My memory probably isn’t serving me right, but I think the first time I met Ryan was amid bowls of chili, bottles of light beer, and black and white checkered floors. It was at a holiday party at Check’s Cafe in Louisville in the mid to late 2000s. I’d been hearing about this “kid doing cool stuff” (which is kinda funny considering we were all not that much older than him and pretty much kids ourselves.) It turned out to be true, he was in fact doing “cool stuff” and now it’s a million years later and he still is.
Ryan’s creative output has taken different forms over the years—from more song-based projects like State Champion, to the instrumental wide openness of Equipment Pointed Ankh, to name a couple. He’s also a visual artist—making intricate pen and ink drawings, collages, paintings, and who knows what else he’s assembling in the depths of Southern Indiana.
While working on his own projects, RD somehow also finds the time and energy to help foster a community of creative misfits and mavericks near and far. This was always evident at Cropped Out, the multi-day music and art festival he co-founded. It ran for eight years in Louisville, 2018 being the last. It was a place to see old friends, make new ones, and feel like you were spending the weekend in a giant treehouse away from the real world. There’s comfort in knowing there are people out there making all sorts of things--whether it’s full-time, part-time, or even just a little bit of the time. The older you get, having a creative practice really becomes a choice you hafta recommit to every day and it’s an admirable and inspiring thing.
In 2020, Ryan started Technique Street, an online mail order shop/distro for acquiring actual physical copies of curated music “you can break, warp, scuff, scratch, and lose.” Technique Street is also the home to Sophomore Lounge, the record label he founded 18(!) years ago. And in 2023, he started Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band, with their first album Dancing on the Edge coming out later that year. The record felt like it perfectly captured a moment in time--all the worry, awe, and absurdness of the previous few years, but in a kindly ramshackle comforting way. Their second album was recorded this past summer, again at Machines with Magnets in Rhode Island. It’ll be coming out sometime this year, probably right when we all really need it to. Something to look forward to. Thank God.
Here’s a lil email chat we finished up this week, before he and the Roadhouse Band head to Nashville for the last few shows from a month-long tour opening for MJ Lenderman. (Photo in collage above by Elizabeth Fuschia. All other ones by me, unless it says different.)
HH: Where’d you grow up and how would you describe it to someone who hasn’t been there before?
RD: I grew up both in and outside of the Louisville, Kentucky area. For most of my upbringing, our house was on the Southern Indiana side of the Ohio River (opposite Louisville). This part of the country is odd in that southerners will say it’s not the “real” south, Midwesterners will say it’s not the “real” Midwest. Louisville is an objectively unique place, for better or worse. I guess you’d say our neighborhood was suburban, but it felt more like a weird little outer pocket of the city itself. I liked it there, for the most part. My parents still live in the same house and my partner and I live nearby. It’s quiet. It has its charms.
What’s one of your earliest memories?
I don’t recall any of my earliest memories being… memorable. haha. Or profound enough to warrant mentioning in an interview, but I do recall little flashes of experience from our Louisville house, before we moved to Indiana. This was as early as two or three years old. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I’ll try to picture all the rooms in the house and how they connected and fill them with any little memory I can grasp at, just to stoke the embers of my ever-worsening retention. Like, for example, I vividly remember the ceiling fan in my bedroom because one of my favorite things to do was to throw stuffed animals into it when it was on and watch them get slapped around the room at random, depending on how the blades of the fan hit them. I thought it was hilarious. There was a shopping center across the street (Mid City Mall, it’s still there) that I recall being taken on walks around, almost daily. Oh, and I used to have one of those My Buddy dolls. I brought it to The Bristol, which was the closest restaurant to our house at the time (kind of a moderately fancy American bistro type spot, also still there), when my parents took me to dinner with them one evening. The proprietor came out and asked me if My Buddy would be dining as well. I said, “Yes!” and they brought out a little hamburger for him.
Weirdest or worst job you’ve had?
They’ve all been bad in some way or another. I worked for a very short period of time as the operator of a mobile photo booth, like at weddings and corporate events. The job was basically to hand out wigs and outrageous hats and other silly little props for people to yuk it up with while drunkenly posing for the camera. If you know me, you understand that this line of work was not fitting to my general disposition. I also came VERY close to taking a job spinning a sign outside of a business once. I think it was for an income tax place, and I would’ve had to have worn a Statue of Liberty costume. It was early on in my adventurous post-college rock band days and I was desperate for money between tours, but ended up finding a restaurant job at the last minute and never had to suit up.
Who is someone you know/knew personally who has inspired you?
I’m inspired by people I know almost daily, and I’m not just saying that to be fake humble or something. The people I hold close have always been a driving force for my creative processes, even when said processes don’t directly involve them or come as a direct result of their influence. But if you’re looking for one of infinite specifics, I’d say my friend and fellow Kentucky-native Mikey Turner is a pretty perfect example of someone who has inspired me for 15-or-so years now. I think, in some ways, he helped me to understand both the joys and challenges of working outside of any one distinct, classifiable path, among other things. I first came to know of Mikey’s music through his color-and-shape-shifting chameleon of a “band” called Warmer Milks, which operated free of (if not against) any and all rules/restrictions/expectations for a solid chunk of the mid-to-late ‘00s. I think, at that time, I was listening to a LOT of new music, more so than maybe ever before or since, and trying to figure out my own place in that whole world of underground sound-making. Mikey was churning out harsh noise tapes and downer/dirge-punk LPs and countrified slacker folk CDs, just relentlessly, often within the same calendar year – not as any sort of “flex” as to what he and his crew were capable of, but just simply because that was what he was internally charged to do on any given day. And he not only followed the scent, he executed it with full commitment and sincerity. On days when nothing makes sense and every possible artistic gesture seems wholly pointless, if not sociopathic – and I have these days quite often – I try to remind myself of people like Mikey, and the records, or paintings, or poems, that I love so dearly and that would have never been made had someone not pushed through the very senselessness of it all and made it anyway.
One of the best people to ever exist, Catherine Irwin, is one of your recurring collaborators. How has working with her been?
I just got off the phone with her, actually. We were talking lots of shit, which we tend to do. Catherine is a musical giant who just happens to live where I live at the same time in human history, so I think it's easy to take it for granted that I can text her to come sing on some random shit I wrote and she's almost always down to sprinkle her magical genius dust on whatever it is. But I do have a firm understanding of how special of a privilege that is. She and I are pretty harmoniously self-deprecating, which is somehow more of a net positive than an obstacle in the path of our collaborative productivity. Her singing is only just a sliver of her greatness though. I recently went to a gallery show of her paintings here in town and was quite touched by the work. I firmly believe there should be a Catherine Irwin statue in Cherokee Park, or a state park named after her or something. She is a treasure of our time and place.
An album you never get sick of? Like one where you don’t skip around.
If I put on a record or tape or CD that I’ve chosen to listen to because I know what it is and like it, I don’t generally skip around, unless I’m DJing or something. But albums I never get sick of… George Jones - The Grand Tour, The Fall - Grotesque, Royal Trux - Veterans of Disorder, The Other People Place - Lifestyles of the Laptop Cafe, Gravediggaz - 6 Feet Deep, Fairport Convention - Unhalfbricking, DJ Rashad - Double Cup, Papa M - Live from a Shark Cage, Sun Ra- Lanquidity, Lower Dens - Twin Hand Movement… This is by no means a definitive list of my favorite albums, just the first 10 repeaters that come to mind. I could go on forever. I love music so much.
I always enjoy hearing about what yall listened to in the van. Any highlights from last year’s tours?
We start most tours listening to a tastefully enlightening array of artful and/or culturally stimulating sounds that we’ve recently discovered on our own respective journeys and are eager to share with one another as musical peers and creative thinkers. This generally lasts for about one 24-hour cycle before devolving into Stone Temple Pilots and NOFX for the remainder of the trip.
What’s a strange place or situation you’ve found yourself in?
I wouldn’t even know where to begin with this one… trying to think of something internet appropriate… I used to sleep outside a lot on tour because my allergies were so bad at the time, and 90% of people who let random bands stay at their houses are also the kind of people who live with cats (not sure what the correlation is there, but it’s a thing). Anyway, one time after a show in Bloomington, I passed out under this giant pine tree in a cemetery and woke up the next morning to the sound of someone urinating not far from my head. It was an unhoused man who, I think, as it turns out, had been sleeping next to me under the same tree that night. He said ‘sorry if I woke you’ or something to that effect. He was very friendly. We exchanged pleasantries as I gathered my things and then he rode away on a bike.
Something you wish you’d known sooner?
I simultaneously wish I knew how completely pointless the majority of what I learned in school would prove to be, and also that I had taken school more seriously at the time, which I realize doesn’t make much sense. I wonder if maybe it was only pointless because I was never paying enough attention to actually learn anything. I mean, I could not tell you one fucking thing I learned in high school outside of some basic math and a couple comprehensive reading/writing practices that I’ve used more than once in life. I know so little about anything beyond my immediate interests, it’s truly embarrassing. I think if I could go back to high school now, just to listen to certain teachers a little more closely, I might actually enjoy it. And had I enjoyed it, who knows where that would have led me. Most likely not to where I am today, but that’s impossible to assess. I do know high school helped shape me imperatively in some broader environmental way. I just know absolutely nothing about virtually anything and I feel like I lack the cognitive tools to even correct that at this point.
How/why did you decide to put out a record with your for-real name vs a band name or pseudonym?
It was not something I was entirely OK with doing and it actually still bothers me in some ways. But… I don’t know. I knew State Champion was over, and that this was not a State Champion record, despite numerous people advising me that it was foolish to shed the band name that I was so closely associated with and that I worked so hard to promote over countless years of touring. I just knew, without question, that this was not that. But I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t have a new band name figured out before making the record. And by the time I did finish the record, the songs felt too meaningful to come up with some arbitrary pseudonym to attach to them. So, I was just like, fuck it, I guess this is what it is. It’s “me,” even though it’s not, you know? Like, the risk being that I – Ryan Davis – am presumed as narrator from song to song, rather than the songs simply existing as they are, as phantoms, independent of the person who just happens to be singing them. But realistically, in order to sell an album and successfully suffer the fate of participating in the “music industry,” there has to be some sort of identity attached, and the other side of the coin is calling it something like, I don’t know… “Cage the Elephant.” And then everywhere you go, there you are – Cage the Elephant. Forever. Until you die or change careers entirely, and even still, you used to be in Cage the Elephant. Any time someone plays the song, comes to a show, buys a t-shirt… There’s no escaping it regardless of what your angle is, so I figured I might as well assign these songs to the random identity that I’m already stuck with just by having a birth certificate and move on to the next challenge from there.
How similar to the demos did the final songs turn out? Did getting the crew of Chuckleheads involved in the recording change the songs much, musically or the spirit of them?
I think both of the records are markedly true to the demos aside from some very obviously group-minded embellishments, which are especially present on the new one. Dancing On The Edge feels, to me, like demos brought to life in the best possible way. This next record is perhaps a slightly more evolved transformation, but neither batches of songs make the dangerous jump from acoustic bedside introversion into howling distorted rock jams (in the way that State Champion songs often did). These songs are inherently soft and warm. We maintain a respect for that throughout our process of fully animating them by way of collaboration. If I’m Geppetto and the 4-track demos are my wooden doll, Seth (Manchester, engineer) & my chucklehead faction were the fairies that helped me turn them into a real boy. I don’t know how the growing-nose part of this metaphor applies. I promise I’m answering these questions truthfully.
There are so many lines that just kill me on your new batch of songs. I don’t wanna give away any specifics, cause half the fun is hearing them for the first time, but I'm curious what your lyric writing process is like. Are you scribbling down notes all the time? Or do you set aside time and write all at once. Or something else?
Yes, both. I am constantly "writing" as I move through life in the most mundane and basic of ways. Driving to the post office, pushing around the skatepark, whatever I happen to be doing. Words and images and questions come to mind (if/when I'm lucky enough to receive them) from all angles of just simply existing and observing what's around me. I write down the ones that feel potentially useful or that make themselves available to me as some sort of fuse for a greater explosion. When I am actively "writing a record" though, ie spending long periods of time alone with a guitar, intensely focused behind doors, what I am actually doing is sifting, stitching, sculpting, editing these little souvenirs of existence into something that can be presented as a song or songs in the service of a desired effect or feeling. So, for me, "writing" is more or less just manufacturing the paint. That is frequently the easier part because it's mechanical, or gifted to me via some sort of difficult-to-discuss and generally unlabored cosmic delivery. The assembly of the writings is where the actual painting happens. And that is the work that I find to be extremely challenging.
Aside from zero broken bones and zero van/blizzard incidents, what are some highlights from yall’s tour with the MJL gang?
I wouldn't even know where to begin with answering that. The entire thing was essentially one month-long highlight in so many ways, aside from everyone experiencing various degrees of comedically gross illness for large chunks of it. That wasn't enough to curb our mojo though. My band had a blast hanging out together, and we loved the Lenderman crew, and honestly, getting to see them do their thing every night to/for so many genuinely ramped-up, generation-spanning rock club audiences... it was inspiring, to say the least. I've never been a part of something like that and I'm beyond grateful to have been invited.
What’s something of yours that you consider a keepsake?
I used to have a baseball signed specifically to me (“Best Wishes, Ryan”) from Nolan Ryan (my namesake), but I haven’t seen it in over a decade now. I kept hoping it would eventually turn up, but by now I’m starting to think it was definitely stolen by some asshole at a party or something, who knows... If anyone reading this has any useful leads, please submit them to Keepsake’s anonymous tip line. We’re going to get that fucker back.
Something you’re looking forward to?
I look forward to drawing every day. I'll probably put a few hours into a drawing I'm working on after finishing this interview. Making art comes so, so, so much more naturally to me than songwriting does. It is virtually automatic for my brain. Writing a song is fucking impossible.
A friend of mine gifted me a Wurlitzer last year and I've been playing it a lot this winter. I look forward to that most days too. I don't even use it to write, I just sit there with my coffee in the morning and play it recklessly for 10-15 minutes while soaking up some natural light from my studio window. It gets my brain going for the day, like stretching before a run.
We have a few more shows with Lenderman this weekend, the last of the bunch. Those will be bittersweet in that our carriage will soon after revert to a pumpkin. But I always look forward to getting the crew together to hit the road and make some music regardless of whether we're playing a sold-out Thalia Hall show or a boardgame cafe in South Bend. I don't even give a shit anymore. I just do whatever I can to sustain my various art-making practices and avoid the news.
What’s up next for RD and RB?
You and I both would like to know the answer to that, my friend. Waiting on things to happen, I suppose... (God?! Are you listening?!)... This new record will come out at some point. There will at least be some overseas shows this year. Some festivals in the UK and such. America seems to be slow-moving at the moment, but then again, we did just put a human dirty diaper in office today, so I can't say my expectations for 2025 are necessarily soaring. I'm just waiting to see where the wind blows us at this point.
Bonus Question. What is a midi?
It’s best you don’t know, Hillary. Some things you can’t unlearn. You must abstain, stay pure. Protect yourself from all external clocks.
Visit More with Ryan here:
Technique Street
Bandcamp
Visual Art
AMAZING AND THANK YOU