Metro Pulse/Music/Evinrudes

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Who:
The Evinrudes

When:
Thursday, April 27 at 8 p.m.

Where:
Borders Books and Music

Admission is free.

The Evinrudes let the music be the guide

by Chris Neal

Sherry Cothran doesn't have to be prompted to describe her excitement at the string of intimate, acoustic-based shows she and Brian Reed, her partner in the Evinrudes, have been playing lately. The ebullience in her voice fairly crackles across the telephone line from her home in Nashville.

"I really enjoy it, because I like to see people's faces and see people nodding and getting into it," she says. "I get off on that, I get off on the pure entertainment of it. Pure entertainment is the exchange between the audience and performers. It's a wonderful exchange, it's an appreciation that turns the heart more than a club (show), which is more of an excitement thing. It's like the opposite side of playing in a club."

While the Evinrudes have been filling those clubs as a rocking electric combo since their formation five years ago, the last several months have seen Cothran and Reed take to the road to play smaller, calmer gigs like the one scheduled for 8 p.m. tonight at Borders in Knoxville. "It just has this added element I don't think we would have had with the band," she says. "It's a little bit different. It's more of a song kind of vibe."

Cothran quickly calculates that she and Reed have played about 50 such shows since last December, accompanied only by a small assortment of drum machines—one for realistic drum sounds, two others for "a burbly kind of hip-hop sound." They were led to this setting, she says, by the songs being composed for the embryonic new Evinrudes album. "We were writing a lot of songs we felt would go over better in an acoustic environment," she says. "The stuff we were recording had drum machines and hip-hop kind of grooves."

The shows' set list features many of the songs slated to appear on the next Evinrudes album, and Cothran says that seeing audiences' enthusiastic feedback for the new material has been very rewarding. "Of course, our enthusiasm for playing them is great," she says. "With new songs, there's always a renewed enthusiasm for that, because it's got more of me in it."

Cothran estimates that about half the current set consists of new songs, along with several tunes written over the last several years but deemed "not rock 'n' roll enough" for the full-band version of the Evinrudes. In fact, according to Cothran, the stripped-down shows have resurrected some of the earliest songs written for the band upon its formation in Nashville in 1995.

Fueled by Cothran's compelling, melodic voice and Reed's whip-smart songcraft and crisp guitar work, the band attracted attention very quickly in their hometown. Their self-released 1996 debut, Little Red Stars, established a fan base which blossomed with the next year's eponymous EP. That release's leadoff track, "Drive Me Home," became omnipresent on Nashville radio for years and eventually wound up being heard on TV's Party of Five.

The Evinrudes expanded their following nationwide, leading to a deal with Mercury Records in spring of 1998. Shortly after the release that August of The Evinrudes, though, the band members found themselves swallowed up by the billion-dollar merger of Mercury's parent company with the Seagram's conglomerate; the band was unceremoniously dropped, along with hundreds of other bands on affiliated labels. (The band managed to buy back the rights to their Mercury album, and have been selling it themselves.)

In the intervening time, the Evinrudes have played a lot of shows, and worked intermittently on a new album in their home studio—where, Cothran enthuses, "you can work at your own pace, in your pajamas." She says the band felt somewhat artistically constrained by Mercury, and is glad to be following its own muse again. "I think when you're on your own and not tied to a financial organization, you're very free to do what sounds good to you," she says.

And while the financial pressure is back on in the absence of major-label money, Cothran sees the bright side. "When your back's against the wall, you come up with your most innovative stuff," she says. "Going through the major-label mill, there's a lot of excitement and glamour and limos, but on the other end of it, it's like, 'Wow, what happened?'"

While work on the new album has been moving forward, "on and off," for about a year now, eager fans may still have a wait ahead of them. "It's coming kind of slow, actually," Cothran says, admitting she has "no idea" when it will be released, or on what label. Work has been delayed over the last couple of months, she reports, because Reed has been busy working on music for a possible beer commercial—for which Cothran may provide vocals. "That'll be interesting," she muses.

Cothran is also at work on her first solo album, recording for the first time without Reed behind the board as producer. "It's the wave of the future for me," she says. "It's very experimental and very exciting." She hopes to have a label lined up for the album within six months, for hopeful release within a year.

"With all these different things going on," says Cothran, "it makes you think, 'Where should I be putting my energies?' I'll be looking to where the music is leading me."