OPEN & DOWNLOAD

OPEN & DOWNLOAD

Over the past decade, Matt Ross-Spang has emerged as one of the premiere record producers and engineers working today across country, folk, rock and roll, and R&B. Known for a philosophy of putting artists first and for a skillset that’s enabled him to capture a vintage warmth and energy without ever sounding stuffy or dated, Ross-Spang has a discography that encompasses production, engineering and mixing for legends, perennial critical favorites and some of his own generation’s most exciting musicmakers: Elvis Presley, Lou Reed, Al Green, John Prine, Jason Isbell, Mountain Goats, Cut Worms, Drive-By Truckers, Margo Price, Lucero, Iron & Wine, St. Paul and the Broken Bones. He has won two Grammy Awards, for engineering Isbell’s 2015 album Something More than Free and again for its follow-up, 2017’s The Nashville Sound. 

When Ross-Spang came into the chance to build his own studio, Southern Grooves, in Memphis’s Crosstown Concourse, he embarked on a sort of tightrope walk. He’d recorded in some of America’s great music towns — Memphis, Muscle Shoals, Nashville — and worked in many of its iconic studios — Sun, Sam Phillips, Fame, RCA. He’d studied the work of heroes like Rick Hall, Chips Moman and Willie Mitchell. But if he was going to open his own place, it couldn’t just feel like a stew of influences — it had to feel like him. 

A lesser craftsperson could easily lose balance and plunge into a sticky pit of nostalgia. But Ross-Spang is well-practiced in this regard — put on a record he’s worked on and you’ll probably encounter a sound that harnesses the live-in-a-room warmth of classic country and rock and roll, planting it in the present day rather than mimicking what it may have sounded like 50 years ago. A keen student of music-making history, he understands that the great studios of the mid-century weren’t about overloading a space with amenities and technology to lure clients, but about making a group of people and their instruments sound the best they could in a given space. 

“If you’ve been to Motown or Sun or Royal or Capitol, you can feel it without even striking a chord,” he says. “You can tell it’s a magical room.” 

So as he embarked on building Southern Grooves, Ross-Spang applied the methods behind that magic, with his own touches. There’s a real-deal echo chamber, and a couple of historic consoles, including the one used to record Big Star at Ardent Studios. In a nod to Sam Phillips, Ross-Spang avoided right-angles and parallel surfaces in the live room. The aesthetic — light and uncluttered, with shades of orange and avocado and lots of wood — reflects his love of mid century-modern design. He obsessed over the details, “the floorboards all the way through the doorknobs.” 

Ross-Spang maintains the credo that has driven his work for years: “You’re never better than the client or the music” — whether the music is Elvis or an Elvis impersonator. This, too, is a driving force behind Southern Grooves; for it to truly reflect Ross-Spang’s ethos, it must foremost be a place where the artist leaves proud of what they’ve done. 

Among the carefully curated pieces that comprise Southern Grooves are a few with especially personal resonance for Ross-Spang: Prine’s office chair; Phillips’ lounger; and a pair of overalls worn and signed by Dan Penn, the Memphis-via-Muscle Shoals singer-songwriter-producer who, as Ross-Spang puts it, “was never super flashy or fancy … he just kind of went to work every day and wrote some amazing songs and made some amazing records.” These totems are markers of where Ross-Spang has been and indications of where he’s going. And it’s clear that Southern Grooves — as much as it honors Ross-Spang’s forebearers, his artist-forward ethos and his city — is more than anything an embodiment of its creator. 

“It totally feels like me,” he says, then adds with a laugh: “It’s better than me.”

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press: jake@luckybirdmedia.com