When Knoxville’s Black Cadillacs sought to reimagine their sturdy brand of nouveau Southern rock with Pixies-esque guitars and other alt-rock flourishes, they found a willing—and very able—partner in Nashville producer Ken Coomer.
With a sterling resume as drummer for Uncle Tupelo and then Wilco, Coomer not only had the chops but the vision to see where the band wanted to go and how to get them there. With Coomer at the helm, the Cadillacs released their new five-song self-titled EP in February.
“When we were considering producers, he was one of the first people that wanted to work with us,” says Cadillacs frontman Will Horton. “He saw what we wanted from the songs and really enabled us to make that a reality in the studio. The musical ideas all originated from us rehearsing. But pulling it off on a recording was a whole other task. And he just got it.”
After two strong albums of alternately winsome and potent traditional Southern rock—think Rolling Stones- and Faces-style blues rock filtered through a below-the-Mason-Dixon aesthetic a la the Drive-By Truckers or early Kings of Leon—Horton says the Cadillacs had a collective instinct to bring to the fore some of the college-radio sounds of their youth. It was music they all loved that had never really found a place to reside alongside the band’s bucolic brand of blues and dusky, blue-eyed R&B.
“These were things we had been wanting to do for a while,” Horton says. “We wanted to be a little heavier, a little grungier. We had always been fans of the Pixies, Nirvana, Queens of the Stone Age. But it had never found its way into the writing until the last two years.”
A catalyst, says Horton, was a retreat the band took last spring. Holed up for a week in a cabin on a mountain, not far from Norris Lake, the band wrote most of the songs on the new EP, plus a few others, too. Horton says there are another 10 new Cadillacs songs—about an album’s worth—sitting around in various stages of the recording process.
But with songs in hand, the band needed a producer. Some friends in Nashville introduced them to Coomer; Horton says the rest was easy.
“He had already heard our music and had been a fan,” Horton says. “Then we came out to one of his shows and visited his studio in East Nashville. And it just worked. From there, we knew he would be the guy.”
Credit Coomer, then, because the new EP hits all the right notes. The Black Cadillacs still sound of a piece with All Them Witches and Run—the band’s first two offerings—but introduce fresh ideas and new sonic twists without compromising their core sound.
In the meantime, the band is hoping to build on the momentum of a strong 2014. They played a slew of festivals last year—including Hangout, in Gulf Shores, Ala.—and toured Europe last spring.
They’ve also seen a handful of songs picked up as background music for video games and television shows—including “Find My Own Way,” off Run. Now, says Horton, it’s gratifying to roll into college towns along the East Coast and hear Black Cadillacs songs playing on local college radio.
“Sometimes it’s hard to tell how well you’re doing,” Horton says. “There’s so many things that are just out of your control. We have had some luck, with the festivals, and with having people put our songs on TV. Now we’re just taking things as they come. Our goal is to get out more music as soon as we can. And to keep on touring.”
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