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A lot of my songs are about things that I never lived nor ever will live, mostly because the world we live in is extremely superficial compared to the world a lot of those old guys grew up in. I'd never want to put our music or myself in any kind of category or place near theirs, but the influence is definitely there in a major way. I don't at all deny that the music we're playing references music that preceded us. -Adam Stephens |
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Photo by Steve Hopson
So if his approach isn't autobiographical, what does inspire Stephens?
 Two Gallants |
"Old age. The fear of not doing enough with my life before it's too late," he says matter-of-factly. "I don't really find specific things as being inspirational. You can hear a beautiful song and it may have a momentary effect on you, but that's not what made you write a song. For me, you just write a song if you have it in you, or if you have a desire or a need to write a song. That's how it's been for me at least. Every day, I'm kinda bombarded with thoughts and ideas. I don't really try to do it so much as I don't have the choice. I try to just sort of allow the song to lead a trail, word-by-word, and each line leading to the next line. They kind of just write themselves."
Whatever his Muse may be, it's been plentiful for Stephens of late. In June, the band issued a five-song EP, The Scenery of Farewell, that started out as their next full-length album.
"We actually recorded four more songs and were planning on doing it as a full-length but it ended up being extremely heavy and a little too depressing," he recalls. "Everybody who heard the first masters of it was a little bit frightened. I understood – it had some pretty dark, long, depressing songs on it that we didn't play very much live and were mostly forgotten. They're acoustically based and we don't play live acoustic very often. But I really wanted to record them so they wouldn't disappear."
For both The Scenery of Farewell and their eponymous studio release, the band brought Alex Newport (At The Drive-In, The Mars Volta) on board to produce. Newport wasn't entirely new to the band – he was responsible for remixing The Throes in 2006. In producing both the EP and LP, Newport managed to achieve a sonically rich recording of the band's music without sacrificing any of the primal simplicity that makes it so unique.
"Alex's got a great ear and we liked what he cared about in music and what was important to him," Stephens explains. "It was really fun to get to play these songs and have someone be completely straightforward and honest with us about them. We've never done that before. It's always been just Tyson and I, so it was nice to have a third opinion. It made us have a broader view of what was appropriate for these records than any of our previous ones."
So, if he had to sneak into a record store and slip one of his records in with that of one of his heroes, whom might he choose? Stephens ponders the question silently for a moment before reluctantly offering an answer that may best explain why Two Gallants are the modern torchbearers of the Delta blues.
"I was given The Yellow Princess by my girlfriend's dad and it sort of turned me on to this whole world of the blues that I just had no idea even existed," Stephens says of Fahey's 1969 masterpiece. "His influence on the whole genre, even though he came after everyone, was huge because he reinterpreted the music in a really beautiful way that no one else has really ever done, before or since."
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