Hal & Mal's presents:
Rock Eupora and The Prescriptions
Hal & Mal's | The Brew Pub
Thursday, March 9, 2023
Doors: 8 PM | Show: 9 PM
All ages | General admission (any seating is first come, first serve)
$10.00 advance | $15.00 day of show
About Rock Eupora
Do you want to take a leap of faith?
Rock Eupora, the moniker for Mississippi-bred, Nashville-based artist Clayton Waller, hasalways been a heart-on-your-sleeve musical endeavor. From his earliest recordings, Waller hasnever been afraid to ask the big, searching questions of life. Catchy, hooky pop sensibilities havesimilarly been a consistent through-line in Rock Eupora’s catalogue. Featuring singable, fuzzed-out guitar hooks and stuck-in-your-head-all-afternoon choruses, the discography of RockEupora––including three full-length albums, two EPs, and a smattering of singles to date––bringsto mind Blue Album-era Weezer or the high-energy, hard-charging, harmony-laden early Beatlessingles.
These defining features are still present in Pick At The Scab, Rock Eupora’s latest full-lengthalbum, and yet, something feels different.
“I wanted to let the songs breathe a bit,” Waller says of his mindset while writing the materialthat would become the songs for Pick At The Scab. “I gravitate towards writing up-beat, highenergy songs, but this time around, I decided to lean back a little and let the songs speak forthemselves.”
In Pick At The Scab, the listener hears Waller opening sores––admitting personal struggles,asking existential questions, exploring new sonic territory––and exposing them to the light,reaching beyond himself with emotionally honest lyrics and ambitious musical arrangements.“Feels like I’m going out on a limb with a crack in it over and over again,” he admits on the backside of the album. Indeed, Pick At The Scab is the most adventurous Rock Eupora release to date:lush acoustic guitars pepper the album where once you might’ve heard punchy power chords;warbly organs and swirling synths peer out from behind corners; hushed four-track recordingsflow seamlessly into wall-of-sound production; horn sections and orchestral string arrangementssoar into the picture, joining the cast of anthemic choruses and earwormy guitar hooks thatWaller has made a trademark of Rock Eupora’s sound.
“I'm somewhat of an optimist and am often tempted to inject a redemptive arc into my songs,”Waller says. “But for PATS, I wanted to be as honest as possible and just let the songs be whatthey are––not try to force a happy ending, not try to convince anyone of anything. That’s not tosay there’s not an underlying hope. For example, the trajectory of the album suggests thathealing begins when we stop trying to force it. Instead of trying to change myself or obsess overimperfections, I’ve learned to accept the messiness that surrounds me and love my beautiful,broken self––right where I am.”
On one hand, Pick At The Scab belongs solely to its creator––Waller wrote all the songs andarrangements and recorded and mixed the album himself, mostly during the nearly-two-year
stretch of the global pandemic when Rock Eupora was forced off the road and Waller was left toturn inward.
And yet, even while the listener understands that Pick At The Scab is uniquely a product ofClayton Waller’s mind and heart, the album cannot help but be universally human andcelebratory in its reach and scope. The album is the first in Rock Eupora’s discography to
include other musicians besides Waller himself, and in the “real world,” Rock Eupora is acollective, a touring rock band bringing loud, live, exuberant joy to the songs Waller is sharingwith his audience each night on the road. It’s a collaborative celebration described best in Pick AtThe Scab’s closing track, the aptly named “Ode To My Friends”: “I get so caught up in my life Iforget that the source of my delight isn’t from within.”
Rock Eupora began when Waller was a senior in college. Each subsequent release has seen abroadening of scope and range, and Pick At The Scab is the logical successor to that tradition.Alongside every familiar influence––The Shins, Band of Horses, The Beach Boys––is a newfriend, a Baby Huey, a Steely Dan, an Elizabeth Cotten, and, yes, even a Beyonce. Put simply,on Pick At The Scab, Rock Eupora is arriving at a destination: Waller, now thirty, has chosen tofeel everything, instead of fighting to suppress or ignore the unpleasant or unknown. In so doing,in “feeling all of myself,” Waller has painted a rich, multivariate self-portrait. Throughexperimentation with new songs and sounds, confronting painful personal issues head-on,striving to find the balance between despair and joy, silliness and seriousness, heartbreak andlove, the personal and the universal, Pick At The Scab delivers a full-bodied expression of what itmeans to live and to feel alive, an experience meant to be felt in a music venue together withothers just as much as it can be heard between one’s own ears. At risk of falling into silver-lining-along-every-cloud cliches, it is best to let Waller himself describe the experience of PickAt The Scab: “There is no gladness apart from sadness.”
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About The Prescriptions
A timeless rock & roll band for the modern world, The Prescriptions sharpen their sound with Time Apart. Produced by Ben Tanner (Alabama Shakes) and Brendan Benson (The Raconteurs), the album funnels a half-century of American and British sounds — including taut power-pop, explorative indie rock, jangling heartland hooks, and New Wave nuances — into something sharp and singular. The result is a warm, widescreen follow-up to The Prescriptions' 2019 debut, Hollywood Gold, its songs balanced halfway between classic craftsmanship and progressive exploration.
When recording sessions for Time Apart began, The Prescriptions — singer/guitarist Hays Ragsdale, bassist Parker McAnnally, and drummer John Wood — were still riding high on the critical success of Hollywood Gold. The album's diverse sound had earned raves from publications like Billboard, who praised the "breadth in Ragsdale's writing," as well as appearances at SXSW and Jason Isbell's Shoals Fest. Back home in Nashville after a round of cross-country tour dates, Ragsdale filled his head with songs by Big Star, Elvis Costello, and other artists who, like him, used pop melody and rock & roll muscle as launchpads for a bigger, bolder sound. Flush with newly-written material, the band then headed into Brendan Benson's studio to record power-pop anthems like "April Blossoms," stacking vocal harmonies and bright bursts of electric guitar into songs that blended street-smart swagger with amplified shimmer.
Months later, the guys found themselves in Florence, Alabama, where they recorded additional tunes with former Alabama Shakes keyboardist (and Single Lock Records co-founder) Ben Tanner. A global pandemic had brought the touring industry to a temporary halt, and The Prescriptions found themselves with unlimited time on their hands. They used that open-ended schedule to their advantage, experimenting with synthesizers and other unexpected textures, chasing down new ways of presenting their melody-driven sound. While the outside world grew increasingly chaotic, The Prescriptions created their own universe inside the studio.
"When we recorded Hollywood Gold, we spent a lot of time rehearsing, then went into the studio and cut multiple songs each day," says McAnnally, who grew up alongside Ragsdale in Birmingham, Alabama, before forming the band with fellow Tennessee transplant John Wood in 2015. "This record was more about going out and finding something new, and having the luxury of time in order to do that. With each song, we were asking ourselves, 'What's compelling? What have we not heard before?' We were deliberate. We were collaborative. This album is what it sounds like to really mean it."
"You can listen to our first record and hear our different influences," adds Wood. "We've always had wide interests, but Time Apart allowed us to become more specific. We've been a band for seven years now, and that means we're able to move together in one direction, which isn't something we could easily do at the beginning. We wanted to squeeze all the juice we could out of this combination of power-pop and experimental rock."
Fiery and forward-looking, Time Apart explores both sides of the pop/rock divide. It's a 21st century album rooted in everything that made the classic stuff so compelling — sharp songwriting, ringing refrains, percussive stomp, and guitars that chime one minute and churn the next. "Compartmentalize" finds room for icy verses and noisy, open-armed choruses, while "Fire Moon" mixes acoustic guitars into a spacey, neo-psych soundscape. On "I Get Lost," Ragsdale sings about his own human fallibility over textures that are beautiful one minute and booming the next.
Much of Time Apart finds its frontman in an introspective mood, turning his personal journey toward honesty into something universal. "My favorite songwriters don't just make up clever phrases," he says. "They're speaking some sort of truth, and I don't know if you can speak that truth unless you've become truthful with yourself. It's a process of accessing that honesty and communicating it to others. That's the goal of a lot of these songs."
Released by Single Lock Records, Time Apart is an album for the heart, head, and hips. The Prescriptions have never been shy about nodding to the hook-driven rockers who came before them, but here, they carry those influences into uncharted territory, uncovering something that's truly theirs along the way. It was time together that created Time Apart, and The Prescription have never defined their ambition or abilities so clearly before.