What is never surprising about Surprise Me Mr. Davis, the ecstatic, electric combination of ThaMuseMeant’s Nathan Moore and musical hipsters, The Slip, is that they always bring the audience to every place in the emotional spectrum. They’re reliable like that. In Moore’s “Before You Were Born,” he sings, “Before you were born…your smile had no end/ You were born and now you want it all back again”. Surprise Me, combining Moore’s distinctly raw but comforting acoustic guitar and vocals with The Slip’s stimulating grooves, never fails to bring the audience back to that beautiful place that we might have been in “before we were born.”
Every Fourth of July weekend, thousands of glowing festivarians flock to the High Sierra Music Festival in Quincy, California, in search of just that sort sense of connection and transcendence—the feeling that we are all in this together. This year, at HSMF, Surprise Me was in top form, playing two full daytime sets (a rarity during the jam-packed festival), with the buzzing crowd hanging on every word, laughing, dancing, and crying when they heard about Moore’s run-in with the police on the way up. It was one of those extended moments that truly renewed and refreshed the audience—one they will remember when other elements of the festival are lost in the dregs of memory.
Surprise Me Mr. Davis is named after a snowed-in weekend Moore spent with The Slip in Boston, where there was nothing to do but try to surprise each other with unexpected musical gems—“Surprise Me!” they prompted each other. Later in the week, Nathan received a message on his cell phone from a kind old lady who thought she was calling a “Mr. Davis”. “O’ you’re having fun with that recording!” the message said. “Well I guess you guys are snowed in, I bet you’re drinking a lot of hot chocolate….have a nice day.” The randomness and magical feeling of this message was a perfect fit with the new project. With increasing numbers of shows and audience awareness lately, Surprise Me Mr. Davis is heading into the studio later this summer to work on their first studio album. Glide caught up with Nathan Moore during a rare break in his current tour with ThaMuseMeant, to talk about Surprise Me Mr. Davis, the California police force, and musical healing.
So, I understand you were once the merchandise guy for The Slip?
I knew them before that. The merch guy thing was really when ThaMuseMeant broke up, back in 2000. I went back home to Virginia and I was living in a little treehouse there. After one year, I got cabin fever—I was missing the road life and stuff like that, so I called up Brad or Andrew [Barr] and was like, “Take me with you! Get me out of here. I want to go on the road. I’ll do anything!” We were already friends. On that tour, we did this little shtick where they’d say, “The merch guy wrote a song in the shower last night and we’re gonna have him come up here and do this song. He might do it, if you prod him…” Then the crowd would go, “Yeaaaahh!”, and I’d just be “one of the crowd” that got to go up on stage. We hammed it up and played it like I was just the merch guy, but we were artistic friends before that.
ThaMuseMeant is back together and growing again. Are you planning on touring more with The Slip, as Surprise Me Mr Davis?
For sure. We’re hopefully going into the studio in the end of August to make the first real Surprise Me Mr. Davis album. The album where the name came from, released on Frogville Records, was really playing around with our home recording.
What happened with getting arrested on the way to High Sierra Music Festival this year?
There’s still stuff pending, but it looks like it’s gonna work out. It’ll just be a lot of money. They lowered it from a felony to a misdemeanor, which is good—I won’t be a convicted felon. Basically, we got pulled over going into High Sierra because there were five cars behind our bus, on a country road. There’s a law in California that if there are that many people behind you, you have to pull over immediately. I didn’t do that. I didn’t even know that was a law! We got pulled over. I was driving. The officer called me off the bus and asked me a bunch of questions and then he told me to stick out my tongue. He said he saw marijuana resin on my tongue.
The officer told everyone to get off the bus. Brad [Barr] was with us in tow—we’d hooked up with him in the Bay Area, and he was catching a ride with us to the festival. The officer talked to each one of us individually. He said that he smelled marijuana on Brad and Aimee [Curl]…
Unlikely candidates.
Yeah, he picked the two worst people, for our own personal sanity—the two people who hadn’t smoked in a long time. After that, he put on his rubber gloves and searched the bus for two or three hours. He wound up finding our little stashes of marijuana, and, in my duffle bag, 8/10 gram of mushrooms that I had forgotten were even in there—someone had handed them to me after a show, and I’d thrown them in my duffle bag and forgotten about it, probably a year ago. In fact, when he pulled out the little canister and said, “Whose is this?”, none of us recognized it. He said, “It was in a duffle bag in the back of the bus.” So we said, “Well, show us the duffle bag,” and as soon as he came walking off the bus I saw that it was my duffle bag and my heart sank into my stomach. I said, “That’s mine.”
He handcuffed me and took me in. We were about two miles from the festival. Thanks to Arizona Mike, who posted 10% of the $15,000 bail, and to High Sierra [Music Festival] for cosigning for the rest, I got out to catch the last song of The Slip’s late night set. It was an amazing experience, to go from jail into High Sierra. It became this really epic weekend. I went from feeling so kidnapped and abused to feeling so loved—countless people I didn’t even know, coming up to give me hugs. From one extreme to the other.
During the Surprise Me Mr. Davis daytime set at High Sierra, you mentioned that you were working on a tune in the holding tank in jail.
The acoustics were amazing in there! One little note would last forever. The first line that came to me was, ‘Time goes so slow when you’re in jail’. I kept going:
I don’t know if we’ll make the bail
But I know they’re out there
God bless them for trying
If I were alone and poor in here, I’d be dying
More verses started to come to me. I was alone in the holding tank at that point. Then this other guy got thrown in there with me, and I started singing it to him, to take his mind off his worries too. Then, the next morning, [ThaMuseMeant] played some version of that song in our set.
There’s a difference between the songs you do with The Slip and ThaMuseMeant material. Maybe ThaMuseMeant is more otherworldly and, somehow, more political. A lot of Surprise Me songs are about relationships, personal but open—maybe this has something to do with your relationship with the guys?
In ThaMuseMeant, we’ve got two women in the band. With Surprise Me, it’s like, “Alright! It’s the guys’ night out!”
When Aimee came out during one of the Surprise Me sets at High Sierra, she was crying, while singing. It was a potent emotional moment, like the climax of a play.
There were three distinct times when I almost broke down bawling during that set, myself. By the end of it I was completely drained, exhausted, and confused. While I was telling the story [of getting arrested], I almost cried, and then I fought it back. Then, when Aimee was singing “Lonely Boy”, I almost let it out. It became a very emotional set. A few hours afterwards, I finally got to cry.
High Sierra goes deeper than other festivals, for some reason.
A lot of people go there for a cathartic experience they’ve had in the past, or one they’re looking to have this time. It’s always cathartic. I hope they can maintain that aspect of it.
In your tune, “Rolling Home,” there’s a sense of no real home, of moving in many directions at once. You’re on the road now most of the time, do you see that continuing?
Yeah, I haven’t really had an address in years and years. I don’t see myself settling down anytime soon. I don’t really have a need, or, really, a desire—sometimes I wish I had a spot, but I don’t! I can’t afford one. Also, I recognize that if I sit down I may never get up…
Another song, “Before You Were Born”, is about returning to something, more than it is about moving forward—there is a sense of infinite but dependable cycles.
Before I wrote “Before You Were Born,” I didn’t realize how many parallels it had with a lot of spiritual texts. After I wrote it, I started to see versions of that idea all over the place—being born is being taken away from God, and you’re dealing with that separation from God during your life; death is returning back to the bosom of God. I think that’s what the song is about—before you were born, you were perfect, you had everything, and now that you’re here, you’re separated and you just want it back.
“Summer of My Fall” is one of Surprise Me Mr. Davis’ most memorable songs. People sing it after the show. There is a strong poetic aspect to the lyrics—they seem random, simple, but there is actually something very deep going on. The seasons (“It was the winter of her spring/ It was the summer of my fall”) couldn’t really be in any other order for the song to make sense. How much do you experiment with different lyrics?
My roots are as much in poets and writers as they are in songwriters. The songwriters that are my heroes are the ones that loved poets as well: Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits. They were reading Yeats or Rimbaud or Bukowski, or whatever it was, and they wanted to be poets—that’s what they were.
When I first started writing, I was doing more stream-of-consciousness, but over the years, I developed a style. I had a revelation where I became determined to pull off certain ideas. I got really obsessed for years with making each line mean as many things as possible. My ultimate theory was that if you can take a line and have it mean three different things, then it becomes more of a blank canvas for someone to project their own heart onto, or their own ideas; the more that it can possibly mean, the blanker of a canvas it becomes. The relationship with the artist becomes a lot more personal, because it can become whatever it has to, to fit what they want to hear. [Grateful Dead lyricist] Robert Hunter…thought that people would tend to hear what they needed to hear, and you don’t want to mess with that.
