Interview with LadyCouch: ‘One of the really great things about Nashville is the cross-pollination of music’

Nashville-based blues/soul band LadyCouch will release their intriguing single, ‘Definitely Devilish’, on 4 December, a tribute to Principal Skinner in The Simpsons.

The band was launched by long-time friends Keshia Bailey and Allen Thompson in 2017, following a show at Nashville’s Exit/In where they were both on the same bill. The core group of LadyCouch consists of keyboard player and all around musician Jimmy Matt Rowland, Allen Thompson Band stalwarts Grayson Downs, Clint Maine and Ray Dunham, Atlanta guitarist Mike Ford Jr from Radio Birds and Migrant Worker and Gordon Persha from Nashville jammers, Los Colognes. And on any given evening in Nashville, it’s not uncommon to see musicians from bands such as Old Crow Medicine Show, Maggie Rose and Little Bandit jamming with them.

‘There are a lot of weird Simpsons references in our next single, I’ve been watching a lot of that this year,’ Thompson laughed. ‘It’s straight up soul. It’s riff-based with a horn line, more like the first two Robert Palmer records. I’d been messing around with the progression and it got more and more fun to write and sing. It’s got a Danny Elfman (American composer) type horn line. I sing on this one and Keshia and Olivia do backing vocals.’

Musically, Bailey and Thompson come from quite different worlds: she came from soul group Magnolia Sons and Thompson from the psychedelic Allen Thompson Band. However, their similar Appalachian upbringings and their genuine appreciation for soul, rock, funk, country and folk have allowed them to build bridges across genres to create a sound of their own.

‘I’ve always been in awe of the power and emotion in her voice’

‘Keshia’s been one of my very best friends and confidants for a long time,’ Thompson said. ‘I’ve always been in awe of the power and emotion in her voice. When we first got together, I think we were both kinda in a place where we were feeling stagnant in terms of our creative output. I knew I wanted to bring a little more soul into what I was doing, but I didn’t know how to do it within the confines of ATB. I was falling in love with the big revue-type bands of the 70’s like Little Feat, Parliament, Mad Dogs & Englishmen, Bob Marley & The Wailers, and Delaney and Bonnie.  I kinda forced Keshia down that rabbit hole, too, and we decided that if we were gonna have a band, it was gonna be a big one like those.’

Earlier this month, they released their single, ‘Good God’, which changed direction as they wrote it: ‘I think it started off as a break-up song,’ said Thompson. ‘In my mind, I was looking at it like ‘Black Hearted Woman’ (by The Allman Brothers Band) but it morphed into a ‘know when to hold, know when to fold’ kind of song, it’s more about the pandemic. It’s also a message to each other to keep our heads up after the life changes we were both going through.’

Their name is an inside joke between them and friends who used to hang out together at a friend’s house in East Nashville. ‘Someone got a Yankee Candle called ‘Man Town’,’ he laughed. ‘The dudes would be in the kitchen or out back shooting BB guns and the women would be inside. Keshia called the couch the ‘lady couch, the annex of ‘Man Town”, and we knew that if we ever had a band, that’s what it would be called!’

My favourite of their songs to date is ‘Foolish and Blue’, which is the first song they wrote together. ‘We wanted to have at least one duet in the reportoire to showcase the difference in our vocals but also to show how well our voices work together,’ Thompson said. ‘It was quick to write, which gave us the confidence to write other songs. I’d dated this girl for a little while and it didn’t really work out. Keshia said if you’re too worried about that stuff, you can’t live in the moment and enjoy it, so that’s what the song’s about.’

As the song goes: ‘We haven’t known each other too long, how can you be certain what we’re doing is wrong? When I said I loved you, I believed it was true. Why am I feeling foolish and blue?’

‘If something is bothering you and you remove it, it’s not like a game of Jenga, the house won’t fall down’

Other songs in their repertoire have been kicking around for a long time, notably ‘Heartache’, which Thompson wrote for the Allen Thompson Band in 2004. ‘It never really worked onstage but I loved the song and thought it deserved a chance. We didn’t change a lot, I changed some of the lyrics and added the horn but I didn’t change any basic instrumentation. It’s crazy, if something is bothering you and you remove it, it’s not like a game of Jenga, the house won’t fall down. You just need to remove that part. It’s one of my favourite to play live now.’

His biggest musical influences include former American rock band Little Feat and The Grateful Dead ‘in terms of writing style, presentation and delivery, we’ve most modelled ourselves on them’.

Thompson acknowledges that Nashville has an incredibly diverse music scene. ‘Typically, one of the really great things about Nashville is the cross-pollination of music. I’m really looking forward to going to concerts again, to see Dirt Reynolds (a local rock group).’ He’s also a massive fan of local artists Little Bandit, LORE, Mercy Belle, Maggie Rose and Trigger Hippy who he very accurately describes ‘as if Harry Nilsson started a country band’.

LadyCouch have extremely diverse musical influences, which feed into their songs. ‘What’s really cool about this band is that Grayson our keyboard player likes music like The Smiths and The Cure, Mike likes country but all of that runs along the same stream of American music, it all fits somewhere on the same spectrum. It’s part of the same lineage.’

(Photo By Michael Weintrob)