It’s a straight shot up I-65 from Louisville to Chicago, through nearly three hundred miles of worn-out gas stations, dilapidated motels, factory towns, and wind turbines. It’s a drive Ryan Davis has made many times, and it’s a trail that’s been paved by many Louisville artists before him. There’s Catherine Irwin, one half of the seminal alt-country band Freakwater, who moved north and worked with Thrill Jockey. There’s Will Oldham, who’s been at Drag City for three decades now. And there’s Slint, who recorded with Steve Albini and released records on Touch and Go. “​​I think there was this relationship between the two cities that was fruitful for a long time,” Davis tells me in the greenroom before his sold-out Chicago show. “And it still is.”

After playing a hometown gig near Louisville, Davis pointed his tour van up the highway and drove five hours to the Windy City, which he calls his “home away from home.” He’s playing at the Hideout, a wood-paneled house adorned with a decaying Old Style sign. Nursing a PBR, he’s breaking down the distinction between Kentucky, where he grew up, and Illinois, where he went to college.

To him, Louisville is a place that’s bisected into two separate parts. It’s a city that feels neither Southern nor Midwestern; instead, it’s a composite of the two. In addition, the circles he found himself in were at socioeconomic odds with each other. He grew up skateboarding and playing in punk bands, hanging out with people less wealthy than him, but he also attended a small private school, where he felt equally out of place for the inverse reason.

“I kind of split this difference,” he says. “I was one thing to one group of people, and one thing to another.” Looking back on those formative years, the ones he spent with “assholes… kicking around causing trouble,” bled into his songwriting. “Those sort of nefarious characters that end up in my songs… I just learned to observe all ways of being and respect all sorts of ways that people behave on one side of the fence and the other.”

These types of scruffed-up, lovable losers appear all over Davis’s new record, New Threats from the Soul. The album is a home for characters in crestfallen conditions due, more often than not, to heartbreak. But, despite facing existential, godly threats from above, and hauntings from their hellish pasts, they pine for lovers and push on.

On “Monte Carlo / No Limits,” a man is haunted by a former girlfriend, and Davis cleverly pulls the listener along at his whim, offering moments of misdirection. In the first verse, the narrator leaves his two-door coupe in the front yard, hoping a past lover will recognize his car when she passes by. It’s a move of hubris, hoping she sees he’s better-off. In the second verse, the truth comes out. “I didn’t really even mean to go and park the Monte Carlo in the street,” he confesses. “I just left it there when it crashed / Now I’m scared it’s there to last.” 

As the lyrics excavate this mental breakdown, the music follows suit. The song builds slowly in a typical country fashion: acoustic guitar accented by a rollicking drumbeat, Davis’s gruff voice complimented by his partner Jenny Rose. “There have been limits that I have pushed past,” he sings, and then, all at once, the limits of normalcy break away. Feedback echoes, a synth dopplers back and forth, and a pedal steel cries out in pain. The steel is an instrument that Davis has always loved, and one that features prominently on New Threats. “I think it pushes things into this country world that I love being in,” he says. “It’s like this weird emotional cheat code.” 

By the end of the song, the house he parked by is empty and the doorbell doesn’t work anymore. One can imagine the Monte Carlo’s rusted hood, the overgrown grass out front, and the cracked front porch. 

In 2003, Davis made the trek northward to Chicago to study fine art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At that point, he’d never considered music a possibility, save for a few singing stints in high-school punk bands. It wasn’t until junior year of college that he began songwriting. While in Chicago, he worked in the Drag City mailroom and met people in the local scene, but Davis felt the need to come back to Louisville soon after graduation: “I kind of just had this intuition to get back home and start my own path of work,” he tells me.

Returning south, Davis formed a band called State Champion and self-started a label to release his work, Sophomore Lounge. Those early songs penned in his dorm room informed his first release, but soon the project grew to four albums. Those State Champion tracks capture his brand of existential, self-deprecating poetics, shaded by punk and country both. Songs like “There Is A Highlight Reel” meander through death and redemption, in which a narrator imagines burning in hell, watching “the best of your worst.” 

Around the same time, in 2010, Davis founded Cropped Out, a hometown music festival he ran with James Ardery. Across the years, legends in every genre crossed paths: Susan Alcorn on the same day as Bitchin Bajas; Träd, Gräs & Stenar next to Michael Hurley; Lil B next to R. Stevie Moore. In an email, Will Oldham called it “one of the best examples of a ‘music festival’ I have ever witnessed or participated in,” while Catherine Irwin fondly recalls the time she drove Jandek around the festival grounds, before playing bass with him that night. “It was the best day of my life,” she says giddily. 

But slowly, over the course of the last decade, both the band and the festival grew to the point of burnout. “That’s why I stopped doing State Champion,” Davis recalls. “A lot of it’s just feeling where you’re at in life… Like, what actually makes you happy and intrigued?”

After State Champion fizzled out in 2018, songwriting felt like an otherworldly challenge. The pressure of putting out a record under his own name was daunting. For a few years, he didn’t touch songwriting at all, and spent his time drawing and making instrumental tracks instead.

“I think for the early State Champion records, I never even wrote things down, I would just sit with a guitar,” Davis says. Now, his songwriting has evolved. “I have a little bit more of a responsibility — if I bring characters into a song, or certain imagery into a song, I feel the need to get it to a place where it makes sense to leave it.” 

Davis’s lyrics fold together metaphors and references in an additive process. In place of the traditional verse-chorus structure, he adopts a meandering, free-verse form. The listener jumps from one place to another and one idea to the next, yet always lands somewhere familiar. Metaphors weave across songs, and themes reappear across his discography.

New Threats from the Soul is a feat of musical arranging that achieves impressive pound-for-pound lyrical density. The songs stretch out into the ten- and eleven-minute marks, yet never overstay their welcome, twisting and writhing their way through love, loss, and bewilderment. Narrators look pensively back into the past, finding that life has turned unrecognizable. “I’ve been bullied by a parallel time,” Davis croons in the title track, only later to say “it’s a pissing competition / Between the man I am and the guy I was.”

To write this record, Davis hid out at his father’s cabin in South Central Kentucky, where he sifted his way through years of notebooks; words, phrases, and couplets he’d collected, dating back to State Champion. “I bring it all out and fill a couple tables with it, and just figure out where I’m at. I start with getting some chords I like, and then I start picking through the wreckage.”

Along with writing, he also did a healthy amount of staring out of the window. “There are a lot of different birds that hang out in the trees around my house, and even more down where I go to write,” he says. “I’m not sure why I sing about them so often, but I do think they act as a pretty flexible metaphor or symbol for so much of what I ultimately feel is worth singing about: freedom, mobility, beauty, mystery, language, family, chaos.” Those birds, whether “pecking on a W-9” or “willingly endangered” — a parrot, bluebird, warbler, or robin — all weave their ways into his lyrics. At the end of the title track, a sample of birds chirping appears. “It’s all in there and it’s one of the easiest gifts one can receive from the universe.”

Melodically, these songs are hazy permutations of the American canon. They recall every genre blurred into one, taking breakbeats from Chicago footwork, tape loops from the avant garde, and saxophone solos from free jazz — all held together by the inner workings of a honky-tonk bar band. “The more I make music with the current people that I’m with, I’ve learned that the boundaries are sort of pointless,” he says. On “The Simple Joy,” three-piece harmonies between Davis, Will Oldham, and Grace Rogers find themselves next to programmed drum machines; later, a sharp viola line echoes into oblivion, recalling the studio tricks of dub. 

Despite playing with meandering structures and melodies, Davis, at 40, confesses that nothing he did on his latest record feels too far from what he’s been working on for the past two decades. “I really only know how to do one thing,” he explains, “and I can do it in different colors, different shades.”

When Ryan Davis lived here in Chicago, he came to the Hideout often, seeing local legends like Scott Tuma of Souled American and Todd Rittmann of US Maple. One weekend in 2006, he came out for the Touch and Go Block Party, where Seam, Scratch Acid, and Big Black played from the afternoon into the night. 

Tonight, nearly two decades after he moved away, fans similarly spill out of the Hideout’s doors, smoking and chatting under the full-moon light. He’s played here “a bunch of times over the years, with State Champion, Equipment Pointed Ankh, and Tropical Trash,” he tells me, referring to his noisy side-projects. “But playing to a sold-out room,” he says, feels “pretty special.”

After an opening set from local rockers Tobacco City, Davis saunters up to the microphone, Stratocaster strapped to his body. He’s wearing a denim pearl-snap shirt, one he’s drawn all over in Haring-esque magic marker — squiggles, jagged shapes, and lines swirling together. It’s in the same style as his album covers and tour posters, all self-drawn. With the shirt buttoned all the way up and a turquoise bolo hanging from the collar, he looks like an absurdist auctioneer or a bygone lounge singer. “It’s this until I can get a Nudie Suit,” he’ll tell me after the show, taking a break from selling Sophomore Lounge shirts at the merch table.

Even though State Champion fizzled out decades ago, the label endured. At first dedicated to Louisville’s outsider scene, it now releases endearing indie rock from Nashville (Styrofoam Winos), twangy garage-rock from Massachusetts (Animal Piss, It’s Everywhere) and outsider folk from Australia (Ned Collette). Like all the best labels, the roster feels intensely personal, with Davis’s taste at the forefront. “There’s a lot of people doing good work in Louisville, and I think Sophomore Lounge definitely aggregates some of the best stuff,” Louisville songwriter Grace Rogers tells me. “But I feel like it has a more national- and even global-facing scene, who’s really committed and who’s really engaged and who really cares.”

Oldham adds: “He’s putting years of paying attention to the best of possible uses, including creating songs and recruiting some of the more fluent and expressive players, who are also his friends, to bring this music to life.” 

Country, perhaps more so than any other genre, has always captured that throughline between “humor and pathos,” to quote Davis. The humor in his songs reminds me of John Prine, or Jerry Jeff Walker, or Warren Zevon: characters on the edge of breakdown who still have a punchline tucked away somewhere. “It’s the blueprint,” Davis says about his songs. “That’s why you can call it country, even though there’s fucking drum machines.” Nestled within each song are phrases that are equally ingenious, lighthearted, and lofty, as if a one-liner muttered by the regular at the end of the bar. “There’s always one line where you think, Well, anybody could have said that,” Irwin says. “It’s just very natural and very incisive.”

At the Hideout tonight, Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band are a synthesis of Sophomore Lounge’s past, present, and future. The band is made up of frequent collaborators and labelmates who also play full-time in Styrofoam Winos, Equipment Pointed Ankh, and Little Gold. But the Roadhouse Band just stands there now, patiently waiting while Ryan Davis’s lone voice fills the room. Hearing his stark voice is welcome; it mutates from the stiff yell of a punk frontman to an impassioned yelp, or a sly hiss. Then slowly, the band fills in the gaps behind him.

For their final song, Davis sings “Free From The Guillotine,” where the guillotine in question is the toil of humdrum life on tour — of devoting your life to making art, no matter the outcome. “It’s an anthem for the DIY-lifer thing,” the bass player LT tells me. “We’re gonna keep doing it for ourselves, and we’re going to try to chase joy and meaning from that in a really scary, fucked-up world.”