Inside the Spacebomb studio with Natalie Prass and Matthew E White
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Version 0 of 1. Drinking a flat white in a coffee shop in Richmond, Virginia, Natalie Prass has a certain no-nonsense air about her. Perhaps it’s something to do with her career to date. Her name has recently appeared on a lot of “new artists to watch in 2015” lists, the result of her eponymous debut album, which got rapturous critical notices from the minute the promotional CDs landed on journalists’ doormats. But as Prass is quick to point out, she’s anything but a new artist. She is 28, and has spent her entire adult life as a professional singer-songwriter, much of it in the notoriously unforgiving environment of Nashville’s music scene. “You learn pretty quickly if you’re cut out to do it there,” she says. “It’s such a hard audience. The level of musicianship and professionalism there is just off the charts. You really have to show people you’re worth their time, because everyone and their mom plays music. It’s cutthroat. If you want it, you have to get your shit together, you have to shape up really quickly.” Indeed, Nashville was so tough that Prass was on the verge of giving up music entirely in favour of an unlikely career making sweatshirts for dogs: “I started my own company called Analog Dog and it was doing really well. I thought: maybe this is my calling.” Then a mutual friend alerted her to the music an old school acquaintance of hers, Matthew E White, was making back home in Virginia with a collective of local musicians who called themselves Spacebomb. “I was like, are you kidding me, Matt White from Virginia Beach?” she says. “He said: ‘Sure, you guys should work together.’ You hear that all the time in Nashville – you guys should write together, record together, jam – so I was a little, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ But the music was really special, I have a loyalty to Virginia, I thought that it would probably be an extremely good match. And we met and it just made sense. It was so easy making the album, very easy, extremely easy. It’s really amazing what happened.” She laughs. “The guys in Spacebomb,” she says, “are all just freaks.” Sitting on a couch in the studio a few blocks away, the core members of Spacebomb don’t seem much like freaks, unless you count art director Travis Robertson’s immense beard. “I haven’t cut it in three years,” he announces, from somewhere behind a moustache that completely covers his mouth – and guitarist Trey Pollard’s decidedly un-rock’n’roll love of Radio 3, so strong that he has an app on his iPad that enables him to access the BBC iPlayer from the US and listen to Composer of the Week. Even Matthew E White, by some distance the most famous person in the room (Spacebomb’s first release, his 2012 debut album Big Inner, was an unexpected critical smash, topping a lot of end-of-year best-of polls) and viewed in some areas of the media as a rather exotic figure thanks to his early life as the son of Christian missionaries based in the Philippines, turns out to be unstarry. He is entirely unaffected by the experience of having been “interviewed by just about every magazine in the western world” over the past few years, and the very model of modest southern manners. And yet, you see Prass’s point. There is something deeply odd about Spacebomb. It’s not just that they have done the one thing that everyone in the music business agrees you shouldn’t do in a world where anyone can make an album in their bedroom: set up a recording studio. It’s that they set up a recording studio along the lines of Stax or Motown, complete with a house band, arrangers and something approaching a signature style, born out of a mutual love of Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions’ late 60s albums, Ray Charles’s Modern Sounds in Country and Western and Brazil’s psychedelic Tropicália movement. “The idea was sort of that a house-band-centred label and production company would be a way that we could just really express our creativity in a lot of different ways,” says White, who came up with the idea. But no one makes records that way any more, I say, because it’s not supposed to make economic sense. He shrugs: “I’m very much an if-you-build-it-they-will-come type person. When I was in music school, a lot of people would talk a lot of shit about how that song on the radio was garbage, how they could do better. It’s like: ‘Hey man, I don’t want to talk bad on the industry or what other people are doing unless I’m providing a solution.’ I thought: ‘Let me make the best thing I can make, with the best people I know and just see what happens.’” Furthermore, there’s something a little freakish about the records Spacebomb make. They announced their arrival with Big Inner, intended “purely to be an advertisement for the studio”, that catapulted White, who “knew it was a badass album, but didn’t think anyone would care”, to cult stardom. Three weeks into 2015, it already looks as if they have produced two of the records of the year, in White’s second album, Fresh Blood – a more eclectic, expansive, darker album than its predecessor, complete with a song about the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman and an impossibly lovely gospel track called Circle Around the Sun at its centre – and Prass’s debut, a set of remarkable songs that set baroque strings, girl group influences and old Disney soundtrack ballads against Spacebomb’s luscious soul-influenced horn section. They seem to have hit upon a sound that is both immediately identifiable and remarkably malleable: everything on Spacebomb sounds as if it came out on Spacebomb, but no two records on Spacebomb sound the same. “It’s very American music,” White says. “North American and South American. There’s very little punk rock influence, or new wave, or European pop. There are big bands that are in the lexicon of most music I hear, that aren’t in our vocabulary at all, for better or worse.” Nevertheless, Spacebomb make albums that sound like a million dollars – Big Inner famously featured a nine-piece horn section, an eight-piece string section and a choir – on what appears to be a shoestring budget. They say the reason they can do it is the reason they founded Spacebomb in the first place: for a relatively small city, whose main contributions to pop have been D’Angelo and the preposterous metal band Gwar, Richmond is apparently almost comically overburdened with musical talent. “Overabundance is an absolutely accurate word,” laughs bassist Cameron Ralston. “I mean, it’s irrational how many great musicians there are here.” White agrees: “You see these little periods of time in certain cities and certain places where there’s just an energy that happens to catch. Before we started Spacebomb, I felt like: ‘Man, there’s so many amazing people here in Richmond, I don’t see that in a lot of places.’ It felt unique to me.” Many of them – including most of the Spacebomb collective, who initially went on to perform improvised music – are alumni of Virginia Commonwealth University’s celebrated jazz studies programme, which White describes as “exceptional in its musicality and as a sort of training ground”. It produces a constant turnover of student musicians, while the sheer level of musical ability engendered by the course means that Spacebomb can work quickly, according to Pollard. “We don’t really have the time or the money to do hundreds of takes, so it’s kind of out of necessity, but I think we also cherish the live-ness of performing on records, the inconsistencies.” Drummer Pinson Chanselle nods: “It’s kind of the tidiest mess you can manage.” For all White’s grand ambitions, Spacebomb’s beginnings were pretty humble: its original studio was in the attic of his house. Now, “people are knocking on our door all the time”, according to Spacebomb’s project manager Jesse Medaries. “It’s definitely working, even though we’re not slamming out five records every six months. Just financially speaking, it can be a burden at times, but in the long run, it’ll take off because people really love the music. We’re being contacted not just by people that want to record with us, but bigger labels that we’ll work with in the future.” “So far, so good, truthfully,” nods White, who says he “basically loves Kendrick Lamarr more than any other artist on the planet” and fantasises about the collective working in hip-hop. At the other end of the musical spectrum you can easily imagine a heritage rock star rooted in the same kind of music as Spacebomb making a career-rejuvenating album here. “But I think people we work with have to be trusting of us,” says Pollard. “You know, the way we work is, I just show up with the string arrangements and no one’s heard them. Like, everyone just trusts me that it’s going to be OK, the way everyone trusts Cameron to play the bass and Pinson to play the drums.” He laughs. “Do you think that would be cool if you were working with someone huge?” White does. “The more records we make, the more we can point to that: this is how we work, this is the deal,” he says, evidently still very much an if-you-build-it-they-will-come type person. “The basic seed of the idea, that there’s a great group of musicians here, that with a little bit of organisation we can do something different than anybody else is doing, has proven to be a good idea. We’re seeing that big time. People who need to figure out how to make a record, they’re saying ‘Oh, these guys seem to have a thing.’ So, we’ll see.” • Natalie Prass: Natalie Prass review – spellbinding country-soul • Fresh Blood by Matthew E White will be released on 9 March on Spacebomb/Domino |