The Quivers make a big, loud Mess

Terra Skaggs, lead singer and bassist for the Quivers, had a rough night. When she arrives at the Filling Station for our Sunday-morning meeting, she emits a dry laugh — really more of a cackle — and tells me that her band had played late the previous night at Westport Saloon, where somehow she crossed paths with a couple of shots of tequila.

“Ain’t nothing like a late-night show on a Saturday night in Westport, that’s for sure,” Skaggs says. “What did we see last night, Todd?”

Todd Grantham, the band’s keyboardist and Skaggs’ songwriting partner, looks at Skaggs as she shakes her head. His own expression is a mixture of sympathy and smugness.

“Heart-shaped nipples,” he replies, a ghost of a smile tugging at his lips.

“We were walking to the car, and this guy was like, ‘Have you ever seen heart-shaped nipples?’ ” Skaggs recalls. She laughs. “He’s got this girl sitting there with her shirt up, showing off her heart-shaped nipples. Westport at 2 a.m. on a Saturday — it’s a beautiful thing.”

Westport at 2 a.m. is just the place for a band like the Quivers. An environment of free-flowing liquor and wild degeneration fits this scrappy, brass-knuckles-toting rock troupe fine. The whole point, after all, was for Skaggs to blow off some steam.

“It started with me asking Bernie [Dugan, drums] to join the band,” Skaggs says. This was in 2011. “We were at the Brick, and I was like, ‘Do you want to play in a rock-and-roll band?’ It was totally cliché like that. Bernie brought Todd in, and I initially did not want to play bass at all. I was very anti playing an instrument and singing [simultaneously]. I just wanted to be able to front a band and go nuts. But we went through three bassists, and I finally just got disgusted because none of them would stick around. So I said, ‘Well, fine, I’ll just do it my damn self.’ “

The Quivers eventually found guitarist Abe Haddad, but when he moved out of state in February, Desmond Poirier — also the guitarist for Red Kate — took over his spot. Skaggs laughs again at the idea that Poirier had to learn the Quivers’ entire catalog — a whopping 48 songs — before the band ventured to Austin for South by Southwest.

Poirier’s task was made more daunting by the fact that most of the Quivers’ songs adhere to the same format: short, two-minute bursts of blistering energy. That’s largely what you hear on the Quivers’ March-released debut, Hot Young Mess, a 16-track ode to the sweat and salvation of rock and roll.

“Man, you come out knocking like that, you don’t have to stick around long,” Skaggs says in defense of the mini-songs that form Hot Young Mess. “That’s how I feel. You come out swinging, you give ’em all you got for two minutes — anything over that and you’re outstaying your welcome. That’s how I’ve always felt about rock and roll. Long songs bore the hell out of me.”

There’s another reason that only two songs on Hot Young Mess make it past the three-minute mark: Skaggs wields a tortured, throaty roar, and she pushes it to extremes.

“At our first practice, she sang into the mic, and something in my right ear popped,” Grantham says, remembering the first time he heard Skaggs sing. “That was January 2011, and my ear’s never been the same since. But as soon as it popped, I was like, ‘That’s the singer for me. That’s the one.’ “

Skaggs grins. That kind of visceral reaction, she says, is important to her music.

“My daddy raised me on rhythm and blues,” Skaggs tells me. “I grew up listening to Aretha and Otis and all the blues greats, the people that could make you feel things in your guts. I always said I liked Motown, but it’s too pristine for me. I like that dirty Southern soul where you can just feel it.” Skaggs beats her chest for emphasis.

Despite the slow heat of the late morning and Skaggs’ insistence that she is “not all here,” her eyes flash behind her sunglasses, and she speaks with more and more passion as she talks about “the feeling.”

“The Quivers are everything that’s inspired me in my entire life,” Skaggs says. “I’ve been in a lot of crappy bands that have never been able to move me the way this band does, and it’s really wonderful to hear when a band can actually get you to the point where you are literally blood, sweat and tears on that stage. When I started this band, I said that the moment it becomes a burden, something I don’t want to do, it’s not fun anymore, I’m going to quit. And it’s not happened. The fire is there every time we practice. This band keeps me going.”