Atlas takes its own route toward success

In the middle of the small basement where Atlas holds its weekly Monday-night practice, the five band members cluster together, more or less facing one another. Cords crisscross in an impossible web, threatening to trap these five full-grown men as they rub elbows and somehow avoid bashing their instruments together.

Atlas has been playing in basements since it formed, in 2007, and the members — lead singer and guitarist Jeremy Chugg, steel guitarist Jonny Wooddell, guitarist Josh Orwig, drummer Dave Dalbey and bassist Nick Welch — show zero discomfort in cramped, subterranean quarters. And though natural light seems not to be their thing, there’s a window of sorts here: a big whiteboard on one wall, covered in painstakingly neat script. Look at it and you see a whole future laid out: the practice agenda, proposed set lists for future gigs, the hypothetical track listing for the band’s forthcoming album, metrics for each song’s completion, even bulleted budget goals.

“We’re all teachers and project managers here,” Orwig says, laughing as he notes my reaction to all this data.

The future is close, judging by the next song I hear them rehearse, an in-progress number titled “Do You Know Me.” It’s a catchy, cozy slice of Americana that seems hardly to need more work. “Back Home” is next, the lead track off the band’s most recent full-length, Ten Twenty, released last October. The feel is vintage Laurel Canyon, familiar and worn-in from the first chord, easy to nod along with.

For another new song, “Parade,” Wooddell abandons his steel guitar for electric, and the sound turns groovy and upbeat. Atlas may have surprises in store.

“Here’s how it works with us,” Wooddell says later. “Jeremy will come up with some lyrics, kind of the skeleton of a song, and bring it to practice. We’ll all come together as one band to flesh it out, but we’re all coming from different playlists. Some of us are listening to Sturgill [Simpson]. Some of us are listening to Daft Punk. Whatever we bring comes together in one song, which is how ‘Parade’ happened.”

“We all like similar styles of music, but we all have particular cups of tea that we prefer, that we bring to the table,” Orwig adds. “We’ve been trying to tap into those for a while, and ‘Parade’ is an example. Essentially, every time we write something, it’s a snapshot of where everyone is at and what they’re listening to. The main thing is that we’re all trying to grow every time we write something.”

We’re assembled now upstairs in the living room of Chugg’s Roeland Park home, chatting as Sturgill Simpson’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music plays in the kitchen. Beers are handed out; “drinking” was written into the practice agenda. This is how it usually goes.

Although Atlas isn’t in any immediate danger of veering into dad-rock territory, its members — all in their late 20s and early 30s, all married, two of them fathers — have come to hold these Monday-night sessions as their versions of poker night. When I suggest, based on the tight set of songs I’ve just witnessed, that they might not need such a strict practice schedule, Dalbey laughs and says, “Don’t tell our wives.”

“We were all single when we started the band, so we’ve been through all of that together,” Chugg says. “None of us had kids before we got together as a band, and now there’s four kids. We were all friends and roommates before we were in a band, so it really feels like the music is secondary to all of us hanging out.”

“For a while, it seemed like every time Atlas would do anything, people would be like, ‘So, are you guys trying to make it?’ Because that’s the expectation, right?” Orwig says. “And I would usually have some kind of smart-aleck response, like, ‘We are.’ We’re making music and having fun, and we’ve got the opportunity to hang out and be together every week. I feel like that’s what we’re most passionate about, especially because me and Nick have kids, and it would be easy to be like, ‘Oh, I can’t go out for the next four years.'”

Orwig’s claim that the band isn’t seeking any next-level success is almost a shame for the music. The smart, cohesive Ten Twenty would easily fit into the national conversation, somewhere between albums by Dawes and American Aquarium. Atlas’ untitled, in-progress new album is shaping up similarly, benefiting from the quintet’s steady approach and uninterrupted lineup. The men play with genuine shared assurance, and it shows on record.

“We have a lot of friends in Kansas City who have been around and played music, and the reality is, they don’t play for eight years,” Orwig says. “They go really hard for two or three years, and they sound a thousand times better than we do, and they sell a lot more T-shirts and make a lot more money, but then it’s over. We’re in this for the long run, and we’re doing exactly what we want.”

“We’ve been through births, deaths, unemployment, strokes,” Welch says. “We’ve kind of gone through a bunch of shit together as friends, and it’s more about that than it is about the music. It just happens to be the music that brings us here together on a Monday night.”