Elvie Shane. Photo: Nathan Chapman
After first breaking onto the music scene in 2021 with Platinum single “My Boy,” country singer-songwriter Elvie Shane has aimed to share how he sees in the world through storytelling. His sophomore album Damascus released today (April 19), tells a little bit of his story while providing insight into the minds of blue-collar America. With lyrics about struggle, inspiration and everyday life, Shane cultivates an album that can resonate with anyone. Prior to its release, Shane took some time to speak with MusicRow about how Damascus came to be.
The artist penned all thirteen tracks on the record, with “Does Heaven Have A Creek” being a solo-written song.
“I get down to Alabama with Oscar Charles, my producer Luke Preston and Dan Couch, and then Jeremy Spillman and Ryan Tyndell show up,” shares Shane. “The first couple of songs we wrote on that trip were ‘Forgotten Man’ and ‘Baptized.’ There was a very stark contrast between songs. I was like, ‘I know I love both of these songs a lot. There’s something there, but they sound so different. How in the hell do I put them on the same project? I’ve got to have this all on the same project.'”
While trying to figure out how to fit all of the tracks onto the record, Shane plucked some inspiration from steel. “So one day I just started thinking about how Damascus is also a type of steel, and when you take all these different types of steel and you forge them together, they’ll have different carbon values or nickel values. So, all the metals kind of look different once they’ve been through the forging process and are finished out and polished. It creates a very strong type of metal and it’s got all of these designs in it that are unique to each piece.
“And I was like, ‘I’ve got all these songs that are different. ‘Baptized’ is inspired by Mac Miller, ‘Forgotten Man’ is like [Bruce] Springsteen and The Who and ‘Chicken Shit’ is The White Stripes.’ And I’m listening to all this different stuff at that time as well. I was like, ‘Well, maybe I’ll just make those my types of steel, put it all in the forge together and try to create a Damascus knife out of it.’
The album begins with “Outside Dog,” written by Shane, Charles and Jonathan Sherwood. “I started the record with ‘Outside Dog’ because it was a very ego-driven song. I was really pissed off, and I had a couple of meetings where initially I was told that we don’t need to do this. We need to look for other songs, etc. But I believed in this stuff, and I was really frustrated. While on a plane ride home, I was listening to this track that Oscar had built. I said to myself, ‘You know what? I’m just going to let the ego out,’ because as bad as ego can be, in many cases, it can also be the voice in the back of your head that’s like, ‘Hey, buddy, we got this. You know we can do this.'”
Regarding the different themes among the tracks, Shane notes, “There are things like working class struggle, which tends to be what I’m most interested because I come from that. I know those people, I know those stories. So that’s what I wanted to focus on as the bigger picture. But within all of that, you’ve got addiction. I’ve got quite a few friends from the past that are either in it, have been in it or not with us anymore. Also, there’s prison reform. “215634” is an autobiographical story of my oldest childhood friend. He’s in prison right now for shooting a man and killing him in self-defense. But he was a felon, so he couldn’t claim self-defense. I felt that was an important story to tell.”
When reflecting on his writing process, he points out that the closing track, “Does Heaven Have A Creek,” was the easiest to write. “I was sitting outside of my camper in Kentucky at the lake one day. It was a fall day and it was so beautiful outside. It felt great, and I was reminded of a day when I was a kid. My favorite person in the entire world, my great grandmother, was walking out of church with her big bouffant hairdo. The wind was blowing, there was sunshine, and she just looked over at me and said ‘It is amazing out here today.’ They were such simple words, but it was the way the sunlight was like gleaming off of her hair and face as well as the joy that she had. It’s just stuck with me for all of these years. She’s been gone for over 20 years now, I miss her every day. She taught me my first three chords on guitar, and introduced me to Roger Miller when I was a kid.
“So I’m thinking about my granny and this little swimming hole I used to go when I was a kid, where we would just hop in this creek in our blue jeans, swim and then hike back home through the woods. I just looked up at the sky and said, ‘Granny, does heaven have a creek where I can swim in my old blue jeans?’ I’d also been sitting outside watching videos from Tyler Childers‘ Can I take My Hounds To Heaven? and Brent Cobb‘s And Now Let’s Turn To Page with my daughter, and I was just immersed in spiritual, gospel music that day. So, while driving into Nashville from Kentucky to the studio to do some pre-production that afternoon, I wrote that song.”
As for the road, there’s a few songs off the project that Shane already loves performing for fans. “It’s been a lot of fun performing. We’re getting standing ovations for ‘Baptized,’ ‘Forgotten Man’ and ‘Does Heaven Have A Creek,’ in the middle of the show now. It’s so cool, and I love performing “Does Heaven Have A Creek” and “Outside Dog.”
“‘Outside Dog'” was a weird one to me because I didn’t know how people were going to respond. We played that song before we ever recorded it because I just wanted to test it out on the crowd. We were performing at a motorcycle rally and [tested it out] there. After the set, this girl walks up to me in tears and said, ‘My dad’s Black, my mom is Jewish. I grew up in central Alabama and I never felt like I had a song until I heard ‘Outside Dog.'” That was enough for me to say, ‘Okay, if it touches this person, then it could possibly touch many others.’ So it’s been cool to play that one and see the response, especially with me being on the fence about it topic wise and stylistically.”
When asking Shane what he hopes listeners will get from the album, he says he hopes people can find their own stories in these tracks. “After I’ve finished [the album], put it all together and listened to it down in sequence, I just saw a person going through it.” Shane continues, “I also want people to know that I don’t take myself too seriously, and wanted to give everybody a break from all of the heavy thinking, struggle and drive that’s in ‘Winning Horse.’ I see [Damascus] as the story of a guy that was lost in the beginning and finds his way back to God in the end in some way, form or fashion.”
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