Three Stars: Title Tracks
Within the same breath of announcing the dissolution of one-album wonder Georgie James in the summer of 2008, co-creator John Davis revealed that he already had another project underway. Over the past decade Davis had shown that he could do high-strung hyperkinetic rhythms (as the drummer of Q and Not U) and more polished and melodic power pop. His newest outfit, Title Tracks, proves that Davis can be a driving musical force as well as a team player.
It's not hard to connect the dots between Title Tracks tunes and the songs from Davis's previous bands. The Tracks songs are upbeat, often poppy numbers that combine guitar and keyboard melodies for sounds that wouldn't have seemed out of place on a California beach in the 1960s, or an Ohio home recording studio in the early 1990s. The songs are both catchy and timeless, and the seeming effortlessness in creating them make the title of the upcoming LP, It Was Easy, an apt one. Title Tracks solidifies what we knew all along: John Davis has become a D.C. music staple. This guy's not going anywhere, and the quality of his work continues to be rock solid.
We caught up with John recently to talk about upcoming Title Tracks videos, his show on WOXY, and his hopes that his spring tour won't involve missing every Caps playoff game.
See them next: With Ted Leo & The Pharmacists and Radio 4 at the Black Cat on Thursday night. The show is sold out, so consult your pal Craig.
Buy their music: On iTunes. Or anywhere that Dischord releases are sold.
Find them online: http://www.myspace.com/titletracksdc
If I remember correctly, Ted Leo opened on an old Q and Not U tour. Is this the first time you're going to be sharing the stage since that tour?
No. That tour was April 2001, but I remember we played together on election night in 2004. We were in San Diego. That may have actually been the only other time Q and Not U and Ted played together after that, I think. And then Georgie James played with Ted several times. I know in Baltimore. We did maybe a week of shows together in Canada and the Northeast. So, we've done it a few times since then, but this is the first time that Title Tracks will be playing with Ted.
How long have these Title Tracks songs been around? There seemed to be no turnaround time between the end of Georgie James and the first Title Tracks shows.
The breakup of Georgie James was announced in the summer of 2008, but it was pretty much in reality, much earlier than that. I think I started writing the early Title Tracks songs in December and January. And I pretty much knew at that point that I was just going to play the last few months of shows with Georgie James and then pretty much stop as soon as we could. I was already really thinking of the next thing at that point. In a sense, I knew that Georgie James was not going to last much longer and kind of my nature is just to always be doing something like that; something musical. I wanted to start right away on a new project. So, I started writing the songs and they all came pretty quickly.
I noticed that Merideth Munoz is no longer in the band. Is that because she's moving to Austin, or did that happen earlier?
Yeah, that was something that we knew was coming. We knew that sometime early next year she was going to move and that was going to coincide with when the Title Tracks album was coming out, and we would need to be touring. We knew that a long way in advance, so last May was her last show with us and we had talked a little bit before then saying that we should probably get somebody new so when the band did tour, we had a few months with the new person to sort of get comfortable. And that was something we had agreed on together. So her last show was mid-May and Nick's first show was later in June.
There seems to me a difference between the more polished sound of your live show and the more lo-fi sound of your recorded material. Is that intentional?
Can you think of what you're referring to? Like, what songs?
Specifically, I was thinking of "Every Little Bit Hurts." Actually, both of the tracks on the Two Songs single.
I guess I wouldn't have thought that, that the single was particularly lo-fi. I mean the Dischord single is, to me, if anything, more polished than we had originally planned. So, I'm not sure. I can definitely say that we'e not going for a polished thing really, anyway, which I guess is a difference from Georgie James. And live, I hadn't thought of it as a particularly polished thing, but we do play a lot and there isn't anything particularly ragged about our live show, which is pretty fine by me. But yeah, with the recordings we're not aiming to join that kind of trend of a lo-fi sort of thing, but at the same time, I do prefer sort of rougher recordings to slick recordings. And I want a sort of simplicity on the recordings if possible, so that's something to go for, but I wouldn't say we were going for any sort of polished live set. We play a lot and everybody plays well in the band, so it might come off that way, but no agenda there.
When do you expect the full length to come out?
It comes out February 2.
Will you be touring immediately off of that release?
Yeah, basically about a week or two later we'll start touring. We're going to be touring from February into the beginning of May pretty much. Not solid, we'll be home here and there, but we're going to do half the U.S. in February and March and probably go down to SXSW in late March, and then I think we're going to the West Coast in the end of April, the beginning of May. That's sort of the plan for now, maybe go to Europe later in the summer and do more America touring in the fall.
Speaking of Austin, you have a show on WOXY. How did that come about?
I had been doing a show on XM Radio for about maybe nine months and then they got essentially shut down. I mean, they merged with Sirius, which you probably heard. Although the name XM lives on, it's called XM/Sirius, or something like that, but everyone from XM was pretty much let go and my show was a specialty show and there were a couple of other ones, too. So, I guess there was a chance that we could have stayed, but they were going to need a couple of months to figure it out, and I'd already been not that excited about my time at XM anyway, so I was happy to kind of go elsewhere.
I certainly knew WOXY from having played on WOXY, 'cause it's one of the better stations, and Merideth who you mentioned earlier is friends with them, so I just asked her if she knew who I could talk to. And she passed on a contact, and I asked them if they wanted to pick up my show and they said yes. So after a month or two off the air it came back on WOXY.
I'd heard that you'd been shooting Title Tracks videos last weekend. Are you willing to divulge anything about the taping?
Yeah, sure! The original plan was to record us playing live just on a soundstage. We weren't going to have a lot of money to do a fancy video for anything from this record. With Georgie James, we had a pretty big video budget. We sort of spent a lot on that video, but that wasn't something I was going to be able to do this time. But I worked with the same people and we just came up with an idea that would be much cheaper. So the original idea, as I said, was to just record us playing live on a soundstage and we did that. We did two songs like that, but then we also got a little more ambitious and started to do two actual music videos as well, which are performance-based but they're more like videos instead of just footage of us playing live.
We did four things, basically. There are going to be two live clips. One is "Every Little Bit Hurts," which is already on the Dischord single but that's going to be on the album, too, and another song from the album called "Piles of Paper." And then we did a video for a song called "Steady Love," which is on the album, and we did the footage for a video for "Every Little Bit Hurts," kind of like a proper video for that, too. So, the two live clips we'll have on the internet just on our website and this and that to give people who haven't seen us a chance to see what we sound like. And then the videos we'll sort of get out to the normal video world. But, that's the plan with that. We shot stuff for four different clips this weekend, but it all went by pretty quickly. It was fairly well planned and we just went in and played and that was that.
They're going to start editing and hopefully we'll start seeing something in the next four to six weeks. It's the same guys who did the Georgie James video, so I worked with them before and I was happy with that video for the most part. I think our acting in the Georgie James video was pretty bad, but other than that it was definitely good. So, I was happy to work with those guys again.
I notice that your touring comes right in the middle of hockey season. Are you going to be able to make any of the Caps games when you come home?
Because I'm always on tour in the spring, I have many many memories of missing Caps playoff games. It's almost like a tradition. I remember being on tour two years ago in that series against the Flyers, and during Game 1 my friend Ari was texting me giving me the updates on what was happening as I was driving up through California. Then I remember way back with Q and Not U playing some show in like, Pomona, California in the spring of 2001 and somebody in the front was telling us that the Caps had lost that night and me and Matt, who was the bass player at the time, being very unhappy about that, so it's just sort of like a tradition. I guess there's probably a good chance that I'll miss a fair amount of playoffs againm but I'm pretty used to it. But if they go deep this year which I think they will, I'll be home after the first week of May, so I'm hoping to be around by certainly the third round of the finals, which I'm expecting them to get to this year.