Fault Lines

Bill Warden keeps busy. Several nights per month, you'll find him on stage (nine times out of 10 at Pilot Light, where he bartends), playing guitar in blues-metal power trio Black Sarah, lending searing lead guitar to Three Man Band, playing a solo acoustic set or fronting country-psych band New Madrid. He's played in numerous bands throughout the past 15 years or so, of varying genres, but usually rooted in a guitar-based rock or folk setting.

The mainstream analogy that comes to mind is Neil Young, restlessly moving from project to project, pounding out sloppy thrash blues on one album, turning in a folk, country or even feedback assemblage down the line. And like Young, Warden's voice is something of an acquired taste — heavier on naked emotion and raw immediacy than technique and smoothness.

If you go with this analogy (and I know some of you are already bucking), New Madrid might be Warden's On The Beach effort – a meld of laid-back country-rock, somber dirge-blues and loose, up-tempo rock. Along with Warden on guitar and vocals, longtime co-conspirator Lou Vesser plays organ and sings, fellow Black Sarah member Cain Blanchard handles bass and fiddle, Liz Tapp plays violin, and Dave Weller sits behind the drums.

The band, named for a city in Missouri that sits on a major Midwest fault line, came together in early 2006, after Warden, Vesser and Blanchard's former band Newport packed it in. Tapp and Weller were recruited for some informal sessions, and a band was born. Initially Blanchard sat it out, but when Tapp left for Chicago, he took over the violin (or in his hands, fiddle, maybe) spot.

“I'd just gotten that thing when Liz left,” Blanchard says from a group huddle in Vesser's South Knoxville house, where the band practices and records. “Then I got a band so I didn't actually have to learn how to play it. In the end I don't know if it worked out.” Blanchard is being modest, as anyone who's heard him play “that thing” can attest.

Weller would soon relocate to Minneapolis, making already sporadic performances and recordings even more infrequent. The group gets together whenever they can, touring when everyone gets time off from school or jobs.

They're getting ready to go out on a 10-day jaunt in support of a split 7-inch single with Adam Ewing's Mountains of Moss project, released on Blanchard and Knoxville Voice contributor Matt Silvey's Laboratory Standard Recordings. It's a good pairing, Ewing's powerful acoustic lament “Page of Shame” complimenting the mournful blues of New Madrid's “All That Trust.” The song is also the opening track on a recently recorded CD-R, which the band hopes to eventually put out as a full-length vinyl record.

Warden is an extensive, almost obsessive archivist, and has released a plethora of CD-Rs, tapes and even a record of various solo and group efforts since the early ‘90s. The New Madrid recordings, however, have slowed somewhat recently, and that's something of a concern because the group doesn't get together all that often.

“I probably should be recording these practices, but I'm not,” Warden frets.

And while Warden may seem the focal point because he's the principal singer/songwriter/guitarist, his lanky frame standing front-and-center, it's clear New Madrid is most definitely a group effort, with every member having his or her say in a song's development.

“I don't know if you know you're like this,” Tapp tells Warden, “but I've never played music with anyone who cares as little as you do about what I do. I've always been told, ‘I want you to do this, play this,' but you're like, ‘Whatever you think is right. It'll be right if it's what you feel is right,' even with songs you've written.”

There's agreement all around, and discussion of how the songs may change, expand or contract with each run-through. New Madrid seem to adhere more than most bands to the idea of music existing in the moment — each practice or performance a unique experience — with a potential discovery emerging each time the group assembles. The extensive recording is meant to document not necessarily the progression, but the variations and possibilities of a song.