Interview: Stuart McLamb (Fancy Gap)

Photo by Jordan Brannock

A stalwart of the Raleigh, North Carolina indie rock scene for over a decade, The Love Language’s Stuart McLamb – with a number of critically-acclaimed releases under his belt – found an unexpected muse in songwriter Charles Crossingham when exploring venues to rent for live show rehearsals. The two had met years prior and casually kept in touch but, as McLamb tells me, the relationship blossomed when Crossingham offered a rehearsal venue in exchange for getting to produce what he thought, at the time, would be new Love Language material.

When the pandemic made everyone’s world much smaller, McLamb and Crossingham sequestered themselves in Crossingham’s cabin Fancy Gap, Virginia where they listened somewhat exclusively to ‘90 alternative rock and 98.1 WBRF, a classic country radio station out of Galax, Virginia while writing the songs that make up Fancy Gap’s self-titled debut.

McLamb recently pulled into a parking lot to hop on a video conference call to discuss the genesis of Fancy Gap, the songwriting approach, and the future of both this burgeoning relationship with Crossingham and the band the two have formed.

Did you consider putting this out as a Love Language album and titling it something like The Fancy Gap Sessions?

STUART: This absolutely started as a Love Language record. The whole catalyst and genesis of it was me wanting to work with Charles who was kind of a first-time producer. I think that’s why a lot of people ask, “What is this and who is Charles?” Sometimes it’s not about, “I wish I could work with this guy or that guys.” Sometimes the people are right in front of you and are the people that are going to inspire the art. Charles would agree. I’m not saying he’s some master knob turner kind of producer, but his vision and his commitment was just so above and beyond.

I met him in passing in Raleigh, North Carolina going on 10 years ago. He mentioned that he did some recording and that he really loved my music and that he’d like to record some time. At the time, maybe I was a little hipster cool or something, but, also I didn’t really know him. We didn’t have many mutual friends. Perhaps we could have started this relationship earlier. He just stayed on me and DMed me over the years, just checking in. He’s a real nice guy. I lived in L.A. for four years and I was back visiting North Carolina around the holidays. I still had Love Language, my North Carolina band, and we needed a rehearsal space for a show that we were playing in December of 2019. I posted on Facebook looking for one and Charles offered a rehearsal space. He was like, “The catch is, we’ve got to record one of your songs that I’ve been wanting to do.” That began our bond.

We had such a good time tracking and talking about music. At the time, I wanted to make this very Tonight’s the Night *Neil Young*-like sloppy minimal record. This didn’t turn out like that at all, but I was like, “This might be perfect. We’ll record at your house and we can just track it.” After that, I was like, “Let’s do the next Love Language record together. I’m going to fly back in March and let’s do the whole thing in a month.” That’s not the record we made, but that was the initial idea.

COVID came in around that time. I was keeping an eye on COVID but I moved back to North Carolina. My decision to move was really based on these conversations with Charles when I was in L.A. I was already kind of on the fence and considering coming back home, but that really sealed the deal for me. I moved back in March of 2020 and COVID hit right when that happened. That’s really what forced me and Charles into this relationship. There was another guy that was going to be involved as the engineer for the record we were going to make. He had a kid coming on the way and he kind of fell out of the picture. Me and Charles’ thing is that we keep pushing against all odds.

We both learned a lot of mixing and engineering on our own throughout the process. We became pandemic buddies. The album did start as a Love Language record. Charles was so hands off at first as a producer. I worked with BJ Burton, he’s a super talented guy, but this type of production, which I think is really getting through the process, was different. I was ready to trust that.

Charles was completely hands-off for the first few months and was like “Demo on your own and show me ideas.” He’d be real and he would say things like “I don’t know about this” and “This one has promise.” Sometimes I would agree with him, sometimes I wouldn’t, but it was an interesting process and then somewhere along the way, I think the first song we wrote together was “Sweet Time,” and it took me a long time to warm up to it because it was so different. It came out of nowhere really fast. It was written in a day. That was the first song we ever wrote and it’s just kind of a massive song.

Charles and I have this weird chemistry where we are creative together. I think collaborations are like that. It started to slowly morph into these songs. The ones we were excited about were the ones that we were collaborating on.

I had a lot of thoughts about everything. I tried to be as honest as I could. I wonder if it was ego? I had to remember for a moment that this wasn’t Love Language. That’s what I know, but I also knew it felt like something new because of the collaborative spirit. You go through a little bump before you’re like, “Oh, this is nice.” It wasn’t like we were arguing or anything. It was more like a mental bump because it was kind of scary. I was like, “I’m 40. Is this crazy to start a new thing? Is playing music in general just crazy at this age?” Once we did it, the band name was right there the whole time. Fancy Gap is the place where we were recording and it all kind of clicked. It’s great to have a partner in crime. There’s power in duos.

You mentioned that you were partners in crime. At any point did it ever feel like a teacher/student relationship since you had more experience? Did it feel like you were brothers from another mother?

Stuart: I think we’re brothers from another mother. We are definitely best friends. We’ve also fought like the Gallagher brothers. In a way, that strengthened the friendship. We trust each other’s different talents. I have more computer knowledge, like using Logic, knowing how to record but sometimes I’ll miss the forest for the trees. Charles is really good at calling BS. He has a simple approach to music that’s really important.

I was thinking about this while making the record. Sometimes people consider themselves hip or they have this highbrow thing with art. There’s this other side of it. I don’t want to dilute my music to be pleasing to the masses but there’s an element where I want to impress my little cousin the same way a classic oldie by someone like Van Morrison impresses me. When your song comes on, the goal is to hold it up to those songs. You look at my little cousin as someone that doesn’t have a lot of opinions or taste in music, but she’s definitely gonna hear a song that isn’t up to that pop standard and be like, “Eh.” Charles has got a little bit of that where he’s got a simplistic pop standard that’s really powerful.

A friend of mine, Alex Dezen (The Damnwells), told me he’s working with younger artists and that the advice he gives them all is that if they want a lasting career, they should be making hamburgers, not steak. You’ll sell way more hamburgers than steak. People want those timeless pop songs that are easy to consume. I also know the Blind Melon guys and they have one of those timeless songs (“No Rain”) that will outlast my time here on earth.

STUART: That’s the goal. I think that’s me and Charles’ common north star. I don’t want to be all arrogant and say we did it, but the goal was to try to write these classic songs. It’s not even like it’s motivated by money to sell out, there’s a real artistry in the classic canon of songs. That’s always been the goal with my songs to an extent but I would detour because I love everything. I love Pavement as much as I love The Four Tops. I’m like a lot of people, just a big music lover.

You said cheeseburger not steaks. That’s so funny you said that. Charles started “40,000 Miles” with a riff. I wrote “Old Ways” with Charles. Then there’s the “Sweet Time” piano riff. Charles would call all those “cheeseburgers.” He’d be like, “I’ve got a new cheeseburger for you.” He comes up with these hooks. He’s written some beautiful songs on his own. I’m trying to get him more out of his shell on the next record because the stuff he writes is really great. He’ll always like, “I got a new cheeseburger” and then it’ll lead to a great song.

I feel like if you sold some of those songs to bigger, already well-established artists, they would be huge hits. A song like “Little Heart Racer,” if an artist like Blake Shelton or Kenny Chesney covered it, it would be a huge Country hit.

STUART: I know. We’ve thought about that. I’ve had some people be like, “Y’all need to just sell these songs.” Maybe that’s the next step. We’re just trying to find joy in music. There’s so many odds against you that if you’re not getting joy out of it, what’s the point? I think I’d be equally happy just writing songs and making some money off them as I would playing them in a bar for whoever. We hope that this album gets some kind of traction or at least we get our foot in the door of songwriting like that.

My first listen to the album was while I was driving through a rural part of Ohio, surrounded by farms, just 30 minutes outside of the city. The first half of the record was the ideal soundtrack for that drive.

STUART: That’s a perfect scenario.

The second side isn’t as rural sounding. Were you thinking about the listening experience when sequencing the album?

STUART: There was a sequence that we considered that had “40,000 Miles” starting side B. And I think there was one version of the sequence that we were really close to using where “Old Ways” was going to open the record. They all had their different merits. I feel like it was my decision, and Charles agreed, to start with “How to Dance.” I remember when I made the first Love Language record, I was so adamant with Matt Brown at Bladen County Records about how I wanted to open the record. He said, “You’re crazy to start this with ‘Two Rabbits.’” He’s like, “Start it with Lalita.” I wonder if I would have gone back, if it would have been a lot more successful if we had done that? It could have been.

There was a little bit of that thought of front loading this album but not in a way that I felt it sacrificed the artistic integrity. There’s a lot of heavy emotional themes in the record. That’s a lot of the way I write. I really do want to try to write more happy songs now that I’m happily married. I really want to try to push myself to do that. But I always sort of lean into the grimmer side.

“How to Dance” was a little more peppy and I just thought with the band name, Fancy Gap, I wanted the face of the record to be a little more lighthearted.

So you opened with a cheeseburger, something that will appeal to the masses.

STUART: Yeah, a cheeseburger. I definitely obsessed over the sequencing.

I’m always guided by emotions and not a lot of logical thoughts in my songwriting. I wasn’t trying to make it a concept album or find some arc. It was just more, “Does this vibe fit with the songs in this order?”

Do you write in the moment, about what’s going on in your life today? Do you pull from old ideas and thoughts? Are you creating a world that you don’t necessarily live in, but that is in your head?

STUART: It’s a combination of it all. One of my favorite songwriters is Paul Simon, he’s so great. What are his songs about? They’re about everything all at once. He brings all these things to mind, like a divorce and a road trip with his kid, but all these more abstract metaphors. I enjoy stuff like that a lot more than just your standard ballad. I really respect the craft that goes into a ballad in a really cohesive song, but I’ve always struggled to write those.

So my songs will be about multiple things. It’s about how much you love someone and how much you’ve got to move on for yourself. They’re kind of intertwined in a lot of my songwriting. There are songs about other people. I can know about a friend going through a problem and I can channel it into a song. It’s not always current stuff, sometimes it’s based on old memories.

I think a lot of people went through some tough times during the pandemic with vices like drinking or overeating and I did as well. When I wrote “Old Ways,” I was trying to quit smoking and Charles was quitting caffeine, which was crazy. He successfully quit. There’s a line in that song, “You could relapse or never refrain / is it worth losing all the weight?” In this case, weight is a metaphor for heaviness.

Do you try to keep the lyrics ambiguous enough so that your friends and family don’t know that you’re writing about them or are they listening and thinking, “This song is definitely about me”?

STUART: I had to tell my wife, Kate, that I channel the bad stuff and really blow it up in my lyrics. I didn’t want her to think we were on the rocks. She understands. She’s like, “It’s all good.” I’ve told some friends when they’ve inspired a line here and there. I don’t necessarily try to keep it a secret. My songs are weird. I’m probably not alone here, but they’re weirdly prophetic where I don’t know what they’re about and then they’ll be right on the nose with something in my life or with someone else and they’ll say, “This is eerily exactly my situation now.” My lyrics are just vague enough that they’re universal, I guess.

When you were writing and recording the record, you were listening to a lot of ’90s rock radio and a lot of Country music. Were there things that you heard in those songs that you tried to incorporate into your own music?

STUART: I could trace back some stuff. I remember when I started to write “How to Dance,” and that happened really quickly, I think it was titled “Wilco”. I was listening to Summerteeth a lot. I’m always listening to music, but I very rarely am like, “I’m going to write a song that is inspired by the one I just heard.” I probably should do it more. You hear Keith Richards and some of the greats talk about it. “I sat down and thought ‘I want to rewrite this song that sounds like Howlin’ Wolf.”“ I’m always scared to feel like I am copying a melody. That’s one of my weird challenges. I can hear a song, someone else’s song, and in roughly five seconds, I can tell the exact melody that they copped from another song. It’s a weird talent I have, but I’m pretty quick with it. I’m always surprised that I can make that connection. But I’m really hard on myself making sure I’m not ripping something off. Maybe I need to loosen that up a little bit.

Rich Ivey is a friend of mine, he was in a great punk band from Raleigh called Whatever Brains. They were really noisy. It was really arty punk, it was really amazing. He would tell me, “This song was me ripping off the structure of a Leonard Cohen song” or something that you wouldn’t relate to their songs. He wrote a lot like that. When I started singing “How to Dance,” I was tapping into Sheryl Crow. I’m a big Sheryl Crow fan, at least her first three albums. It was more a stylistic plagiarism than direct intellectual property.

When you were writing “Strawberry Moon,” were you thinking, “I want this to have the vibe of …”?

STUART: “Strawberry Moon” started a really long time ago and I was really on the fence with the piano hook. It was almost a synthier-sounding War on Drugs kind of thing. Adam (from War of Drugs) does those two or three chord movements really well. “Strawberry Moon” started like that. That’s one of my favorite songs I’ve written and it’s so funny, I threw it away. I just wasn’t into it. Over time, I didn’t change anything, I never edited any of the lyrics. I had all these demos and one was me practicing that song so I could play it live as part of an acoustic set. I didn’t think much of it but I just played this iPhone recording of me playing it stripped-down, and Charles was like “What’s this?” In my head, I was hearing it as a pop song but Charles helped steer it into a Fleetwood Mac “Dreams” type of song. I think every songwriter tries to write their own version of “Dreams” and that’s definitely what this is. It’s just the simplicity of a simple chord progression that doesn’t really change and making the melody interesting the whole time.

That song did go through a lot of demoing before we landed on what became the final version. It’s interesting that I bring up demos because that’s really what the album is. This is a pandemic record that we worked really hard to make not sound like we made a pandemic record with a bunch of people in a room. I’m showing our magic trick here a bit but the typical recordings would be me, or Charles and I together, building these sessions in Logic with a placeholder drummer, not a real drummer, and then building the track around that. Then we tracked the real drums in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Charles had a connection there, Justin Holder, he’s the house session drummer at Fame. Through Justin, we met Craig Alvin, who did an amazing job mixing the record and engineering the drums. He really brought it all to life, made it all cohesive.

The record is a combination of these intimate sessions we wrote in a cabin and the work we did in studios. It was not fancy. This record will show people that you can do a lot with a little. After getting the drums on the recordings, we’d send the tracks to Rami Jaffee, someone Charles had met on his own, who would add B3 organ. A lot of the people who played on the album came from organic relationships or friendships that we had. Jon Graboff, an amazing pedal steel player, one of the best, if not the best, added his texture and color to the songs. Once that all came together, it just felt alive.

Do you feel like you owe it to the audience to replace the album live? Will you bring a pedal steel guitar player with you on tour? A Hammond organ player? Or, because the songs were written simply and the color was added later, can it be played live the way it was written?

STUART: The current live band now is amazing. This is the most fun I’ve ever had playing with a group of people. We don’t have a pedal steel player. I would like to add that eventually, but it might be too much because we’ve got two electrics and an acoustic on stage. We’ll have to see. It would be great. Steve Howell, who plays lead guitar in the live band, does a great job of using a volume pedal and swells to make it sound like a pedal steel. And then we’ve got Mark Simonsen who plays organ. We’re hauling an actual Wurlitzer electric piano to all of the live shows, which is crazy but it sounds great.

After obsessing over this record – the mixing, the mastering – I knew the entire mechanics of this thing, too much. I was a little too obsessed with that in the initial rehearsals and I was getting frustrated with the band where I’d say, “Play it like this.” I’ve always kind of done that with Love Language and I think there’s some wisdom I’ve learned because of that. Sometimes the best results come when you’re being collaborative with music, letting it breathe a little bit, letting everyone bring their own personality into it.

I love the record, obviously, but now I’m most excited with the live shows and how the band is having this dialogue. We don’t jam like Goose or Phish, but we are jamming a little bit on some of the songs. We’re extending some sections like when we play “Whispering Winds.” That’s turned into a seven-minute song and we really let go in that one, it gets really cool at the end when Steve gets a little Allman Brothers kind of thing going on.

To answer your question, I’m all about the songs taking on a life of their own when they’re played live.

You mentioned that “Sweet Time” was the first song you and Charles wrote. It’s really a great closer to the album. Many albums ride off into the sunset at the end. On an album full of great songs, the closer might be my favorite. How did that end up as the final song rather than earlier in the sequence?

STUART: The album was going to end with “Diamond Cutter.” We made this adjustment at the last minute before it went off to be mastered. It was going to close with “Sweet Time” and then “Diamond Cutter.” When we were in rehearsals, there was just something about the way it all flowed. Our live set was played in the sequence of the album until we decided to end with “Sweet Time.” That’s when we thought that maybe “Sweet Time” needed to end the album too so we switched it.

You’ve been in bands for a while now. With Fancy Gap, did you rely on your past to guide the direction or did you think of your partnership with Charles as something brand new and not go in with any limitations?

STUART: it’s a 50/50 partnership that we agreed on, which I think is good. Charles was a big fan of my music so he’s not trying to delete things from my past, I think he’s trying to amplify that quality. It’s not like Charles is referring to this as “the new thing” but we’ve realized that it doesn’t have to compete with Love Language. Sometimes it’s good to just start fresh. And I do want to do another Love Language record but I can tell that my inspiration right now has been reignited by doing something new with someone else.

Is Fancy Gap like a fling that you’ll eventually tire of and go back to full time with Love Language or do you have room in your life for both?

STUART: I would love to do two bands, if it was manageable. I go with my gut. We’re definitely already starting to talk about the next Fancy Gap record.

I’m not making millions of dollars off music – I do some web development, I DJ weddings, I mix music for other artists – and there’s only so many hours in the day. It takes a long time to make a record so I don’t feel like I have enough bandwidth to start on two records at once. I think I have to follow the muse and the songs that have been coming out feel like Fancy Gap songs. Charles and I have a lot of ideas. So many songs have already come out of this partnership. I’d say we probably have started 50 songs. They’re not all finished, some need lyrics and arrangements, but they are really strong ideas.

You’ve got to turn everything off, at least I do, to write. I need to go away for a two-week period and unplug from everything other than writing and that’s hard to do especially in this modern day. but that’s what it takes to get it done. But I would say that with Love Language, I knew when I started that it was going to be a lifelong project and Charles has said, “I absolutely don’t want you to not do Love Language.” I think I’ll know when it’s time for a new Love Language record.