Four albums into a music career built on reviving the trappings of traditional, old-time rave-up rock ’n’ roll, JD McPherson gave himself one directive for the songs that ended up on his latest album, Nite Owls.
“I love guitar music, and I love busy guitar players, but my favorite players have either a thing that they’ve invented or keep it pretty sparse, like Bo Diddley, Daniel Ash [of Love and Rockets and Bauhaus] and Ricky Wilson from the B-52s,” he says. “I love when the guitar is distilled down and focuses on a sound.”
The particular sound in McPherson’s head as he set out to make Nite Owls, his “surf-noir” record, was based around a motif of single-note riffs with a generous helping of spring reverb.
“How many sort of different ideas can you convey with that being the glue that holds everything together? In my mind, that was obviously surf guitar, and Duane Eddy and [Ennio] Morricone spaghetti Western soundtracks, and even a wee bit of Depeche Mode – Martin Gore and the big Gretsch hollowbody stuff,” he says.
But much to his frustration, it took three tries to finally get Nite Owls right.
McPherson first began recording the songs pre-pandemic, but when Covid restrictions and life changes splintered his longtime band, he was left at square one. “The pandemic happened and everybody started to rethink their priorities in life,” he says. “Restaurants closed down, bands broke up – that’s a pretty universal story. But it happened, and I was sitting with this unfinished thing.”
After another false start in 2022, McPherson shelved the project and signed on as guitarist and opening act for Robert Plant and Alison Krauss on the duo’s first tour in 12 years. The opportunity to walk away from his solo career and do something completely different, where he describes his role as being “a rubber mallet in a drawer full of scalpels,” arrived at the perfect moment.
“I really can’t overstate what they did for me,” he says. “They grounded me at one of the worst, darkest times in my musical life and handed me this incredible gift, to be able to commune with those musicians and with Robert and Alison.
“Playing Zeppelin songs and playing songs from the Raising Sand record, which is one of my favorite records of all time, with Marc Ribot, another one of my very favorite guitar players. It was just bananas.”
The trek allowed him to road test the songs he’d been trying to record, such as Just Like Summer and Sunshine Getaway, which McPherson says became favorites for the crowd and band alike during his opening sets. It also reset his thinking about how to record them for Nite Owls.
“I was wrestling with whether or not I was even gonna finish it and keep doing music, honestly,” he says. “And then I got the call from the Plant/Krauss crew to come play – and talk about a shot in the arm. Just playing other people’s music for a while with one of the greatest bands ever put together, real icons of music, was exactly what I needed at the time.”
Inspired by the musicianship and spontaneous live setting, McPherson gathered a few trusted musicians from his inner circle, including his musical director Doug Corcoran, and returned to Reliable Recorders (formerly Hi-Style) in Chicago, where he recorded his 2011 debut, Signs & Signifiers. The sessions reunited him with another frequent collaborator, Alex Hall. “Alex is one of my favorite engineers and a fantastic drummer. I wanted those drums.”
The skeleton crew committed the 10 songs on Nite Owls, his first proper studio album in seven years, to analog tape with as much recorded live as possible using only a small stable of guitars, amps and effects.
“If I don’t limit my palette a little bit, I’ll get really distracted and waste a lot of time, and on that third attempt at making the record, time was of the essence,” he says. “We had to knock it out pretty quick, so I kept my arsenal pretty low – just a couple of amps, a couple guitars and a spring reverb unit, and off to the races.”
McPherson limited his focus to playing a Fender Jazzmaster and a Gretsch White Penguin reissue through vintage amps like a 1940s Epiphone and a National that were kicking around the studio. For the all-important reverb, he went with a Surfy Industries SurfyBear Reverb.
“If you’ve ever played like a real old Fender reverb tank, it’s exactly that,” he says. “Those are insane amounts of money now, but the SurfyBear is worth every penny.”
The guitar sounds on Nite Owls are classic surf rock, especially on the instrumental track The Phantom Lover of New Rochelle, with blistering single-note lines finding space alongside simple garage-rock riffs designed to land with maximum impact under McPherson’s tuneful vocal melodies. The stomping Sunshine Getaway, built around a riff plucked with his fingers, is one of his favorites.
“That riff is really fun,” he says. “I have a habit of playing with my fingers on pretty heavy tunes, like peddling away with my thumb on the lower strings. It’s just a real old blues move, but it’s sneaking its way into a lot more songs these days.”
- Nite Owls is out now via New West Records.
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