Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band’s Dancing on the Edge brooks traditional song structure

Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band. // photo courtesy the artist

Dancing on the Edge might be the debut album from Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band, but it’s hardly their first effort.

For most of the previous decade, Davis released music with the rootsy indie-rock group State Champion and more recently, as a part of the adventurous instrumental outfit Equipment Pointed Ankh, whose membership includes several of the people in the Roadhouse Band.

So, what led the Indiana-by-way-of-Kentucky songwriter to put out an album of intricately straightforward, cynically open-hearted country songs under his own name?

“I’d written and recorded this specific collection of songs under the assumption that by the time I had to finalize the artwork and put something on the cover in order to sell it, I would surely have come up with some perfectly fitting, wittily mysterious moniker that could function flexibly between solo-alias and traditional band name,” Davis tells The Pitch, with trademark sardonic flair.

“But it just never happened. Everything I came up with (and I thought about it exhaustively) felt wrong or pointless and random at best. Releasing it under my own name was not any sort of declaration or victory cry. Quite the opposite, in fact. It was a white flag.”

There is a feeling of deep consideration, compassionate frustration, humorous surrender and “fuck-it-all” determination that runs throughout Dancing on the Edge. The comfy warmth of Davis voice–it can approach Garth Brooks-levels of richness–is amply supported by the hearty twang of Christopher May’s pedal steel and the easy lope of Will Lawrence’s drums. But as traditional and homey as the music can sound, it behaves strangely–the songs are long, mostly 7-9 minutes, and lack traditional choruses, if not hooks.

“I threw traditional song structure out the window many years ago, because I didn’t think I was good or potent enough a writer to make any sort of valuable connection with the listener over the course of 3 minutes,” is how Davis puts it. Drum machines and backing synth drones give the affable back-porch melodies a slightly unsettling sheen and tricky nuances.

Above all, there are the lyrics. Davis’ songs are teeming with unexpected one-liners, deliciously off-putting metaphors, alarming confessions and brazen come-ons:

“But it’s getting longer babe/ the list of things I’d do for a buck/ If I only had a Pepsi now/ for all the coke spilled in this truck.”

“I don’t want to make death rock anymore/ I want to go where my alarm clock won’t dare to come find me/ I’ll leave my roadmaps in a drawer and explore/ Where the asphalt’s still smeared with the deer of the nineties.”

“I alone am but a negligible fraction/ of the holy trinity/And I’m only in town for this one night.”

Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band. // photo courtesy the artist

Somehow, all this sophisticated bounty emerged after a low point in Davis’ interest in traditional modes of music-making.

“I was burned out on songwriting,” he says. “I couldn’t fathom doing it anymore. It was virtually all I’d ever known, and even then, it had never come easy to me.”

This unsurprisingly coincided with the end of State Champion just before COVID hit in 2020. Davis’ growing disenchantment with his usual mode of creation led him down some unusual rabbit holes.

“I was listening almost exclusively to instrumental electronic music for long spells at a time,” he recalls. “I pieced together a PA inside of my grandmother’s empty house when she was living elsewhere with cancer. I inhabited the space and began experimenting with making my own confused forms of ‘techno’ music by gathering whatever cheap, undesirable MIDI-equipped synths and drum machines I could find.”

His willingness to tinker with unusual textures and instruments helped him fit in with Equipment Pointed Ankh, who make highly improvisational “digital woodwind funhouse music,” as Davis wryly calls it. This spirit can be heard in the eccentric flourishes and free-flowing structures that populate the alternate-universe shadow country of Dancing on the Edge. Still, it’s hard to picture anyone in a band as odd and experimental as Equipment Pointed Ankh also making music if not exactly wholesome, then companionable. Davis doesn’t necessarily disagree.

“On first listen, there is virtually no connection to be made,” he admits. “But I’d like to think that the closer one listens and the longer one feels around for the connective tissue therein, the more our collective understanding of A) Those who did it before us and B) The processes by which we actively chose to do it differently, the more blurred those genre lines become. It’s not like I sit down, put a cowboy hat on and all of a sudden I’m trying to make a John Prine song.”

A funny and appropriate image, but it leaves one wondering how exactly these strange, stirring, loopy anthems got made, especially as they came in the wake of a protracted songwriting lull. As Davis tells the story, they just sort of happened, with a little inspiration from some fortuitously acquired gear, much as he fell into electronic composition with the jury-rigged PA at his grandmother’s house.

“I found this metal resonator (a National Guitar knock-off called a ‘Continental’ that some German guys made back in the early ’90s) for way-too-little money at a used gear shop in town, and I fell in love with playing it. I found a spot in my house that I loved playing it in so much that the songs just sort of began erupting,” he says. “I’d tried on and off for years to do this, to forge something useful out of all the stacks of unused lyrical content leftover from my late 20s/early 30s, but it wasn’t there.”

Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band. // photo courtesy the artist

But now, the tap had at last been opened, and his store of observations, jokes and symbols began to find a musical home. Once the juices began flowing, Davis relied on his long experience to channel them down the right pathways.

“I write everything on an acoustic guitar, obsessing intensively on not only the lyrics themselves but also what guitar chords to employ and when and how many times, etc. in order for the words to connect most efficiently,” he says.” Then, historically speaking, I either show the more-or-less finished songs to a band with whom I can bounce arrangements off of, or figure out how to ‘animate’ them myself, musically speaking. Sometimes I’ll hear steel or strings or little organ lines early on in the writing stages. Other times I go into the studio not knowing what will happen at all. It can be stressful, obviously, but you learn to trust your instincts by this point.”

Those instincts led him to take some chances in the studio.

“This guy Kevin who played bass on [album track] ‘Flashes of Orange,’ I’d never even met him before,” Davis confesses. “[Producer] Seth [Manchester] was just like ‘I have an idea, can I call this dude who lives nearby and we’ll see what he does?’ We were like ‘I don’t give a shit.’ It sounded great so we rolled with it.”

The result is an impulsive record that feels carefully planned, a beguiling and contradictory collection of long-held, highly polished ideas, gutsy risks, bad jokes and spontaneous sparks.

“We got up there the night before we started tracking and essentially stayed up all night passing booze and instruments back and forth, talking about what should happen and how,” Davis says. “After that, we just went for it and never looked back.”

Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band will be at Farewell on November 25, with Ace of Spit, Warren Burns and Blue Horses of Madness. Details on that show here.