Photo by Alexander Thompson.  You could mistake JD McPherson for a revivalist, given how few other contemporary artists are likely to assert, as he boldly does, that “’Keep a Knockin’ by Little Richard is the best record ever made. It’s so insanely visceral, you feel like it’s going to explode your speakers. If I’m listening to that in the car, I find myself having to brake suddenly. I can listen to that and it makes me feel like I’m 20 feet tall. And the feeling of joy I get from that record is always going to be the real push behind trying to make music.” But in a very real sense, McPherson is much more a pioneer than roots resuscitator. He’s knocking at the door of something that arguably hasn’t yet been accomplished—a spirited, almost spiritual hybrid that brings the forgotten lessons from the earliest days of rock & roll into a future that has room for the modernities of studio technique and 21st century singer/songwriter idiosyncrasies that Richard Penniman would not recognize. Let the Good Times Roll, his second album, is a stranger, and more personal affair than its Fats Domino-redolent title might at first suggest, but the name isn’t exactly ironic, either. If you, too, brake for pleasure, you’ll screech to a halt at the enrapturing sound of these Good Times. His first album, 2012’s Signs & Signifiers, was hailed as “an utterly irresistible, slicked-back triumph” by Mojo and “a rockin’, bluesy, forward-thinking gold mine that subtly breaks the conventions of most vintage rock projects” by All Music Guide. The Washington Post wrote that, “he and his bandmates are great musicians taking ownership of a sound, not just mimicking one.” That same review remarked upon how, “the album sounds as if the band is in the same room with the listener.” But for the follow-up, McPherson wanted to maintain that raw power while also capturing the more mysterious side of the records he loves. To that slightly spookier end, he enlisted as a collaborator Mark Neill, known for his work as a producer and engineer with versed-in-the-past acts going back to the Paladins in the 1980s, but, most recently, for recording The Black Keys and Dan Auerbach—a friend of McPherson’s who co-wrote the new album’s “Bridge Builder.” Talking up one of the freshly minted tunes, “Bridge Builder,” McPherson describes it as being “the psychedelic Coasters.” That no such thing really existed prior to this album doesn’t deter him. “This is something I actually talked about with Mark at the beginning of the record: ‘I want to make a ‘50s psychedelic record!’” Neill was up to meeting that seemingly oxymoronic challenge. “It’s still a rock & roll record, but the borders are expanding a little bit,” McPherson explains. “With some of the writing that came out this time, it became apparent the songs weren’t going to lend themselves well to our usual process. So as we sought out a producer, we took aim for a slightly wider—I guess hi-fi is the word—sound, and got more experimental. Mark Neill certainly has all the tools in his hardware shop with which to produce any range of sounds from vintage Capitol Records stuff on up to…gosh, we listened to so much David Bowie making this record. We’d play Primal Scream’s Screamadelica to listen to how they suddenly started making dance records, and then Mark would play us Marilyn McCoo singing ‘Marry Me, Bill’ over and over again, I guess trying to re-wire our brains.” Amid this flurry of possible influences, a few production approaches stuck. “I find that the records that I like to listen to over and over again are the ones that have those strange engineering choices, or weird sounds. I was very attracted to the idea of using plate reverb. So whereas the first record was really informed by New Orleans rhythm and blues, where everything was very dry and up-front, I really was listening more this time to a ton of Link Wray, and the Allen Toussaint-produced Irma Thomas stuff, and all the early ‘60s rock & roll that is saturated in plate reverb.” McPherson certainly doesn’t begrudge the attention that Signs & Signifiers unexpectedly brought him. “If it hadn’t been for the ‘North Side Gal’ video, this probably never would have caught on,” he says, recalling the fame he found on YouTube even before Rounder picked up his indie release. “That’s how we found our label and found our management. I was still teaching school, and here I am with got this video that’s like a million hits. I’m like, what? I had no plans to quit my job. Luckily, I lost it.” A middle school art department’s loss was Rounder’s and the rock world’s gain. It’d been a while in coming. “I started getting obsessed with this stuff when I was in high school,” McPherson says. “There wasn’t much to do where I grew up in rural southeast Oklahoma, where I lived on a 160-acre cattle ranch.” When he discovered early rock & roll and R&B, “it was like finding a treasure no one else knew about. Nobody around me had any interest whatsoever in Little Richard except for me and my friend. Once we started listening to Jerry Lee Lewis, and to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, which was the best thing you could ever find, everything started to change. I’ve got a videotape of us playing at a pool hall in the early ‘90s in Talihina, Oklahoma, and it’s cowboys and criminals and people that are cooking meth up in the hills standing around playing pool, and here we are with our greaser uniforms on, playing Buddy Holly’s ‘Rockin’ Around with Ollie Vee’ followed by ‘Clampdown’ by the Clash, and all these people are really confused. Those were happy times.” The covers and the grease got dropped along the way to adulthood, of course, even though he knows what he does now is likely to wind up with some inaccurate revival tags. “There’s never going to be a point where I’m not going to hear the word ‘rockabilly’,” he says with a laugh and a sigh, “even though it’s not anthropologically correct, because it’s separate from rhythm & blues and rock & roll. Not being able to be perceived as how you sort of define what you’re doing is frustrating, but you just have to understand that not everybody is a nerd about this stuff. What it comes down to is that you can’t expect for people to listen if you’re not doing something personal. I mean, you can’t just do covers of Johnny Burnette Trio songs, because that idea has already been expressed, and it was actually moved past pretty quickly. Rock & roll music changed really quickly when it started becoming ubiquitous youth music and the President’s sister started doing the Twist. Yet there’s something intrinsically valuable about a lot of those ideas that haven’t fully been explored yet. And you take everything you love about it and write personal music and hope it translates into its own thing. I always hear ‘Man, bringing this stuff back is really important,’ but I have goal to bring rock & roll back in some reactionary way to battle something else. I want it to just kind of nudge it into its own little place alongside what’s happening now.” Since the debut album came out, McPherson has played for a lot of those aforementioned genre nerds who pick up on every single influence. But he and his band have also opened for acts ranging from Bob Seger (getting a standing ovation at an arena in Detroit, the headliner’s hometown) to the Dave Matthews Band to Nick Lowe to Eric Church (who sought him out to write some songs together). For a Halloween night 2014 show at the Forum in L.A., super-fan Josh Homme, one of McPherson’s biggest supporters, handpicked him to open for Queens of the Stone Age. These may not all seem like natural pairings, but the music is primal and melodic enough that, after a few minutes, it never fails to make sense even to audiences with the least of expectations and musical educations. “Man, people may not even know it, but they all like that stuff,” McPherson declares. “I’ve seen it happen over and over again. You’re in a record store where they’re playing some weird underground amorphous electronic record that has no configurable beat per minute, and then they put on a Sam Cooke record, and everybody is just like ‘Ohhh’— like a weight lifted. All kinds of music are interesting, but man, there’s something about the 1/4/5, 12-bar blues form that’s just hard-wired into American brains. And I shouldn’t say just American brains, because this stuff is still really huge in Europe, too. Everybody likes rock & roll. They just either won’t admit it or don’t know it yet,” he laughs, unshakable in his faith that the whole world is or will be on a roll.

After the success of her critically-acclaimed 2021 release Daddy’ s Country Gold, Melissa Carper, dubbed “HillBillie Holiday” by friend and collaborator Chris Scruggs, was eager to get back in the studio. With co-producers Andrija Tokic (St. Paul & The Broken Bones, Hurray For The Riff Raff) and Dennis Crouch (The Time Jumpers) behind the boards again at Tokic’s analog paradise The Bomb Shelter in Nashville, Carper assembled that same crew of magical music makers - plus a few more - to embark on her newest effort, Ramblin’ Soul, set for release November 18th via Thirty Tigers. Carper’s deep, old-timey music roots were firmly planted as a child, playing upright bass and singing in her family’s traveling country band in rural Nebraska. Her love of country classics was cultivated as she laid beneath the console listening to her parents’ record collection. Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, and more became the soundtrack of her youth. When Carper’s father gifted her a collection of Jimmie Rodgers’ recordings, she began to find her voice and calling as a songwriter. Carper attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on a music scholarship, and spent much of her time in the music library, instinctively drawn to the great jazz classics and jazz vocalists such as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Nat King Cole. She also discovered Lead Belly, uncovering a deep well within when singing his songs.   After two years of college, wanderlust set in, and Carper hit the road in the family’s 1980 Dodge Maxi Van, and landed in historic Eureka Springs, Arkansas. There, she was welcomed into the busking community, and found a new home base—a place to write, reflect, and rejuvenate in years to come. As she belted out the lyrics to “Ramblin’ Man” life began to imitate art. Carper put a few hundred thousand miles on her vans and pick-up trucks, playing the streets and clubs of New Orleans, Austin, and even a stint in NYC as a founding member of The Maybelles. Magnetically pulled into the cultural heritage wherever she went, she immersed herself in the music of those who sang on those same street corners, and off the beaten path in times gone by. Along the way, she founded award-winning bands like power trio The Carper Family, the perfect outlet for her unique skills and style. The band brought her original work to life in a simple yet dynamic fashion that also served her inspirations - country, bluegrass, western swing, and old- style jazz, playing festivals and shows across the globe, and on shows like “A Prairie Home Companion.” Carper also holds a spot in award-winning Arkansas foursome Sad Daddy, and founded roots duo Buffalo Gals with Sad Daddy bandmate and partner, award-winning fiddler Rebecca Patek. In 2020, grappling with the loss of regular gigs, Carper and Patek moved to a friend’s farm near Austin, working in exchange for housing, organic vegetables, and fresh, country air. “I had a handful of songs about rambling around and living a free life that I wanted to weave through the album,” Carper recalls. “I wrote the title track driving back home to Texas, and it felt like the seeds of the next album were planted.” “I had a handful of songs about rambling around and living a free life that I wanted to weave through the album,” Carper recalls. “I wrote the title track driving back home to Texas, and it felt like the seeds of the next album were planted. I also knew I wanted Ramblin’ Soul to have a different feel than Daddy’s Country Gold, with more upbeat and diverse styles and grooves.” Ramblin’ Soul features a co-write with life long ramblin’ buddy and bandmate Gina Gallina, a song penned by friend and frequent collaborator Brennen Leigh; a reimagined classic from folk pioneer Odetta; and ten Carper originals. The album ventures into blues, early rock and roll, and old school soul, along with Carper’s signature styles of country, western swing, and jazz. Album track “Ain’t a Day Goes By” breaks your heart, then mends it again in the universal longing for a loved one now gone on. Backed up by Hammond B3 organ (John Pahmer), the emotion is punctuated by the gospel-style harmony stylings of Kyshona Armstrong, Nickie Conley, and Maureen Murphy. “1980 Dodge Van” heralds pulsing electric guitar and a grooving upright bass (Dennis Crouch) in an ode to the loyal family vehicle, while “I Don’t Need to Cry” is a Patsy Cline-esque lament showcasing Carper’s classic country range and songwriting finesse. The upbeat, tongue-in-cheek “Holding All The Cards” transports us to a smoky New Orleans speakeasy, with wordplay, honky tonk piano, and playful clarinet, while Carper pays an upbeat western swing tribute to her current home state in “Texas, Texas. Texas.” Carper’s lifelong, steadfast listening has come to fruition in the songs on Ramblin’ Soul. Her childhood love of the family record collection planted the seeds of what is her own bountiful orchard today.