Moot Davis admits he was all fired up over completing his latest CD, but he was not expecting flames to almost consume his music.
“I had finished recording my fourth album, Goin’ in Hot, at the Wow And Flutter studio in east Nashville,” Davis says. “We had finished and they gave us the mixes and we left, and a few hours later the studio burned to the ground. But, amazingly, the producer was able to rescue my music from the hard drive of his melted computer!
“And we had taken all of our guitars and amps, so we didn’t lose those, either.”
Davis plans to release the album on April 15 on his own label, Crow Town Records, and is promoting it in advance by returning to places he has performed in the past, like Stickyz,where he’ll play tonight.
“I remember playing at Sticky Fingerz when that was its name in 2005 or 6, and I’ll be back with my guitar, bringing along a guy, Michael Massimino who will play some electric guitar on bass,” he says.
Davis set out on his tour Jan.21 with a show at the unusually named Dead Horse Cantina and Music Hall in McKees Rocks, Pa., and will be out until March 14, when he will play at The Mint in Los Angeles.
A native of a small town near Princeton, N.J., Davis had never planned to pursue music, thinking acting on the stage was his destiny - at least until he fell under the sway of music he heard in a television commercial.
“I don’t remember which soft drink it was for,” he says, “but it involved a delivery guy taking Coke or Pepsi into a store, and deciding to drink a can of his competitor’s product, and the song in the background was ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart,’ by Hank Williams. And suddenly, music made sense to me, the honesty and integrity contained in that came through and I just had to hear more of that guy’s music, and then I started writing my own songs, and after a few years, they started to get better.”
As a youth, Davis fell under the sway of two distinctly different influences: Bob Dylan and Roxy Music.
“When our family would go on road trips to Pennsylvania, my dad only had one cassette in the car,” Davis says. “One side of it was Dylan’s Desire album, and on the other side was the Greatest Hits of Roxy Music, and he would just play those albums constantly. I never got tired of hearing them for some reason.”
With a voice that has been compared to that of the legendary Roy Orbison, Davis has slowly built a career as a honkytonk sort of a singer-songwriter since recording his self-titled debut in the mid-2000s and a second CD, Already Moved On, in 2007.
Though he recorded his first two albums on the Lucky Dog record label, owned and operated by Pete Anderson, guitarist for Dwight Yoakam, differences arose and Davis reached a breaking point in his music career, so he decided to get as far away as he could, and New Zealand became his retreat for half a year.
“I was pretty burned out after four years of touring,” Davis says. “I was thinking maybe I should retire, but instead I decided to go off to the farthest place I could find. I almost didn’t even take my guitar. When I got there, I stayed drunk for two weeks. For a while, I thought, ‘This country is full of girls that would make somebody never want to leave.’”
Davis still calls New Jersey home, but now spends much of his time in Southern California, where entertainment industry contacts have helped him place at least 20 of his songs in TV and movie projects.
To get ahead in his chosen field, Davis has chosen a unique approach in his wardrobe decisions. He always wears a coat and tie, which has proved to be helpful in more ways than one.
“People treat you differently the more better you dress,” Davis says with a laugh. “And it helped me get in bars when I was too young to legally be there.”Moot Davis
9 p.m. today, Stickyz Rock ’n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 107
River Market Ave., Little Rock
Admission: $5
(501) 372-7707
stickyz.com
Style, Pages 30 on 02/11/2014