“Cassandra“
from the album Dialog
2008
iTunes
Paper Rival might be one of the Nashville rock scene’s most commercially promising acts — even if a lot of folks in their hometown have yet to hear (or hear of) the band. But before the scenesters start grumbling, consider that the band, formerly known as Keating, didn’t exactly land a record deal overnight. The musicians just haven’t been at home that much.
Not long after they got together, they recorded an EP, got a booking agent and, in early 2006, piled into a van and hit the road for an epic six-month stretch, landing opening slots for big-name bands including 30 Seconds to Mars.
Two years and change later, they’re touring behind their full-length debut Dialog (released earlier this month via Photo Finish Records, a division of Atlantic).
“We maybe did four local shows (before our first tour), one of those being Chattanooga,” front man Jacob Rolleston says. “We love Nashville, but it’s a rather pretentious city musically, and deservedly so. People who live in Nashville and play music are better than anywhere else in the world. So trying to play music in Nashville, for it to be enjoyable is kind of hard sometimes. It’s not like we’re trying to disown our hometown. We just want to go to other places.”
On that 2006 tour, the then-Keating played its earliest tunes — punchy emo/punk numbers that were noticeably sophisticated but easily palatable for an all-ages crowd. By the end of the six-month run, the musicians had made scores of fans, but it was all in a musical scene that Rolleston, who was closing in on 25, felt they had outgrown.
“We knew we wanted to change,” he says. “We’re all getting older, and we wanted to really throw out our influences and add in everything that we could.”
Around that same time, the band was looking into getting its name trademarked and discovered a Canadian band already held the rights. After receiving a stern letter, the band decided to change its name to Paper Rival (a reference to the other Keating).
The name change provided an opportunity to switch gears, and the band began venturing into slower, subtler and more organic territory. Rolleston, a Tennessee native, says much of the new sound came from exploring the players’ musical upbringing: equal parts ’90s alternative and the work of rootsy rockers such as Jackson Browne, Van Morrison, and Creedence Clearwater Revival — music heard when “our moms had to drive us to baseball practice.”
They pull off the mix remarkably well on Dialog. Folky ballad “Cassandra” casually cribs the melody of The Shins‘ “One by One All Day” for its chorus, augmenting its hook with Southern flair: fiddle passages and loose-but-limber strums.
The group maintains a modern, slightly emo edge in its songwriting, as Rolleston finds himself drawn to confessional lyrical fare, but he keeps drama to a minimum.
“For me, writing songs that are extremely personal, I don’t know why, but it’s a lot easier than writing songs that try to generalize the subject,” he says.
That approach comes to a head on “Bluebird,” easily the track with the most emotional heft. It’s about Rolleston’s best friend from high school, who murdered his parents and is serving life in prison.
“That was probably the toughest song lyrically,” Rolleston says. “Not because it was an emotional experience, but because I didn’t want to just beat it into the ground that my friend made this terrible mistake. I still love my friend and I think about him every day. So now it’s like I have a song that I’ve written about him, and I feel like if our record is successful, that’s going to be the way that people will see this person.”
Making the best out of bad experiences seems to be a pervading theme of Paper Rival’s career. The name change — an action that can let all of the air out of a young band — allowed Paper Rival to head on a different track, perhaps the one they should have been on all along.
“As soon as we found out we had to change our name,” Rolleston recalls, “we were like, ‘OK, well, now we can really experiment — and have fun.'”