RoCK EUPORA
Do you want to take a leap of faith?
Rock Eupora, the moniker for Mississippi-bred, Nashville-based artist Clayton Waller, has always been a heart-on-your-sleeve musical endeavor. From his earliest recordings, Waller has never been afraid to ask the big, searching questions of life. Catchy, hooky pop sensibilities have similarly been a consistent through-line in Rock Eupora’s catalogue. Featuring singable, fuzzed-out guitar hooks and stuck-in-your-head-all-afternoon choruses, the discography of Rock Eupora––including three full-length albums, two EPs, and a smattering of singles to date––brings to mind Blue Album-era Weezer or the high-energy, hard-charging, harmony-laden early Beatles singles.
These defining features are still present in Pick At The Scab, Rock Eupora’s latest full-length album, and yet, something feels different.
“I wanted to let the songs breathe a bit,” Waller says of his mindset while writing the material that would become the songs for Pick At The Scab. “I gravitate towards writing up-beat, high energy songs, but this time around, I decided to lean back a little and let the songs speak for themselves.”
In Pick At The Scab, the listener hears Waller opening sores––admitting personal struggles, asking existential questions, exploring new sonic territory––and exposing them to the light, reaching beyond himself with emotionally honest lyrics and ambitious musical arrangements. “Feels like I’m going out on a limb with a crack in it over and over again,” he admits on the back side of the album. Indeed, Pick At The Scab is the most adventurous Rock Eupora release to date: lush acoustic guitars pepper the album where once you might’ve heard punchy power chords; warbly organs and swirling synths peer out from behind corners; hushed four-track recordings flow seamlessly into wall-of-sound production; horn sections and orchestral string arrangements soar into the picture, joining the cast of anthemic choruses and earwormy guitar hooks that Waller has made a trademark of Rock Eupora’s sound.
“I'm somewhat of an optimist and am often tempted to inject a redemptive arc into my songs,” Waller says. “But for PATS, I wanted to be as honest as possible and just let the songs be what they are––not try to force a happy ending, not try to convince anyone of anything. That’s not to say there’s not an underlying hope. For example, the trajectory of the album suggests that healing begins when we stop trying to force it. Instead of trying to change myself or obsess over imperfections, I’ve learned to accept the messiness that surrounds me and love my beautiful, broken self––right where I am.”
On one hand, Pick At The Scab belongs solely to its creator––Waller wrote all the songs and arrangements and recorded and mixed the album himself, mostly during the nearly-two-year stretch of the global pandemic when Rock Eupora was forced off the road and Waller was left to turn inward.
And yet, even while the listener understands that Pick At The Scab is uniquely a product of Clayton Waller’s mind and heart, the album cannot help but be universally human and celebratory in its reach and scope. The album is the first in Rock Eupora’s discography to include other musicians besides Waller himself, and in the “real world,” Rock Eupora is a collective, a touring rock band bringing loud, live, exuberant joy to the songs Waller is sharing with his audience each night on the road. It’s a collaborative celebration described best in Pick At The Scab’s closing track, the aptly named “Ode To My Friends”: “I get so caught up in my life I forget that the source of my delight isn’t from within.”
Rock Eupora began when Waller was a senior in college. Each subsequent release has seen a broadening of scope and range, and Pick At The Scab is the logical successor to that tradition. Alongside every familiar influence––The Shins, Band of Horses, The Beach Boys––is a new friend, a Baby Huey, a Steely Dan, an Elizabeth Cotten, and, yes, even a Beyonce. Put simply, on Pick At The Scab, Rock Eupora is arriving at a destination: Waller, now thirty, has chosen to feel everything, instead of fighting to suppress or ignore the unpleasant or unknown. In so doing, in “feeling all of myself,” Waller has painted a rich, multivariate self-portrait. Through experimentation with new songs and sounds, confronting painful personal issues head-on, striving to find the balance between despair and joy, silliness and seriousness, heartbreak and love, the personal and the universal, Pick At The Scab delivers a full-bodied expression of what it means to live and to feel alive, an experience meant to be felt in a music venue together with others just as much as it can be heard between one’s own ears. At risk of falling into silver-lining-along-every-cloud cliches, it is best to let Waller himself describe the experience of Pick At The Scab: “There is no gladness apart from sadness.”
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