About
Slow Parade is the musical messenger of songwriter Matthew Pendrick. Based in the fertile landscape of Atlanta, Georgia, Slow Parade distills a familiar recipe of Roots, Blues and Country into a potent elixir once known as Rock & Roll. Slow Parade's 3rd LP Maybe You'll Come Around Again follows closely on the heels of 2020's psychedelia soaked ‘Hi-Fi LowLife’ but pares it all down to its barest essentials: a band, a room, and a keen eye for the song.
Born and raised in Decatur, Georgia, Slow Parade leader Matthew Pendrick came up during a creative heyday in one of the South’s small town artistic meccas. As a kid, Pendrick honed his musical chops while busking under the tutelage of notorious street musician ‘Guitar Red’. Soaking up the city’s deep musical history while digging down through the roots, Pendrick has shared the stage with many of the South’s musical torch bearers as well as contemporaries as diverse as Daniel Romano, CW Stoneking , Anderson East, and Israel Nash . After a decade and half spent touring, writing, and recording , often as a sideman for some of the souths most promising talent , Slow Parade is eager to step out on his own and kick transmission in high gear.
It’s latest LP, 'Maybe You'll Come Around Again' finds Slow Parade digging new holes in old dirt, following in the footsteps of their folksy forefathers down the path that lies in service of the song. With echoes of Harvest-era Neil Young or the Band's more clear eyed moments at Big Pink, the album strips back the shiny veneer of digital technology in search of something less. These songs exist in the here and the now: a reality as hazy as a Sunday morning hangover. Pendrick’s characters are low on gas, incurious of redemption, and probably high on something. They slouch towards the lucidity lurking under every pounding headache from a good time Saturday night. "Not much left sacred nor profane," Pendrick yawps out in the frenzied final stanza of “Junker In the Fast Lane” a rowdy anthem to a headstrong jalopy. The song's swampy New Orleans groove lurches like a raucous junkyard jam between Allen Toussaint and ZZ Top.
The bulk of the Maybe You'll Come Around Again was recorded over the course of 3 days at Standard Electric Recording Co. in Scottdale, GA,the former home of the Greater Zion Full Baptist Church. The goal was simple: to capture the songs as naturally as possible, with everyone playing together in one room. “Quick Buck” unfurls at a lazier pace on par with the ambitions of its scrappy narrator. Chiming flange soaked guitars punctuate a relaxed groove chill enough to cool JJ Cale's Lone Star. The tune was written with Pendrick's oldest musical partner in crime, David Kirslis (Cicada Rhythm), after a trip down the road to a scrapyard to do some recycling. "It takes me back some pretty good times we had in our young life, bumming around, catching trains to who knows where, and not having much to worry about other than eventually finding a way home or scrounging some beer money."
Elsewhere on “Maybe You'll Come Around,” Slow Parade strikes a defiant chord in the face of steep odds and a half empty tank. On “Last Call For the Band,” a gut punching power ballad of the hardscrabble touring musician that echoes the rowdier moments of Jason Isbell, harmonized guitars weave across a beer soaked dance floor and erupt into flames under the harsh fluorescent light of closing time. “This Old Van” is a heartfelt ode to the horse the band rode in on. As the song builds from a somber breakdown, steel guitars ring out like the long drip of Jesus' happy tears while a honky tonk piano saunters along in a locked two step dance. Their wheels may be feeble, the miles may be long, but they're bound for somewhere, "not in style, but with ragged grace."
“Napping on the Job” and the lush album closer “Lovely Moon” smooth out the rougher edges of the new LP, trading twang for a touch of blissful atmospherics. "I've been taking my time with a dream I can't mend," Pendrick muses wistfully as the specters of waking life hover above like rain-soaked clouds. As the melody swirls and shimmers around the ears in a hallucinatory trance of lush pedal steel and electric piano, Slow Parade beckons us to surrender to the dream. If only for a few stolen winks, if only for one last drink, if only for a few more miles. Maybe it doesn't have to be so complicated. Maybe You'll Come Around Again.