Johnathan Rice’s new album, the September-released Good Graces, doesn’t sound like a record mostly written during a New York City winter. The nine-track recording, Rice’s third full-length and first since 2007’s Further North, pulses with a sunshiny, guitar-powered pop rock rhythm through most of its tracks, even when Rice’s singing about “going nowhere, at the speed of light.”
There’s a good reason for the album’s sound not reflecting its genesis. “I recorded it in Southern California,” says Rice from his Southern California home.
And that’s that. Rice has a no-nonsense, but humorous, response to some questions. When asked what took so long between albums — do the math, it’s six years — Rice doesn’t linger on what kept him busy during the interim. No mentions of his work with Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis on Lewis’ second solo album, Acid Tongue, and touring behind it. Nothing about working with Elvis Costello on his 2008 record Momofuku. Or even about joining Lewis in Jenny And Johnny and their 2010 release I’m Having Fun Now.
So after all that other work, what made him decide it was time for a new Rice record?
“You know, I was just getting thousands of fan letters, and I was like, ‘Enough is enough,’” he says, deadpanning throughout. “It was either release an album or hire my own personal mailman.”
And so Good Graces is that album. And Good Graces is a quick record, with nine songs in half an hour. The work ranges from the tropical-breeze jangle of “Acapulco Gold” to the leisurely, minimal haze-guitar pop of “That Summer Feeling,” with its refrain, “That summer feeling is gonna haunt you one day in your life.” Among the tracks, Rice, raised in Virginia and Scotland, covers pure love with the urban folk rock of “My Heart Belongs to You” and brood rock with “Nowhere at the Speed of Light.”
Lewis, The Watson Twins and Z Berg provide harmonies and background vocals throughout Good Graces. The rhythms of the record are warm; the words often melancholy. When Rice sings, “Sister, don’t forget about your brother, dying a slow and lonely death, just down the hall,” on “Lou Rider,” female vocals lessen the tune’s emotional punch with ’60s girl group “Doo-do-do-doos” and other angelic and playful background vocals. These are the dark shadows of Good Graces blended with its warm passion. Such is the duality of the album.
A number of songs came to Rice during a particularly fertile writing period — Rice jokes better nutrition was behind this productivity — but most of Good Graces’ tracks are from a half vacation and half songwriting excursion to New York City in January 2012.
“For me, so far in life, if I’m not writing with someone else, if that’s not what I’m doing, it takes me a few days of being by myself to get my mind sort of working a different way and that’s generally where the songs start,” Rice says. “I have a lot of friends in New York, but I didn’t really call them that much. I spent a lot of time by myself, looking out the window and walking around, and the songs kind of came to me in that month.”
But the only Good Graces song that truly channels New York City is the aforementioned “Lou Rider,” with Rice’s singing mimicking Lou Reed’s impassive vocals during the song’s verses. Rice wasn’t aware of his Reed vocal impersonation until listening to the tune later, and the drummer for the Good Graces sessions named the tune. “If you owe such a debt to someone on a song, why not pay it?” Rice asks.
Following the completion of Good Graces, Rice and girlfriend Lewis went to work together on a set of songs for the upcoming Anne Hathaway-starring drama Song One. “The songs themselves kind of run along the script in such a way that they kind of tell a story,” Rice says. “It’s a way that the characters in the film communicate with each other, kind of.”
In creating the music for the film, Rice and Lewis sat down with the film’s writer and director, Kate Barker-Froyland, and producers of the film, and worked out some song sketches. Songwriting from the perspective of a film character was a relief, Rice says, as he and Lewis didn’t want to cover the “druggy jangle” — as he calls it — of the pair’s I’m Having Fun Now.
“It was fun,” he says, “because the director and producer and Jenny and I sat down and talked about, ‘Where is this character from? What hometown? What’s in that hometown? How would you feel if you were in that town?’ Things like that were really fun to invent a character and create a mythical songwriter. It’s fun to invent a backstory and draw from that backstory because it immediately takes you out of yourself.”
Rice and Lewis are working on the film’s score now, but Rice is also on the road, touring in support of Good Graces. He’s already completed one tour and is once again on the road starting Halloween night with a tour that brings him to Little Rock on Tuesday.
For the current slate of shows, Rice is backed during his set by The Apache Relay, the Nashville, Tenn.-based, Americana-fueled indie rockers, with The Apache Relay also playing their own set. Rice says he met the group in Los Angeles and they “became fast friends,” but when we chat a week before their first show, Rice says he and The Apache Relay haven’t held a single rehearsal together. They’ll rehearse a time or two, Rice says, and that’s OK. Or the lack of rehearsing is “gonna have to be” OK. Plus, he is OK with his songs being open to interpretation by his backing bands in certain instances. The evolution occurred on his first tour behind Good Graces.
“It really depends with me on the group of musicians I’m playing with,” he says. “Even though my band might have listened to the record and learned the other musicians’ parts who played on the record, you spend enough time together — breathing the same air, sleeping in the same hotel rooms and just playing that much music together — that invariably it becomes its own thing and it did on this [last] tour as well. This band that played on tour had its own take on the music.”
SEE THE SHOW
Johnathan Rice and The Apache Relay visit Stickyz on Nov. 5 with the music starting at 9 p.m. There’s a $10 cover for the 18-and-up show.