The narrator of “The Simple Joy” seems to have it all figured out. He’s outlived his hard times, outrun his demons, and found a semblance of peace, even at the risk of losing his sanity. “I keep busy in the daytime charging glowworms,” he tells us. “Joys less simple seem to feel like child’s play now.” In the cosmic, karmic world of Ryan Davis, it seems inevitable that, by the end of the song, this character will wind up in jail. It also seems inevitable by now that Davis can tell the story without any sense of judgement or sentimentality. Is this guy bottoming out? Enlightened? Making fun of the whole pursuit? At any given moment, any and all seem like a fair bet.
“I keep it close to what I know, to what I could have potentially experienced,” the songwriter, Sophomore Lounge label runner, and former State Champion frontman told the New Yorker about his lyrics. “But I’m not necessarily writing about things that have happened to me.” Instead, the 40-year-old Davis writes about things that happen just beyond us, as observed by the people you might try to avoid when finding a seat on the bus. Listen long enough and you can spot these scenarios in the world. When I checked my feed last week, I thought how a CEO caught spooning the head of HR on a Coldplay kiss cam could easily find a home in a Ryan Davis song, where life is funny and cruel and love is “not what made the globe turn, but more akin, in fact, to what makes the cows lay down.”
Whether he’s writing from personal experience seems beside the point, even when he’s singing about heartbreak (“Why I let myself let her go, and for who, I’ll never know”), making a living (“Whistlin’ for my payseed/Peckin’ on a W-9”), or our ever-waning days on earth (“A slew of mismeasurements between the place I stand and the place I will rest”). All three of those lyrics come from “New Threats From the Soul,” the album’s nine-plus-minute opener, and each feels representative of the record’s irreverent strengths. The songs are dizzyingly elaborate but strangely inhabitable, and they establish Davis as a writer who gets his kicks from setting images you don’t generally come across in songs you’ll want to listen to again and again. He is, in other words, a lyrics guy, and a previous generation of lyrics guys were pleased to anoint him. (“He’s the best lyricist who’s not a rapper going,” said David Berman in 2018; “This is the sound of someone bearing a torch,” said Bill Callahan in 2023.)
Even with this pedigree, New Threats From the Soul is the most overwhelming, singular display of Davis’ gifts to date: a record whose novelty is matched by its warmth and consistency. Some lyrics dazzle with their idiomatic insight, like this one: “There are times when a white flag is nothing but a blank canvas/It waves for what happens next.” There are others that feel remarkable for how many clever turns of phrase they blend so gracefully, like this one: “If we put our two heads together on this sad sack of feathers/Could we remember what the memory foam forgot?” There are others that remind me of the days when Twitter was a humble platform for silly, self-explanatory observations, like when he reads “OJDIDIT” on a license plate. And then there are lyrics that feel torn from the pages of some lost American spiritual epic, like when he considers the penny slot’s nagging class consciousness as it peers into the high-stakes room.
The lyrics are so good that I could spend this whole review quoting them, but I’d like to avoid that, because, even since 2023’s masterful Dancing on the Edge, the Roadhouse Band has developed a sound that feels just as worthy of celebration. There’s a reason why the average song hovers around eight minutes, and it’s not just Davis’ knack for recurring motifs. The band knows how to stretch out, swapping the scenery to make each left turn feel pivotal. “Mutilation Springs,” the longest song on the record, incorporates a chintzy keyboard intro, a spacey slow-burn for his spoken-word delivery, a blink-and-you-miss-it musical nod to “Lola,” and a closing jam with flute accompaniment from Lou Turner that sounds like a band of animatronic bears jamming to Station to Station.
Arriving at a particularly abundant time for lyric-driven indie rock drawing on folk and country, New Threats From the Soul stands proudly on its own. It is a record that indulges in potentially alienating ideas—like doubling back to “Mutilation Springs” for a similarly titled, similarly lengthy redux with the same melody and structure—and makes them feel inviting, further embedding us in the landscape. As accompanists, the Roadhouse Band often build to climaxes that should be nonsensical—like finishing the otherwise classic-sounding “Monte Carlo/No Limits” with a blast of pedal steel, fiddle, and jungle beats. Uniformly, their performances feel inspired, as averse to cliché and open to interpretation as Davis’ writing.
This freedom makes the record play like a spontaneous breakthrough, assuming shape as we listen, and it gives Davis the confidence to embrace his role as a bandleader. He knows just when to lay on the swagger—selling the hook of “Better If You Make Me” with actorly desperation, or closing his eyes to jump an octave and belt the climactic rhyme of “miracle” and “urinal” in the closing “Crass Shadows (At Walden Pawn).” He also knows just when to step back. Throughout “The Simple Joy,” he occasionally cedes the mic to fellow Kentucky native Will Oldham, who has never sounded quite so exuberant and soulful on record. Together they sing about life’s “simple joys” and the “simpler lonelinesses,” as Davis’ narrator charts his way from grief to deliverance to solitary confinement. “Are we getting any closer to me knowing what the point of all of this is,” Davis shouts to no specific response, which only gives him more reason to keep singing—pointlessly, joyfully, no longer searching for meaning but making it for himself.
