, but there are enough lyrics for 14.
For me, it’s all just what the song needs to be. If “Free From The Guillotine,” for example, was missing one refrain, I feel like the whole thing would’ve just fallen apart.
I envy people that can just sit down after work with a guitar and say, “I wrote about my day.” The process is very difficult for me in a way that making art isn’t, I don’t struggle to make visual art at all. I draw every day. I sit down and it’s just like a faucet. It just comes out of me. But songwriting is such a temperamental thing. I have to come out here two and a half hours away from my house to just have one moment of clarity. I also treat every record like it’s the last, because whatever muse is forcing me to do this at age 40, it might not always be there. So I try to just take it seriously and put the effort in and make the exact records I want to make.
I was thinking about something you said in an interview about how Louisville isn’t quite the South and it’s not quite the Midwest. And I wonder how that informs your songwriting. Do you claim a regional identity?
If I said I was from the South, somebody from Georgia would laugh. And if I said I was from the Midwest, my partner who’s from rural northern Iowa would make fun of me. It’s just a region that no one wants to claim. It’s weird, but I think it’s definitely got its own identity and it certainly has informed me as a writer and sort of my narrative voice. I don’t know if I’d be making the music I’m making if I was from any other place, I guess.
Listening to your music, it does sound like a hybrid of Southern and Midwest flavors. It’s where indie rock meets country music.
There’s always been, historically, this pipeline from Louisville to Chicago, where a lot of the Louisville bands would go record with Steve Albini. I know part of Freakwater lived in Chicago and I think Slint lived in Chicago, and there was always kind of this Thrill Jockey/Drag City/Touch And Go Louisville connection. That predated my musical history, of course, but a lot of those influences hit me at an impressionable age. And I went on to live in Chicago for five or six years, so it’s not like I’m this true mid-southern personality. I lived in Chicago for a lot of my formative years, so I think the Midwestern thing really bleeds in.
How did you become interested in country music?
My mom was really into country and folk music. She had John Prine records and Jerry Jeff Walker records and George Jones records. I would see them in our house, but we never really had a turntable. We didn’t spend a lot of time listening to that kind of music. A lot of my earliest moments are of riding around and listening to what my parents were listening to. It was Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers and Warren Zevon and Dire Straits.
When I got to the age where I was starting to play guitar, I felt connected to country music in some way. I sat down to write a song and the first one that came out felt like something that would’ve been influenced by John Prine, even though I hadn’t really listened to much music like that at that time. Maybe it was just in my blood or something.
Living in Chicago, did alt-country have any impact on you?
I have nothing against alt-country, but it’s never been something that anyone gave me access to at a young enough age to where it really informed what I was doing at all. I didn’t hear Wilco until a couple of years into touring with State Champion. I didn’t hear Drive-By Truckers until probably the last five years. People would always say, “Your band is obviously influenced by Whiskeytown or Uncle Tupelo” and all these bands that I literally never heard before. I think it’s because I was coming at it from the same angle that those guys did, which is that I grew up listening to punk music and then I eventually listened to country music.
You also talked about listening to a lot of rap music as a kid. And I can detect that influence, just by how many words you’re able to fit into your songs.
It’s all interconnected through skateboard culture. I grew up obsessed with skateboarding, so I was finding out about the Wu-Tang Clan at the same time as I was finding out about the Dead Kennedys. It was all a little bit after when those things originally happened. But I was just a sponge and I was soaking it all up. I can’t help but think that whatever I was listening to in eighth and ninth grade is still informing how I write a song to this day.
I was actually wondering if the song title “Monte Carlo/No Limits” was a nod to Master P and No Limit Records.
Master P was hugely influential to me. He actually spends a lot of time in Louisville. His son played for the basketball team for a few years. No Limit and SST and all these people that were basically just making these little underground empires out of the trunks of their car, I was informed by them when I started doing Sophomore Lounge. But that song being called “No Limits”? It isn’t really in reference to that. It was actually more in reference to the Bob Dylan song “Love Minus Zero/No Limit.”
You’ve been putting out records for a while now, but this is the first time you’ve gotten significant mainstream attention. Has that changed the stakes for this record in your mind?
I’m not saying this in a self-pitying way, but having no one really give a shit for so long, I think you become your own judge, jury, and executioner. Now that I’m turning 40, I’m not really looking to an audience to help me to decide what kind of record to make.
This record was really hard to write and at multiple points, I almost abandoned it. It just wasn’t up to my own standard. But at no point was I thinking about whether it’d be as big of a success as the last one. At the end of the day, I just feel like I’m alone in the room. I want the shows to be better and I want to have better tours with my friends and it’d be nice to not have to work other jobs at some point in my life. But I feel pretty centered.
You also seem to have good timing. In the 2010s, State Champion was on an island. But now, there are a lot of indie acts working in the country-rock lane.
The whole Lenderman thing is just such a fluke in a good way. The fact that he would always be at our shows when he was literally a kid, I think, in his teens, and come up to me wearing my T-shirt and telling me he liked my band and asking me how to write songs and what I was reading. And I was always nice to him because we felt on the same level as anybody that was at our shows. And we kept those conversations going. When his whole thing blew up, he really just took me up with him and put us on that tour.
Not even in my own mind, but in the eyes of others, there is this sort of stable of bands making alternative country music or whatever you want to call it. I think the timing of it’s good, but like I said, I never grew up listening to Steve Earle. I never grew up wanting to be that guy that just is making this beautiful, sad, poetic music with an acoustic guitar at a coffee shop or something.
I do love songwriting. I deeply love it, and it is priority number one. But I also listen to so many different kinds of music and I’m so passionate about so many things and I just am not interested in trying to just be the trope of, like, Jason Isbell or Tyler Childers. I have nothing but respect for those people, but I just don’t identify with it. Maybe I’m shooting myself in the foot a little. But at the end of the day, if I wasn’t being truly me — which is the only thing I’ve ever known how to do — I think it would be transparent that I was trying to do something that I’m not really qualified to do.
A part of this that’s sort of the elephant in the room is that since David died, there’s been a lot of interest in people wanting there to be a new David, which is very weird.
I was going to ask about that.
When I was in State Champion, I was actively listening to the Silver Jews and trying to figure out how to write songs like that, whereas I’ve not listened to those records since David died. But it’s not been until now that people want to talk about the Berman thing. And it’s just so interesting to me because no one ever used to compare State Champion to the Silver Jews.
I think it’s a comparison people make because of the sound of your voice, which is similar to Berman, and the country-rock milieu you operate in. And there’s the fact that Berman praised your writing. It seems like an obvious comparison to make. But like you said, there is something else going on, where Berman now is like Hank Williams for the current generation of songwriters. An icon who died tragically young that everyone now seems to point to as the ultimate purveyor of the form.
I guess what I’m saying is I always ripped him off. But for some reason, now I’m part of this pack of people who are ripping off Berman where it’s like, I’m not even thinking about David Berman anymore. It’s actually a topic that I don’t even like to talk about too much because it’s complicated, and it’s personal. We were close to him at the end, and some of the people in State Champion were helping him with that tour. And when he died, it was just the twist of the knife and the end of that band. It’s still hard to talk about and think about, but it’s just so weird to me now that it’s all coming back and that’s what every review wants to talk about.
I must imagine that being compared to the guy many consider the greatest songwriter of his generation is a big compliment. At the same time, nobody wants to be compared to somebody else. You always want to be your own person. It’s positive, and also a prison.
I think that’s a good way of putting it. But yeah, I can’t complain. I’m the one that put a quote of his on a sticker on the front of my record. Maybe I dug my own grave with that, but I think it’s ultimately a good thing. I’ve never really talked about this before, but we tried out to be the Purple Mountains band. We jammed with Berman, learned the songs, and hung out with him for a few hours. There’s video of it somewhere, and we were pretty close to the fire. Our violin player was the tour manager, and we were supposed to play some of those shows, and it was just all infighting and stressful in an interpersonal way. And then when he died, it was just kind of like, what’s the point of any of this?
This is a jokey question, but it’s also a serious one: In the press release, Nathan Salsburg calls you one of the greatest songwriters of your generation. Do you agree with him?
[smiles] I don’t, no. The label boss in me decided to put that on a hype sticker. It feels so gross to put it on my own record. But that’s the thing with putting out your own music — you have to be a salesman when you really want to just be the guy out here in the cabin making stuff for someone else to have to deal with.
I think I’m a good songwriter, and I’m an idiosyncratic one in that I do a thing that is very much me and is maybe unique. But I don’t think songwriting or music-making in any way is a competition or that it needs to be thought of in terms of whether Jake [Lenderman] can write a better song than me or if I can write a better song than Cameron Winter, any of these people that everyone’s talking about right now. I think we’re all just in it together and trying to make fun shit happen.
New Threats From The Soul is out 7/25 via Sophomore Lounge. Find more information here.
