With his long-running, omnivorous rock ‘n’ soul outlet the Reigning Sound, Greg Cartwright seeks—and finds—new angles on old sounds
On Wednesday nights, Greg Cartwright holds court at the Double Crown, a nondescript neighborhood bar with a killer cocktail menu in West Asheville, N.C. For each weekly session, Cartwright pulls an evening’s worth of vintage country tunes from his own collection. “I do it because I want to share them with other people,” he says. “But just as much, I’m doing it so I can hear the records really loud.”
But alongside the country canon—Buck Owens, George Jones, Wanda Jackson—Cartwright likes to spin his salvaged classics. “I have all these oddball country records from the ’60s and early ’70s where they’re mixing country with R&B and soul and funk,” he says. “They’re totally weird records. They don’t properly fall into any genre. Some of them scratch a spot that nothing else will.”
For Cartwright, finding—or crafting—the black-sheep gem is the real joy of music. To wit, he’s not a collector, per se. “I’m not interested in records like they’re stamps,” he says. “I just want to look through a box of junked records and look for labels that look cool. Small, independent releases from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, things that look interesting and on the cheap. I want to look through those things, and pull out a record player, and I want to find something that fucking blows my mind.”
But that idea extends to the music he makes, too. “That’s what you want to create,” he says. “You want that thing that’s so inspiring to you not because it’s everything you expect, but because it’s everything you didn’t expect.”
With iconic garage-punk trio the Oblivians, with the Parting Gifts (his collaboration with the Ettes’ Coco Hames and Jem Cohen), with a legion of other one-offs and defunct projects, and, for the past 13 years with driving rock ‘n’ soul revue the Reigning Sound, Cartwright has chased various traces of American rock and pop to arrive at something singularly his.
Still, with his legacy perfectly well cemented among garage-rock aficionados and discerning vinyl-heads, Cartwright is still chasing the unexpected. The Reigning Sound’s latest album, Shattered, is the band’s sixth proper full-length, a follow-up to 2009’s Love And Curses, and its debut for Merge. (“I’ve never been on a record label this big,” says Cartwright. “I’ve never had so many people to email. I’m really enjoying it.”)
It’s also one of the most varied outings in the group’s deep catalog. Cartwright, the Reigning Sound’s sole constant, is joined on Shattered by the same backing crew heard on 2011’s Scion-sponsored EP Abdication… For Your Love: longtime keyboardist Dave Amels, as well as relative newcomers Mike Catanese (guitar), Benny Trokan (bass) and Mike Post (drums)—all of whom play together in New York soul combo the Jay Vons and bring a house-band chemistry and versatility to Cartwright’s new batch of songs.
But their distance led to a new songwriting approach, with Cartwright demoing songs to guide his sidemen, rather than jamming through rough sketches until a song emerged. “They’re super-good players … I can pretty much make a set list and they can go over it and have it locked down when I get to them,” says Cartwright. And so they did, entering Daptone Studios in Brooklyn armed with a fresh batch of just-learned songs and following Cartwright where he led.
“Sometimes when you just learn a song, you approach it in a way that you’ll never ever approach it again,” says Cartwright. “You haven’t worn the grooves into your brain. It’s still so fresh to you that you’re willing to walk out on a limb. Two months down the road, you won’t do that.”
But because he was charting the course, Cartwright could extend those limbs farther than before, digging into influences as disparate as Del Shannon’s lush and almost-lost 1967 LP Home & Away and the country-western oddities he spins at the Double Crown. And so on Shattered, the Reigning Sound jumps casually from R&B burner “North Cackalacky Girl” into strings-driven ballad “Never Coming Home,” and from the Southern-rock stagger of “Starting New” into the ripping Stax-meets-Sonics garage of “Baby It’s Too Late.”
Describing his ideal record-hunting find, Cartwright says, “Nothing about this is a new form of music, but somebody’s putting their own stamp on it.” He could just as easily be describing his own work—an in-the-margins blend of influences tailor-made for keen, seeking ears looking to be surprised. Blown away, even.
—Bryan C. Reed
