Meet the band: 500 Miles to Memphis

Who they are: Jeff Snyder, bass; Elaina Brown, vocals; David Rhodes Brown, lap steel, organ and piano; Ryan Malott, vocals, guitar, harp; Kevin Hogle, drums; Noah Sugarman, guitar
Hometown: Cincinnati
Latest Project: third full-length album, "We’ve Built Up to Nothing," is out this week
Sounds like: Punked out country rock

Given one word to describe his band, guitarist Ryan Malott picks "tenacious." For the past seven years his band has been playing what he describes as “heartfelt American roots punk rock,” and Malott talked to us last week about the band’s musical progression on their new album and how he feels about snow days.

You guys have been playing and touring since 2002, what’s your favorite city to play?
Well, Cincinnati is definitely a favorite because it’s our home and we love the Southgate House. But other than Cincinnati, I’d say Dallas; Charlotte, (N.C.); and Wrightsville Beach, (N.C.). We do really well there. Those are our main cities, especially Dallas—and anywhere in North Carolina has been really good. I guess our style of music goes over better in the South. We have a lot more fans there and it’s always been good. Denver also has been really good, but we don’t get to tour out West very much.

We’ve been getting a lot of snow recently, how do you feel about snow days?
We’re actually getting ready to go sledding right now. Gotta love the snow days. It gives you an excuse not to work. We went out the (other) night to have a few drinks, and we got—I got snowed in at my buddy’s house for two days. [Laughs] About four or five years ago actually, we were on tour, going from Chicago to Cleveland and we got a huge snow storm and I got stuck in Cleveland. It sucked. Yeah, we don’t tour up north in the winter anymore.

Tell me about your new album
For people who are familiar with our work, the last album was kind of a statement: “This is country punk. This is who we are.” It was kind of a new genre. This new album, we didn’t want to pigeonhole our selves. We had grown as band and gown as musicians and the music kind of progressed to something other than country punk. I mean, the music is still country punk, but there is soooo much more to it than that. It’s like a rock opera. A lot of Queen influence, a lot of Beatles influence. It just comes to a different angle and has a lot of full orchestration on it. We didn’t just stick with standard guitars, bass and drums. We branched out and composed a little bit.

What instruments did you branch out with?
We had a full string section and a full brass section. We brought in a marching snare and a marching bass drum. We used a lot of traditional concert band instruments. A few of the band members, including myself, we come from marching band in high school, we were members when we grew up. And we wanted to get back to that and get more technical with it. The music is a little more complex than the last album—it’s a lot more complex than the last album, actually. But somehow I found it poppier and more catchy than the last album. Musically it’s so much more interesting and fun for us to play.

What brought about the change?
Uh well, we’ve been touring—our last album was Sunshine in a Shot Glass—and we’ve been touring and selling that album for three years. So it just felt like a natural progression to change things up. We didn’t want to put out an album of just more of the same stuff. It’s just a natural progression of being an artist and growing. It just felt natural to mix things up and challenge ourselves. I mean, why the hell not? Why not incorporate as many instruments as we can and make as interesting an album as we can that’s fun? On our last album we didn’t experiment as all. It was just straight up country punk. Bottom line to all of it, is good songwriting and building the instruments around that. If it flows well, it makes life easy.

What are you most excited about with this album?
I’m most excited to see how our fans respond to the new direction that the band is in. I’m excited, because I’m just really, really happy with the new album. We got to work with Erwin Musper at the Bamboo Room here in town. I’m really happy with it and I hope our fans are happy with it. I’m really excited because we’re going to be on the road for a year, so we’re going to be touring a lot, and I always love that.