It's a Thursday afternoon earlier this month and Deer Tick singer/guitarist John McCauley is in the garage of his home in Nashville, Tenn., working on guitar pedals and fighting a case of jet lag.
He and the rest of the band -- bassist Christopher Ryan, drummer Dennis Michael Ryan and guitarist/vocalist Ian O'Neil -- have just returned home from an Australian tour.
"The jet lag is terrible. I should have just stayed there and become a surfer," says the 31-year-old McCauley, who is married to singer-songwriter Vanessa Carlton (fun fact: Stevie Nicks performed the ceremony).
Instead of being a beach bum, he and the Deer Tick crew will be on the road as part of a tour with John Moreland that will bring them to Little Rock's Rev Room on Friday for what should be a night of loud 'n' loose rock 'n' roll.
Deer Tick was formed by McCauley in Providence, R.I., in 2004. The first album, War Elephant, dropped in 2007 and featured rambling, alcohol-soaked alternative country-folk and that was followed the next year by Born on Flag Day. Other studio LPs include The Black Dirt Sessions, the crunchy rock of Divine Providence and the Steve Berlin-produced Negativity.
Throughout, Deer Tick, of which McCauley is the sole original member, earned a rep as a raucous live act. And they aren't shy about paying homage to their heroes -- the band's alter ego, Deervana, specializes in Nirvana covers. (McCauley has a throat-shredding yelp that can be eerily similar to Kurt Cobain's).
McCauley has also proved equally adept at sensitive character studies such as "Baltimore Blues No. 1" and "Twenty Miles," and speeding-toward-a-ditch rockers like "The Bump" and "Let's All Go to the Bar." He is, in this way, much like one of his influences, Paul Westerberg of The Replacements.
And, like Westerberg, who simultaneously released a pair of solo albums of quiet and louder songs -- 2002's Stereo and Mono -- McCauley and Deer Tick issued Deer Tick Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 last year that capture both sides of the group, with the first album focusing on country-folk and Vol. 2 cranking up the ragged power pop.
"I just had a feeling that the direction I was going in with some of these songs, that it was going to be a real pain to try to sequence them on the same record," the ever-wry McCauley says. "So I thought, why not make two, then I won't have this problem."
And that's what he did, with the band setting up at the famed Ardent Studios in Memphis to record the process: "It was a great experience. Fantastic studio. It's like a living museum."
Friday's show in Little Rock is only the third stop on the tour with Moreland.
"We'll be all right," McCauley says when asked if shows early in a tour are ever problematic. "As long we can get rid of this jet lag before then."
Weekend on 04/12/2018