It had been 30 years in between new albums from Souled American, an alternative country band from Chicago.
Described as “twangy rock” and “ambient folk weirdos,” Souled American released “Sanctions” on April 17. Their most recent album before that came in January 1996 when the band — now comprised of guitarist/vocalist Chris Grigoroff and bassist/vocalist Joe Adducci — released “Notes Campfire.”
Over the years, they’ve garnered praise from contemporaries like Jeff Tweedy (Wilco, Uncle Tupelo), John Darnielle (The Mountain Goats) and David Lowery (Cracker). They’ll be playing at Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival on June 27, with a June 29 stop at Spirit Lodge in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood.
In a call earlier this spring from Illinois, Grigoroff and Adducci spoke with TribLive about the big gap, the album, future music and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.
What have you been up to for the past 30 years?
Grigoroff: Well, we never were not together. We always were together — we just really didn’t have anybody to help us and nobody really was interested in putting our music out. We just kept recording. We have lots of stuff. We have lots of songs. Finally a few years ago, I got a guy to agree to put it out — he was a good friend, Jimmy Wiggins — and he died during the covid days and so that cut that. So then Tom Adelman calls and he gets it going, and we were able to finish the record and get it out. But we were never apart, Joe and I always hooked up and played and wrote songs together, and we were always thinking about the next record.
Adducci: Right. As embarrassing as it sounds, we were still writing songs and plugging away at it for 30 years. We even did different groups of songs just because we’d squeeze all the blood out of a group of songs, trying to record them.
Grigoroff: (laughs)
Adducci: I mean, let’s write some new ones we won’t have such high expectations about and then …
Grigoroff: We’d just move on.
Adducci: We did like three different phases of that through the 30 years and finally came up with “Sanctions.”
It sounds like an album has been teased for probably 10 years now. Does that sound about right?
Grigoroff: This particular album, we started in 2018, and we were about three quarters of the way through it when my friend died and I had to move out of there, out of the studio where I lived. I was more or less thrown out because it was his building, and then it wasn’t anymore. So it took a couple years to get it going again, and our good friend Clark Hayes allowed us to come here and finish it here.
Does the technology make it a little bit easier now? You said you’ve been working on songs for all these years. Was it just a matter of not being able to get into the studio?
Grigoroff: We always had the studio. Everything we ever did, we were always trying to get a record out, but there was no one saying, yeah, we’ll put your record out. There’s nothing like that at all, and that was all gone, and we didn’t really have management, so we were kind of swimming in a large ocean, waiting for some boat to come by.
Adducci: All through the years, we acquired equipment, and we would set up studios in houses, which Chris was talking about. That last one with Jimmy Wiggins, it was sound-proofed. We got it all built up for us, but we always had the recording gear. We just would set it up in different places. But sometimes we would isolate ourselves so much where we didn’t have the technical assistance. It would be just Chris and I trying to run through it ourselves. And that was a whole other headache.
Grigoroff: We were using analog. Most of this record was done analog. It’ll be the last one we ever did that way unless we are able to to afford to do it with the analog again. But digital is pretty damn good these days. It really is. We did record a lot of the vocals digitally — some of them but not all of them — so when our machine finally conked out, we just finished it on the digital system we got.
Adducci: Trying to find someone to work on that old analog gear too and something would break down would be just another headache. That would take time, so you keep tallying up that time through the years, the slowing down because of technical problems.
Grigoroff: But Clark Hayes and Jeff Hamand, they’ve always worked with us. Clark, we moved into his place, or I did, and he’s just an amazing engineer and a technician and a mixer, and so we have the best. It was really nice to have somebody with his talents to help us mix that thing.
How far do some of these songs stretch back? Are we talking 20 years?
Grigoroff: Maybe a couple of them. I would say it stretches from the time we finished “Notes Campfire” to now, but if we were to put them all on there, we could have like a triple album. (laughs) We had to choose. Basically we chose the most recent ones plus a few of the older ones.
Adducci: Exactly. I would say as far back as songs I did on this album, I would say 2014 would be the start for this batch of songs.
Grigoroff: There’s that, as Joe was saying, 10-year thing. I get what he means. I didn’t really ever talk about it that way, but he’s right. That was probably about in those time periods. If we would have met Tom Adelman 30 years ago, and he would have been out there doing that, I don’t think it would have been that long before we got a record out. Chicago has never really embraced us too much like a lot of people have. We’re such an acquired taste, a deep dive, if you will. You can’t just expect to put a record on and expect somebody to go, that’s familiar. Now there’s a little more. We found out we had people who’d been listening to us for a long time along the way, and that’s been a nice thing to see.
The band has received some props from Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and Cracker’s David Lowery. Does it help that other musicians are seeing the quality of your music?
Adducci: It’s always nice to see or hear.
Grigoroff: But that’s never been any of our real thoughts, but we always see, when you’re in this business, you have peers and the peer that recognizes you is pretty nice. So we don’t ask for it, but we don’t mind it. (laughs)
Do you hear the influence of your music anywhere?
Grigoroff: Ah, I don’t know. I hear people say this, that or the other, but I don’t ever hear it in anybody. People play things and say these guys have been influenced. I don’t know. It didn’t sound like it to me, but that would be the idea, right? I wouldn’t want to sound like somebody else. So I don’t know. I know I hear that, but I don’t know. Joe might have a better beat on that than I do. I just don’t know.
Adducci: We write verse, chorus, verse, chorus, four chords, a song, and those are the fundamentals of a lot of songwriting, and it’s just all how you shape the sounds. So I think we all work with the same thing …
Grigoroff: The folky, American folky element.
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Do you think the band was maybe ahead of the curve musically? Maybe the ’90s weren’t ready for this…
Grigoroff: Oh, for sure. But we did from the start, because I was 30 years old when we got signed and I felt like an old man and had finally gotten this right band to play with. So all I was trying to do, and I think Joe would agree with this, we just wanted to be a band that created our own music inside of an American rootsy field, and that’s all because we were kind of that naturally. When we met, we had that in us together. Joe’s six years younger, but still, we met in this one plain that I had never met anybody on. He had this real feel for real country music, all kinds of American roots music. We were basically turning each other on to each other’s (tastes). I knew all the counterculture versions. He knows the Nashville stuff, like my brother did, and the country stuff, whether it was Hank (Williams) or any of his people, because they were all there. But all that was part of our listening. So when I met him, he listened to a lot of that stuff. I’d been exposed to all that.
Adducci: When we met each other, we were both playing music for at least eight to 10 years.
Grigoroff: Probably, yeah.
Adducci: So we’re plugging away at this one thing where it’s like, OK, you present your music and then you end up starting to write music and trying to be organic with it, to something that feels real to you. We already had that attitude before we met each other. That was the goal. So when we met each other, it just started flowing and that’s how you start to get your sound together.
Grigoroff: When we were in another band, the Uptown Rulers, we played a lot of ska and reggae and stuff, and there was a real edge to it, and it was a band where I cut my chops as a singer. I’d think Joe would probably say it didn’t hurt him either.
Adducci: Not at all. I loved it.
Grigoroff: So when we met, we had a year and a half in that band to play on the side all the time. We were writing songs that ended up on the first record, like “Tall Boy Blues” and “Magic Bullets.” So we were writing in that band for what became Souled American a few years later.
Adducci: The Rulers would rehearse for a couple, three hours and then they’d all leave and Chris and I — we barely knew each other — but we’d just hang out after the practices and just naturally started playing together. He’d show me ideas he had and that was, as a bass player, my role was always to try to flesh out songs and that’s how we got our process going.
Grigoroff: Turns out though, Joe was going to be an amazing songwriter, so that was a benefit. There was one thing about him being a great bass player in his own unique way, but then there was the songwriting part, which I think that that benefit is enormously interesting.
Adducci: Chris totally encouraged that because in a weird way, I might have been happy just trying to continue to reinvent myself on a bass, but he liked the way I wrote things and was so encouraging. So then I had to spread myself in that territory because he was almost putting pressure on me to be a songwriter too, but then it started to flow.
Grigoroff: (laughs) Well, you can’t do something really good and say you can’t do that anymore. You’re going, do that again. That’s what you want because if you want to make records, you gotta write songs. You gotta have something. I mean, you just have to, and we grew that together, as Joe said, organically. That’s what we did. We do it organically in an intertwinement in the way we can play and be. This time when we go out, at least we’re gonna have a little better collection of players with us to feel more comfortable on stage. Because the first round, it went all right, but I think we could be better.
There’ll be some other musicians with you?
Grigoroff: At least one. We got a guitar player who played with him before, Brian Smith, he’s on some of our earlier material. We hadn’t played with him for years and years, but we called him and he’s amazing. We’re looking forward to this very much.
Does this feel like you’re getting a chance to write new chapters for your story right now?
Grigoroff: Why not? That’s who we’ve always been. We’re exposed, I think, now. Being exposed again is a nice thing, to have a new record. The monkey off of our collective backs has been just awesome to feel hop off. It hopped off, and it’s done with us. For me, that’s an incredible relief.
Adducci: Oh yeah, to get this record out, it’s like a pressure valve got released. All the things we did leading up to this release, we can benefit from now too because we have all this other groundwork laid of new songs.
Grigoroff: Hopefully in the fall, we’ll start recording again and get something out not in about 30 years, maybe three months or six months or a year.
It’ll be out before 2056, in other words.
Grigorff: Let’s hope. (laughs)
Adducci: I would say probably definitely.
Grigoroff: If it isn’t, the crypt keepers will be letting it out, I think.
If you go
Who: Souled American
When: 7:30 p.m. June 29
Where: Spirit Lodge, Lawrenceville
Tickets: Starting at $22.50, etix.com