Ben Nichols is best known as the frontman and songwriter for the long-running Memphis rock band Lucero. Now, at age 50, he is releasing one of his most personal pieces of work, a rare solo album titled In the Heart of the Mountain.

After getting a history degree in his home state of Arkansas, Nichols moved to Tennessee and started Lucero in 1998. Since then, the band has released 12 studio albums and kept up a constant touring schedule throughout the U.S. and overseas. 

In 2008, Nichols started playing more solo acoustic shows and was part of Chuck Ragan’s original “Revival Tour”. The same year he released his first solo effort, The Last Pale Light in the West. 

The Last Pale Light in the West was a seven song concept album inspired by and written about Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian. A copy of the vinyl record is kept with the Cormac McCarthy Papers at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. The title track was used in an episode of the TV show The Walking Dead (season 4, episode 6). The album was primarily acoustic guitar and Nichols’ vocals with piano and accordion by Rick Steff and pedal steel and electric guitar by Todd Beene. 

In the Heart of the Mountain is Nichols first solo album since The Last Pale Light in the West. Although not a concept album, the song titles in sequence do read as a kind of poem.

“A few years ago, a stranger mailed me a copy of What About This, Collected Poems of Frank Stanford. He sent it because he knew I was from Arkansas and Stanford had lived and died in Arkansas and he thought my lyrics shared something in common with those poems. Frank Stanford died in 1978 at the age of 29. Even at the age of 50, I’ve never read much poetry, but there was something about Stanford’s writing I fell in love with. Not because it reminded me of my own lyrics, but because it made me want to write. There was something alive and dangerous in his words. Nothing safe about the way he wrote. Soaked in Southern tones but not backwards, more unconventional and pushing at the edges of Southern decorum.  It was mythology and everyday life, it was an exotic landscape and it was home. It was not quite like anything I’d read before.

Frank Stanford’s poems made me want to write in a style I’d never written in before. I’m not sure if I actually achieved that, but I ended up creating my own everyday-life-mythology of where I was from. I also ended up writing some of my favorite lyrics in years.  

I had a handful of guitar parts that I was holding back from the band. They were acoustic-based and had a quieter feel to them and I wasn’t ready to turn them into Lucero songs. In my head I was hearing different instrumentation and a different approach than what the band usually does. And I had these new lyrics I was working on. Before I knew it, I’d written an album’s worth of songs and fashioned the song titles into a poem unworthy of Frank Stanford but still inspired by him.”

In the heart of the mountain

The darkness sings

A bleak overture

From a western or a war movie 

While the stars disappear

Fading back into the night

I’m in over my head

She’s starlight in the river

The prayer

The swamper’s lament

The devil takes his leave

“I’d say In the Heart of the Mountain is the closest I’ve come to making an album completely on my own terms. I had help from a great engineer and great friends who also happened to be amazing studio musicians, but it was self produced. I wrote it without input from anyone else. There were no band members to negotiate parts and approaches with. It wasn’t based on a novel or a theme. The only inspiration was that desire to create something that lived in my memories of those rivers, fields, and mountains, in that mythological Arkansas my family called home, where I grew up. I haven’t been able to get back there nearly as often as I would like.”

The album features Nichols on acoustic guitar and vocals, as well as the occasional electric guitar solo and percussion. He is accompanied by Morgan Eve Swain (The Huntress and the Holder of Hands, The Devil Makes Three, Brown Bird) on violin and backing vocals, Cory Branan on electric and acoustic guitars, and Todd Beene (Chuck Ragan, Glossary) on pedal steel and electric guitars. It was recorded at Southern Grooves studio in Memphis, Tennessee with Matt Ross-Spang as the recording and mixing engineer. 

LUCERO

Among the Ghosts

Lucero has long been admired in their hometown of Memphis, where they have hosted "The Lucero Family Block Party" every spring for a number of years. At the 2018 Block Party they celebrated their 20th anniversary as a band, with the city’s Mayor Jim Strickland officially declaring it Lucero Day.

The group found their name in a Spanish/English dictionary. Lucero is variously translated as bright star or morning star. None of them can speak Spanish.

It’s been two decades since original members Ben Nichols, Brian Venable, Roy Berry, and John C. Stubblefield (keyboardist Rick Steff joined in 2006) startedplaying shows in Memphis. The band’s first show was April 13, 1998 at a warehouse space across the street from what is now the National Civil Rights Museum, the infamous Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. Their first set was six songs played to about six people. On August 3, 2018, record release day for Among the Ghosts, the band will be co-headlining Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado.

The band’s ninth studio album, Among the Ghosts, is their first for noted Nashville indie label Thirty Tigers. It was recorded and co-produced with Grammy-winning engineer/producer and Memphis native Matt Ross-Spang (Jason Isbell, Margo Price, Drive by Truckers) at the historic Sam Phillips Recording Service, the studio built by the legendary producer after outgrowing his Memphis Recording Service/Sun Studio.

Recorded primarily live as a five-piece, Among the Ghosts eschews the Stax-inspired horns and Jerry Lee Lewis-style boogie piano featured on some of the band’s past recordings for a streamlined rock & roll sound that pays homage to their seminal influences as it seeks to push that legacy into the future. For a band who carried the torch of the alt-country movement back in the 90’s and helped pave the way for what is now called Americana, Lucero have re-discovered what inspired them in the first place. The sound is more their own and at the same time not exactly like anything they’ve done before. This is a band settling into their craft. The 10-song disc’s title is both a tribute to the spirits which roam the streets of their fabled city, as well as the hard road the determinedly independent band set out on 20 years ago. The band played around 200 shows per year for many of those 20 years.

With a nod to his younger brother Jeff Nichols, an acclaimed filmmaker whose movies include Loving, Mud, Take Shelter, Midnight Special, and Shotgun Stories; Nichols has written songs that are cinematic short stories, steeped in Southern gothic lore. There are nods to regional authors like Flannery O’Connor and Faulkner, as well as newer writers like Larry Brown (Big Bad Love,Fay), Ron Rash (TheCove,The World Made Straight), and William Gay (The Long Home).

As the first album he’s written since his marriage and the birth of his now two-year-old daughter Izzy, Nichols approached the task as a narrator rather than in first person. It’s a dark palette that includes tales of a haunting (Among the Ghosts), a drowning (Bottom of the Sea), a reckoning with the devil (Everything has Changed), a divorce (Always Been You), and a shoot-out (Cover Me). And that’s just Side A. Side B is a letter from a battlefield (To My Dearest Wife), a crime (Long Way Back Home), a straight-out rocker (For the Lonely Ones) and even a spooky spoken-word cameo from actor Michael Shannon, who has appeared in every one of Nichols’ brother’s films. The song’s title Back to the Night references a line from Nick Tosches’ Jerry Lee Lewis biography, Hellfire. In addition, there’s a song Nichols wrote for his brother’s movie Loving, which appeared in the film and on the soundtrack, re-recorded for Among the Ghosts with the whole band.

You could also say there’s a rescue, a getaway, a survival story and a middle finger to Satan himself, laughs Nichols. It’s all in your perspective. Several songs juxtapose going off to battle with a rock & roll band’s endless touring, shifting time periods like the spirits which haunt the album, the happiness of domestic bliss undercut with fears of loss and the specter of mortality. Among the Ghosts simultaneously reprises the past and looks to the  future, while being firmly anchored in the present.

Musically, the band highlights range from co-founding member Brian Venable’s Dire Straits-meets-War on Drugs guitar pyrotechnics in Bottom of the Sea and Cover Me to the Springsteen vibe of For the Lonely Ones, Rick Steff’s skeletal piano lines on Always Been You, John C’s bass lines in Everything Has Changed and Long Way Back Home, and drummer Roy Berry’s dynamic shifts from the powerful and brutal title track Among the Ghosts to the marching drive of To My Dearest Wife and the subtlety of Loving. Throughout, Nichols’ bourbon-soaked growl has become even more distinctive and commanding.

Among the Ghosts offers a timeless perspective on Lucero’s distinctive sound. The lyrics could’ve been written 200 years ago or yesterday. Representing a new South compared to the one that’s been mythologized, Lucero have formulated their own ideas and culture which, in some cases, contradicts what came before them (no Confederate flags), but also updates and reconsiders those traditions in a new light.

"I think we’ve tried to remake this place that we love and cherish in our own fashion. We are very proud of where we are from and we’ve spent the last 20 years trying to bring a bit of our version of home to the rest of the world... It may have taken 20 years, but everything has fallen in place right where it needs to be," acknowledges Nichols. "There were some dark days in those middle years, but we’ve learned how to do this and survive. We still write heartbreak songs, but now, with a family at home, it’s a whole new kind of heartbreak."

Among the Ghosts lays out that new territory with alacrity, as Lucero shines their Morning Star, burning just as brightly, if not more so, 20 years later. As one of the album’s song titles so aptly puts it, Everything Has Changed, but one thing hasn’t... Lucero’s music remains more vital than ever.