In 2005, when the singer-songwriter Ryan Davis was 20, he left Chicago for Glasgow. It was part of an exchange program between the Art Institute of Chicago, where Davis was a junior, and the Glasgow School of Art, but progress on his fine art degree was an afterthought. Davis arrived in Scotland with a bag of clothes, a guitar, and a four-track tape machine, keen to record some demos and start a music career.
The day he plugged his four-track in for the first time, it spit out an enormous spark.
“I didn’t have a power converter,” Davis recalls with a laugh during a recent Zoom interview from his home in Jeffersonville, Indiana, just across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky. “It destroyed the machine. I didn’t record anything until six months later when I got home. But I did write some songs.”
Two decades later, now a freshly minted 40, Davis is preparing to release what could be considered a breakthrough album. New Threats From the Soul, out July 25 via his own label, Sophomore Lounge, is the second offering from Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band, following their 2023 debut, Dancing on the Edge. But this is no late start.
Before starting the Roadhouse Band, Davis fronted underground favorites State Champion, who released four albums of “punked-up country gunk” (their term) between 2010 and 2018. He also ran a label, booked shows in Louisville, and started a widely revered local festival. For many, Davis has long been a scene fulcrum, a tireless DIY hero, and a generational songwriting talent.
No less an authority than the late Silver Jews and Purple Mountains songwriter David Berman once said, “If Bob Dylan was funny, if Tom Waits was relevant, Ryan might not be peerless at what he does best, which is writing large gregarious circles around his pitiful colleagues in the field.”
New Threats From the Soul could help many more reach that same conclusion. It’s a remarkable collection of country-rock epics, teeming with unexpected musical detours and lyrical wonders. Catherine Irwin, a fellow Louisville singer-songwriter and a member of the alt-country group Freakwater, says Davis has “this way of distilling things into little nuggets that, once said, seem quite obvious.”
That goes for rich, crafty lines like, “I’ll start flipping through clippings of Modern Martyrdom Quarterly classifieds/Just to find me something to die for.” And one-liners that put you on your heels, like “I can’t remember the last time the good times got so bad,” or Irwin’s favorite, “Blacklight will find the jizz,” from Dancing on the Edge’s “Learn 2 Re-Luv.”
When Davis asked her to contribute vocals to that song, Irwin insisted he let her sing that line. “Like, of course, the blacklight will find the jizz. Why didn’t I think of that?” she cracks, adding: “It’s the unspooling of the lyrics. It’s like magical realism or something. The song could be nine minutes long, and it just seems like he’s getting started.”
Two years ago, Dancing on the Edge was something of a word-of-mouth hit. It was released with no real press push, but it garnered good reviews and real estate on year-end lists. New Threats also comes after Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band spent last fall opening for MJ Lenderman — an avowed Davis fan and disciple — on his Manning Fireworks tour.
“He’s been an influence on me for a long time,” says Lenderman, who once opened for State Champion in 2018. “So it makes sense that if somebody likes my music, they would appreciate what he’s doing. I would hope they would do some digging and realize he’s the real one.”
That tour meant a lot to Davis. “I’m not trying to be hyperbolic, but it really changed my life,” he says. “It was the biggest crowds I’ve played to. Every show since then, someone has come out and said, ‘I saw you with MJ, I had to see it again!’”
The Lenderman tour and the acclaim for Dancing on the Edge have brought Davis a level of attention he’s never really had before. But as he prepares to release New Threats, he maintains a healthy zen about this moment: For all the possibilities that could arise, he’s still gotta figure out how to book a rental van for the Roadhouse Band’s upcoming European tour. That has not dampened his excitement. While writing New Threats proved to be one of the most “maddening” creative experiences of his life, it still reverberates with the joy and energy he unlocked a few years ago after the difficult dissolution of State Champion.
“When you’re young, the whole world is open to you, you’re gonna live forever,” he says. “I just turned 40 and I was thinking, I’m healthy, my friends are excited to be playing this music with me, I’ve got a good thing going. I feel like I’m the happiest I’ve been making music for most of my life. The wave is here, I might as well ride it. And if it continues to happen, that’s great, and if not, I’m glad I acted when I did.”
DAVIS HAD A “pretty long leash” growing up in Southern Indiana and Louisville. He and his friends got into “good trouble,” skateboarding around town and chatting with people in the street. “A lot of what I found to be funny about life, or interesting about other people, that I’ve since grown to express in my songs, it all started from that,” he says. “Even before we get into musical influences.”
Those were numerous: In an email, he recalls the skull-opening power of Beck’s Mellow Gold and says that, if it weren’t for Nirvana, he’d “probably be managing a Chase Bank in Miami.” When he began writing lyrics, Nas, Mobb Deep, and Eminem were as influential as Bob Dylan, Elliott Smith, and Jason Molina. Davis served as the lead singer in a few punk bands in high school, but it wasn’t until college that he tried to pair his lyrics with guitar chords.
Davis recorded his first demos in early 2006 after returning from Scotland. That summer, he started a MySpace page under the name State Champion — “a stupid in-joke,” he says, acknowledging the fact that the kid who fronted those high-school punk bands was also an accomplished jock. (In 2003, Davis won the long jump at the Kentucky State Track Championships with a leap of 21 feet, eight inches. He was inducted into his high school’s athletics hall of fame in 2012.)
Courtesy of Ryan Davis
State Champion eventually became a full-fledged band, releasing their first proper LP, Stale Champagne, in 2010. Along with fronting that band, Davis played in others, including Tropical Trash, who once toured with Louisville indie greats Slint. He put out a plethora of music from artists across the DIY punk, folk, country, rock, and experimental spectrum through his label, Sophomore Lounge. And he co-founded the local festival Cropped Out, which his friend, the singer-songwriter Will Oldham (a.k.a. Bonnie “Prince” Billy), calls in an email “one of our country’s greatest and most exploratory DIY festivals.”
It was a fervent and fertile decade, but by the end of it, most of these endeavors had run their course. Cropped Out began to feel less like a “hub of activity” for the local community, Davis says, and more an event for out-of-towners to come in for three days, proclaim, “Louisville’s great,” and then leave.
The end of State Champion was difficult, too, exacerbated by the 2019 death of David Berman, with whom the band had grown close. “There was this series of events that made the whole thing really just sting for a couple of years,” says Davis.
Taking stock of the career he’d built in the 15 years since frying that four-track in Glasgow, Davis realized he was “burned out” on songs, lyrics, and singing. He’d created and accomplished so much, yet was still delivering burritos on the side. When the Covid-19 lockdowns hit, all Davis wanted to do was sit inside, play keyboard, and draw.
“It was like, is this all there is?” Davis says. “I don’t know how to do anything else. What am I actually going to do for the next 40 years, if I live to be that old? I had these totally useless skill sets of writing weird songs and drawing. I was struggling with how to be in your late thirties.”
Yet Davis was quietly prolific. He drew, painted, and started making music with Equipment Pointed Ankh, a group founded by his friend Jim Marlowe. Those improvisational, instrumental sessions were revelatory. A group of friends sloughing off a decade’s worth of “collective damage from all the shit we’d put ourselves through” and saying: “All bets are off. Let’s make some sounds. Let’s do something that is for no one but us, have fun, and see if we can do it.”
After that, Davis made a few instrumental albums under the name Roadhouse and began writing lyrics again. As his next project took shape, Davis initially shied from presenting it under his own name, something he’d never done before.
When he did settle on Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band, he reasoned, it was best to just say: “Here’s me. This is what I know how to do. This is everything I know how to do. I’m not good at anything but this. If this is the only record I ever make, if we never do a tour, that’s fine. But this is where I’m at in life.”
And then, Davis adds, “People liked it.”
DAVIS BEGAN WRITING New Threats From the Soul in spring 2024, about six months after releasing Dancing on the Edge. Most of the album was finished (save for some overdubs) by the time he hit the road with MJ Lenderman in October. Such a quick turn around was unusual for Davis, who was used to letting “things bake for several years” in between albums. (State Champion released records in 2011, 2015, and 2018.)
“I had this feeling that if I gave myself the amount of time I usually do, I was going to blink and it would be five years later,” he says. “And who knows what life looks like. I just decided, I’m going to hunker down and try to see what I’ve got in the tank.”
But while New Threats came together quickly, it did not come easily. Making Dancing on the Edge and the Equipment Pointed Ankh records felt “very liberating and celebratory,” Davis says. Writing the songs on New Threats did not.
“Every decision I made, I was questioning,” he says, adding: “Maybe it was a fear of not being able to do it again. I’m waking up in the middle of the night, thinking, ‘I shouldn’t have written the verse that way.’ I’ve never thought about music like that, but I really cared about it a little too much.”
It was in the studio that Davis reclaimed that celebratory mood. Sessions with the Roadhouse Band are “always so much fun,” he says. “A lot of laughs, a lot of drinking, but drinking with intent. It never gets off the rails. We’re putting in 12-hour days. We get a lot done, but we have a good time doing it.”
It’s also where the arrangements kicking around in Davis’ head come to life. The whole process becomes “a lot less cerebral and more like you can dance to it,” he says. The band offers ideas, and new ones emerge. Though country rock at their core, Roadhouse Band songs are flush with woodwinds and pedal steel, weird horns and synthesizers. On “Monte Carlo/No Limits,” a violin line is paired with a skittering drum loop reminiscent of the “Amen” break central to U.K. jungle and drum-and-bass.
Justin Murphy*
“I think I’ve probably spent more time with Ryan Davis in the back of a van or sleeping on somebody’s floor than maybe anyone in my life,” Marlowe says. “And [his songs] seem very true to how we talk; how Ryan sees and thinks about things. He’s very articulate, and in a way where it’s — like all the good ones — mysterious. But I still sort of know what he’s saying.”
“I know Ryan has angst,” Oldham says. “But the vibe he puts across is one of balanced and thoughtful calm. I’m not sure how he does what he does, nor where his aesthetic originates. He’s world-class.”
As Davis prepares to release and tour New Threats, he admits he “can’t fathom being able to write another song at this point.” And yet, before everything kicks off later this summer, he’ll have a few weeks to himself, and he’s thinking of heading to his dad’s cabin in south central Kentucky, where he wrote much of this album.
“I think I’m gonna try to go down there for a few days,” he says, “and just stare at some birds and see what I’ve got in terms of songs. Just see where I’m at with things.”
