‘It’s nice to not be forgotten’: Alt-country pioneers Souled American find a second life

Souled American band members Joe Adducci and Chris Grigoroff aren’t prone to reflection, so the two felt a bit out of character when forced to pause and revisit past albums Frozen and Notes Campfire, recently reissued in expansive new editions by the Oklahoma label Scissor Tail Records.

“We really haven’t dwelled on the old material until these reissues,” said bassist-vocalist Adducci, who will join guitarist-vocalist Grigoroff in making a rare concert appearance at a sold-out Secret Studio on Wednesday, Nov. 20. “But it’s led to some nice things happening, at least. It’s nice to not be forgotten.”

While Souled American might have existed for a time off-radar – a pair of October shows in the band’s Chicago hometown marked the first time in 13 years the two had taken the stage together – the musicians never stopped working. Even now, the two continue to plug away intermittently on a new record, which they said stands near completion and will mark the band’s first release since Notes Campfire surfaced in 1996. “There was no step away,” Grigoroff said. “We were always playing and working. We just didn’t have an audience, and no one was reaching out anymore.”

The extended chrysalis in which the band has long existed stands in stark contrast to Souled American’s early years, when the musicians released a trio of albums on the U.K. label Rough Trade in just 18 months beginning with 1988’s Fe – an unrelenting pace that speaks to the creative flowering that had taken hold within the then-quartet. Drawing upon reggae and country, these swampy early records served as influential (if often overlooked) pillars in the nascent alt-country movement, providing a groovier counterpoint to the harder-charging cowpunk practiced by the likes of Jason and the Scorchers and earning the band fans like Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, who called Souled American’s “Before Tonight” one song he wished he’d written in a 2019 interview with Pitchfork.

Souled American’s early productivity could be traced at least in part to the fact that Grigoroff was already approaching age 30 before the band signed with Rough Trade, which instilled in him a fear that time was somehow already running short. “There was definitely that feeling of, man, it’s going to be tough to get signed in rock and roll at 40, so I better get to it pretty soon,” he said, and laughed. 

There was also a relentless urge to create existent within the players, then including guitarist Scott Tuma and drummer Jamey Barnard, which Adducci said made even a six-month pause between records feel like centuries. “We were really on fire, and we were moving at a high speed in our heads back then,” he said. “We had so many songs on deck. I was writing [1990 album] Around the Horn before Fe was even completed. We just had so much. We were bustling.”

Coming into the band, both Adducci and Grigoroff said there was an awareness that they were treading untapped sonic ground, forging a connection between the early roots and country artists championed by Grigoroff – the Carter Family and Jimmie Rogers included – with the rubbery, dub-influenced basslines played by Adducci. Unfortunately, this also coincided with an awareness that the music could be a harder sell both with audiences – “It was pretty obvious [1989 album] Flubber was not going to turn a lot of people on,” Grigoroff said – and with label executives.

“I still remember what I said early, I said, ‘Boys, this isn’t going to sell, so we better push ’em out quick,’” Grigoroff said.

Decades later, though, audiences finally appear to be catching up. The band’s early records have found new life following a digital release last year, while its later records have been resurfaced courtesy Scissor Tail. Now, as the musicians make the final touches on a new album in preparation for their first release in nearly three decades, a late-career flurry could still be in the cards. “Right now, we have three albums of songs that haven’t been recorded because we just kept compiling material,” Adducci said. “And when somebody turns that switch that we couldn’t turn on ourselves, we’re going to jump on it in a heartbeat.”