“Our very first show was opening for the Panther Burns!” There’s something perfectly wrong about that when the band in question is The Autumn Defense, a group founded in 1999 by two singer-songwriters, John Stirratt and Pat Sansone. Sansone, speaking to me while en route to see Paul McCartney in Atlanta, is recalling that moment by way of explaining how out of place he and Stirratt felt when they started the group. Who else in 1990s New Orleans was playing originals emulating the orchestral, harmony-laden pop rock of the ’60s and ’70s? The Autumn Defense’s stylistic gambit perplexed more than a few at the time, including, one can safely assume, many fans of the self-described “art damaged” Tav Falco’s Panther Burns on that fateful inaugural night.
“A lot of writers didn’t know quite what to do with [the band] because it didn’t quite fit into what was happening in indie rock at the time,” says Sansone of those earliest days, long before he joined Stirratt as a member of Wilco. “But, you know, we just wanted to make records that fit in well with the records that we would listen to for pleasure, as if we were thumbing through our vinyl collections.”
In the years since, Memphians have come to know Sansone’s vinyl collection well, via his show on WYXR FM, Baroque Down Palace, described as having “a focus on songs that incorporate symphonic touches or classical influences,” such as Roberta Flack, The Who, The Left Banke, José Feliciano, Dusty Springfield, Tim Buckley, and Isaac Hayes. Doubly fitting, then, that Sansone and Stirratt (with bassist James Haggerty and drummer Greg Wieczorek) will be singing their own songs inspired by those very artists just upstairs from the WYXR broadcast booth this Friday, November 7th, at the Green Room at Crosstown Arts. Appropriately enough, they’ll have a string quartet and flute section joining them.
As any devotee of a particular era of musical history can affirm, Sansone and Stirratt’s love of fluid melodies, dense harmonies, and orchestral colors didn’t go away over the past quarter century. They’ve only deepened their appreciation and understanding of ’60s and ’70s artists (and arrangers) since they first started the group. Now, with Here and Nowhere, their sixth album, the duo and longtime rhythm section have picked up right where they left off, offering a deeper, darker take on what some call the Laurel Canyon sound, with their own distinctive blend.
Meanwhile, Stirratt has had his own way of curating and exploring music that feeds the band’s aesthetic — while developing his own lodge in the Berkshire Mountains. “I really wanted to focus on an immersive experience for guests, and a big part of that was music,” Stirratt noted in a statement. “We have an FM station on the campus and all the rooms have radios broadcasting these playlists I curate every spring, full of deep cuts and lost tracks, so between that and Pat’s radio show, we found ourselves exchanging records and sharing new discoveries all the time like the old days.”
Part of that discovery, says Sansone, has been learning about the arrangers working in the wings behind his favorite records. Carl Marsh, who arranged orchestral parts for the original Big Star recordings, naturally looms large for Sansone, who played in early tributes to Big Star’s 3rd and still plays with the Big Star Quintet. He also mentions Jimmie Haskell, who arranged the strings on “Ode to Billie Joe,” and the great Tony Visconti. Fans of Sansone’s radio show often learn a thing or two: “That is the Monkees with ‘Porpoise Song’ from the soundtrack to their 1968 film called Head,” quipped the DJ on a recent show. “The song, sung by Micky Dolenz, was written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin and features a string arrangement by the great arranger Jack Nitzsche, who also arranged for Neil Young’s early albums. Conducted by the great producer Russ Titelman.”
Beyond his radio presence, Memphians may recognize Sansone as one fourth of Mellotron Variations, a quartet (also including Robby Grant, Jonathan Kirkscey, and John Medeski) that made a splash in 2018-19 with performances and recordings made only with different models of the Mellotron, an archaic keyboard and proto-sampler that, with its warbly tape-loops of orchestral instruments, was a fixture of late-’60s pop albums. Sansone is known for adding that sound to Wilco tracks as well. But its influence on the new album was more indirect. “There’s a couple of little touches of Mellotron on the album,” says Sansone, “but not much. All of the orchestral elements that you hear are real orchestral instruments. The flutes and strings and woodwinds are all the real deal.”
Now in the habit of giving arrangers their due, Sansone points out the new album’s inventive string parts by Matt Combs and woodwinds by Jim Hoke. “It’s one of the great things about being in Nashville,” says Sansone. “The guy that played most of the strings lives five minutes from my house. I just wrote out my arrangements on Mellotron, sent him those parts, and then he recreated them, with some embellishments here and there.”
The result is perhaps the most cohesive and powerful album to date from The Autumn Defense, which certainly basks in nuanced harmonies, flutes, horns, and strings as much as ever, but also, not unlike Big Star or the late, great Elliott Smith, takes those tender melodies, sung with an air of youthful wonder, into some dark lyrical territory. Meanwhile, the overall sound has a period-perfect warmth, thanks to the band laying down tracks together at Nashville’s Creative Workshop studio, an analog oasis founded in 1970 by the (also) late, great Buzz Cason.
For Sansone, though, it’s not about being retro or nostalgic. It’s about a kind of musicality that happened to fall out of favor for a time, but is now being embraced once more. “We didn’t want to do a pastiche, or wear costumes, right?” he says. “We’ve always tried to be authentic with it. The songwriting is coming from an authentic place, where we’re just being ourselves.”
