Working together as Moonrisers, guitarist Libby DeCamp and drummer Adam Schreiber make music rooted in the past yet engaged with the present. They play instruments with long histories—she a Slingerland May Bell parlor guitar from the ‘30s, he a hundred-year-old calfskin drumkit—and they find inspiration in close readings of late nineteenth-century poets and early twentieth-century naturalists. Recorded in a Nashville house that predates country music, their debut, Harsh & Exciting (due out May 30th via Easy Eye Sound), is a new and nuanced take on old and earthy musical styles: folk, blues, jazz, gospel, even cowboy songs.
Based in Michigan, the couple have been playing together for 12 years, but individually they’ve been making music for much longer. Now a busy session player who has worked with Stevie Nicks, Madi Diaz, and Luke Sital-Singh, among others, Schreiber started out as a pre-teen in a band with his siblings before moving on to his own solo career, but didn’t start doing session work until the pandemic hit. “I was posting short clips of me playing drums everyday,” he says. “People started finding them online and asking me to record. From there I haven’t really stopped.” Meanwhile, DeCamp has been making a name for herself as a singer-songwriter whose 2021 debut, Westward and Faster, revealed her to be a bold guitarist and an insightful lyricist. “We’ve both had long, mixed journeys,” she says.
Whenever they were home together, they would make music in their living room, often playing whatever instruments were at hand and never with any intention of releasing or even recording it. They jammed merely for the sake of creating something together in the moment.
Those living room jam sessions intensified during the pandemic, when touring was an impossibility, and the couple began uploading videos to their social media. Dan Auerbach, singer/guitarist for The Black Keys and mastermind behind the eclectic Easy Eye Sound label, became obsessed with their performances and invited them down to Nashville. Schreiber played drums for Easy Eye Sound artists Hermanos Gutiérrez and Robert Finley, and Auerbach invited DeCamp and Schreiber to play their first public show at the label’s annual Fish Fry.
DeCamp and Schreiber quickly cut an album together at Auerbach’s studio in Nashville, and then he hoodwinked them into recording it again. Setting up and playing in different rooms from each other, the newly christened Moonrisers played through all their songs—including a new medley of Washington Phillips tunes—over the course of three days. Without the pressure of an official studio take, the performances were looser, with the larger world occasionally bleeding into the recordings.
There is no known destination for Moonrisers, which started out as nothing more than a casual jam session but has transformed into something compelling, original, and even healing. DeCamp and Schreiber are trying to let the project be whatever it needs to be, unburdened by too many creative expectations or professional pressures. “This album feels hopeful to me,” says DeCamp, “so we’re just going to take it wherever it goes.”
Today, Glide is excited to offer an exclusive premiere of the video for the standout track “Muddy Shores.” Reminiscent of the instrumentals you might find on a Tom Waits or Handsome Family album, the song slinks along with a sly sense of coolness that feels like the soundtrack for a dark night out on the town shuffling along from one dive bar to another. In the fashion of many Dan Auerbach-produced albums, there is a rich sense of soulfulness in this music that is accentuated by the loping organ and occasional ever-so-funky guitar flourish. The animated video captures the dark wonder of the tune.
The duo describes the inspiration and process behind both the song and the album:
“We liked the idea of having a busy flourish of hand-played polyrhythmic drums together with a blues riff tugging it down in some heftiness and a slower tempo, making the whole thing feel like it’s moving around.”
“Throughout the record, there’s a strong current of inspiration from the natural world, and a sense of scene & place. The whole thing is pretty tactile and textural, and doesn’t always have a singular melodic focal point. We enjoyed finding tones and timbres that reminded us of parts of our favorite old recordings. The songs were recorded fairly similarly to how they were formed – in a living room, across from one another and reacting to what the other was doing. No headphones or surgical sound treatment. The house acted like an instrument itself, in a way.”
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