The Quiet Churn: St. Louis Songwriters Keep Filling the Summer Air

The big rooms get the headlines. But underneath the touring calendar, St. Louis runs on something steadier and less glamorous: the constant, unhurried churn of local artists putting new songs into the world. St. Louis Public Radio's monthly roundups of new music from St. Louis artists are the closest thing the scene has to a heartbeat monitor, and this summer's readings show a pulse that refuses to slow down. The exact release dates blur together in the, but the work itself is unmistakable.

Start with Rachel Bouzier, whose R&B single "In My Life" lands with the kind of assurance that suggests a writer who knows exactly what she wants a song to do. R&B has always had a quiet foothold in this city, and Bouzier is one more reason it holds.

Then there is the entry that made every editor in town do a double take. The Opera Bell Band released "Don't Forget the Popcorn," a track from a forthcoming album with the gloriously unhinged title "A Salute to Corn," which was commissioned by the Missouri Botanical Garden. Read that again. A concept album about corn, backed by one of the region's premier botanical institutions. Only in a scene this loose and this fearless does a commission like that even get proposed, let alone finished.

The Hooten Hallers, meanwhile, went reaching into the new-wave canon and pulled out a cover of "Life During Wartime." Handing that Talking Heads nervous-system classic to a band with the Hooten Hallers' grit is the kind of move that either goes wonderfully wrong or wonderfully right, and either way you want to hear it.

Biita Houdei contributes "Life Inside the Hourglass," a title that practically dares you not to sit with it. And 4Deep teamed with Be.Be the Neosoul for "314Deep," a track that wears the area code as a badge, which is about the most St. Louis thing a song can do short of naming a highway. Rounding out the crop, The Maness Brothers earned a feature spot in the coverage, the brotherly roots duo continuing to be a name that keeps surfacing whenever the local conversation turns to who is actually putting in the miles.

Lay these releases side by side and the range is the story. R&B, a corn concept album, a new-wave cover, neo-soul, roots rock. No single sound dominates because no single sound ever has here. St. Louis has always been a crossroads city, and its songwriters write like people who grew up hearing everything at once.

What is easy to miss, watching the churn month after month, is how much discipline it represents. Nobody commissions a corn album by accident. Nobody covers "Life During Wartime" on a whim and gets it out the door. Each of these is a small act of finishing, of taking something from idea to release while holding down whatever else a working musician holds down. Multiply that by a dozen artists a month and you have a scene that produces more than most cities its size have any right to.

The touring acts will keep rolling through the Sovereigns and the Duck Rooms, and they should. But the reason St. Louis stays a music town between those marquee nights is the people who live here and keep hitting publish. The corn album alone should tell you this city's songwriters are not running out of ideas anytime soon.

Sources: St. Louis New Music, July; Power Your June Summer Playlist