—David Menconi, Down on Copperline
Among many other things, Chris Stamey is a master of multi-tasking. Best-known as a singer/songwriter in bands including The dB’s, he’s also a producer, arranger, engineer, collaborator, studio entrepreneur, author and mentor, a list that doesn’t even begin to cover everything. His associations range from internationally famous acts like Kronos Quartet, Bill Frissell and Alejandro Escovedo to largely unknown young acts on the rise.
The coming months will find Stamey playing shows across the country in a variety of groups and contexts, including Big Star Quintet – the latest edition of Stamey’s ongoing supergroup tribute band to the legendary underground cult-pop band Big Star. He’s also been working at his Chapel Hill studio, Modern Recording, on albums for other artists and occasionally even himself while helping organize pre-concert rehearsals for Alejandro Escovedo’s big June 15 Cat’s Cradle benefit show for Lynn Blakey and Ecki Heins.
Stamey’s own latest album “Anything Is Possible” won’t be released until July. But a handful of emphasis tracks are already out in the world, including the title track and “I’d Be Lost Without You.” He’ll also play a hometown Orange County show at Cat’s Cradle on June 14, opening for his fellow-traveler kindred spirits from New York The Lemon Twigs.
The vibe of “Anything Is Possible” is Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys performing in the torch-song style of the 20th century’s “Great American Songbook,” with delectable hooks and late-night salon ambience. It’s a logical place for Stamey to land at the elder-statesman age of 70, the latest chapter of a career spent following the muse into intriguing places.
“There’s a harmonic density to the ‘Great American Songbook,’ moving away from three-note chords to four or five-note chords,” says Stamey. “Once you have more notes in a chord, you can bridge to other harmonic places more easily. It’s a broader toolbox, which is important to me to have under my fingers so that when I’m in the frame of mind of writing a song, I don’t have to stop and think about where a flat 9 chord resolves. There’s no time for thinking that way when you’re in the songwriting zone.”
Stamey began leaning more toward classic song-stylist songwriting with “Occasional Shivers,” a 2016 radio musical set in Manhattan in the early 1960s. Nneena Freelon, Marshall Crenshaw, Skylar Gudasz, Bill Frisell, Branford Marsalis and playwright Mike Wiley were among his collaborators on “Occasional Shivers” and its album counterpart, 2019’s double-disc “New Songs for the 20th Century.” The new album “Anything Is Possible” has another first-rate guest list, with Lemon Twigs plus leading local lights Mitch Easter, Don Dixon, Charles Cleaver and ex-Ben Folds 5 bassist Robert Sledge, among others.
“For years I had been in this cycle of writing a song, arranging a song, performing and recording and mixing a song,” says Stamey. “Where the writing part might take 15 minutes, all the other parts take endless hours. In order to write more songs, I started writing them on paper and putting them in a pile. Once the melody and chords are notated pretty close, I feel like I can pat myself on the back. I still like recording them, but in a way the art part of it is done with the writing. It’s like scripting and then shooting a movie – you can write a lot more scripts than you can shoot.”
Stamey’s earliest music-making came during his 1960s childhood in Winston-Salem, where he and Mitch Easter would make recordings with whatever instruments and gear were available (a period Stamey chronicled in his wonderful 2018 memoir “A Spy in the House of Loud”). One fruit of those early labors was Sneakers, a group that played a seminal role in the rise of power pop during the new-wave underground of the 1970s.
After Sneakers, Easter opened a studio in the garage of his parents’ Winston-Salem house, where R.E.M. was among the acts to record there. Stamey went to New York and played with notables including Alex Chilton before forming The dB’s, another band that was ahead of its time. After about a decade and a half up north, Stamey moved back to North Carolina in the early 1990s. He’s been in Chapel Hill ever since, serving as mentor to multiple generations of younger local musicians.
“I think of him as endlessly curious,” says singer/songwriter Rachel Kiel, a self-described “pop nerd” who has played flute and sang on various Stamey projects including Salt Collective’s new “Last Day That We’re Young” mini-album. “He never rests on his laurels, it’s always about getting on to the next thing. “Despite everything he’s done, he has a lot of humility. At the first rehearsals we did he’d say things like, ‘This is something I did with a band I used to be in, called The dB’s.’ Uh, yeah, I know who the dB’s are. When the Chapel Hill Schoolkids Records closed, I was there buying their dB’s posters off the wall.”
Chris Stamey opens for The Lemon Twigs at 7 p.m. on June 14 at Cat’s Cradle. For ticket details, see catscradle.com. His album “Anything Is Possible” will be released July 11 on Label 51 Recordings.
