As the Flyer was casting about for great bands to play our Best of Memphis 2026 party, to be held at Loflin Yard on Wednesday, September 23rd, from 5:30-8:30 p.m., signing Black Cream up for the proceedings was a no-brainer. That genre-hopping trio has been a mainstay of the local scene in recent years, even selling out their recent show at The Green Room at Crosstown Arts. But then some news crossed our desks that we hadn’t anticipated: Star & Micey are back at it!
This has been welcome news indeed among their many fans, as it’s been quite some time since the band, featuring Josh Cosby, Nick Redmond, Geoff Smith, and Jeremy Stanfill, released new material — their last album came out 10 years ago. In the years leading up to that album, when they were at the height of their local and touring popularity, there was no group that matched their unique Americana-meets-indie-rock, kitchen-sink aesthetic.
Sure, they have played one or two shows a year since then, but now, suddenly, they were releasing single after single. Indeed, as each track rolled out, it became clear that, despite being released in piecemeal fashion, this was a bona fide album, to be called, somewhat mischievously, Greatest Hits. Suddenly, it seemed the group had moved beyond just playing the occasional show. To find out what was really going down, I gave Cosby a call.
Memphis Flyer: Star & Micey are now dropping a series of singles, all with the same cover image. How did this new “album” come about? Are they new recordings?
Josh Cosby: The new releases are actually demos we originally made to pitch to people, looking for a producer at the time. Like, ‘Hey, do you want to work with us?’ This was a long time ago, but they ended up just being so much fun because we didn’t care. We were in the practice space. We were having fun. And it was kind of the first time we weren’t under a microscope, with producers watching us. We weren’t on Ardent [Studio’s] time, and that vibe is in the recordings.
Jeremy was like, ‘Man, you know, we all see each other at the coffee shop. We never broke up as a band. Let’s let people have these.’ Especially our fans that have known these songs for a long time through our live shows in the past. A lot of them are songs we would always play at shows, but people never had a way to listen to them other than live. And so Jeremy’s request got the okay. We all said, ‘You know what, you’re right, Jeremy.’ Like, why not?
That practice space, behind what’s now Rockhouse Live, has played an important role in a lot of bands’ development.
Yes! We called it Superman Ranch, and we had it for, like, five to seven years. I think Andrew McCalla has it now. And that was our practice space, and we would all just end up gathering there. But we rarely ever practiced there. We kind of just hung out, and friends would come over, you know, like that.
It all started when Thirty Tigers bought us out of our deal with Ardent. They’re good people. The weirder and more fun and experimental we were, the more they liked it. So at that point, we had this burst of creativity. It was like, ‘We’re free!’ you know? So we were just writing and recording all night long in this little space. And that’s what these songs are.
Was anyone there engineering and overseeing the recording process at the time?
Yes, Curry Weber. He produced our first record, and then he was the manager of our band. He booked all our shows for touring for seven plus years, and he was always there to cheerlead us and to capture us as best he could. He’s a mixing producer/engineer, who went to school for it and all that. Then we all became best friends and brothers, you know, working off the clock. There’s so much money and time he sacrificed for us. It’s in the millions, probably.
Curry was the one who recorded all those. And he and I would stay up there after everyone left, and that’s when I first started thinking, ‘Oh, mixing’s fun and cool!’ But these songs, they’re band-produced. You know, we all had our ideas, and we didn’t really have a producer standing over us telling us what we needed to be or any of that.
All that fits the communitarian vibe that I’ve always heard in your guys’ music. You get that feeling of everyone just kind of pitching in, and that’s rare as people increasingly arrange and produce music in the box, so to speak, and it all just becomes dragging waveforms around.
Oh yeah! Mark Stuart would be hanging out there drinking a beer and we’d say, ‘Mark, play guitar on this song!’ So he’s playing guitar on some of the songs, and then Kate Lawson’s singing a duet with Nick. That’s not released yet, but it’s from this batch, and we’ll end up releasing it.
And then a super fan, Natalie Jones, was there one night, and we were like, ‘You’ve loved us for five years — sing on this song! We know you know it by heart.’ And she was over the moon to be singing with her favorite band.
