Liz Cooper and The Stampede, Sun Parade

???It started with golf clubs and country clubs, but now it???s all rock clubs,??? Liz says, giggling. She spent the majority of her life developing her golf skills, only to drop her college scholarship to move to Nashville and pursue music. ???Writing songs and playing the guitar came as naturally to me as golf did. But music tickled my brain in a way nothing else ever could.???

But, Liz didn???t know a soul in Nashville when she moved. So, she went and got a job at a familiar place: a country club. ???Liz may not have known anyone when she moved here,??? says the Stampede low-end provider Grant. ???But now, I feel like she knows pretty much every person she walks past. She just doesn???t stop smiling, and people don???t stop smiling back.??? Coincidentally???or not so coincidentally cuz, well, Nashville???some fellow co-workers at the country club also had a band. They called themselves Future Thieves, and they offered to record Liz???s first EP, Monsters. After that, Liz began writing songs as frequently as she smiles. She formed a band with Ky Baker on drums and Grant Prettyman on the weird long guitar, and they recorded the Live at the Silent Planet EP. And now, there???s enough new songs to record a full-length album.???The record we???re working on now is a combination of Liz???s darkly-lit, reclusive songwriting habits, and Grant and I???s Rolling Rock induced rock and roll??? chimes Ky. ???It???s about bringing our different styles together to create something that makes us all question what kind of music we even like anyways.???


Sun Parade formed in Northampton, Massachusetts, where kids skinny dip in the Mill River and smoke on the tobacco farms on the flood plains. The music scene here is legendary. Even now, touring venues and festivals across the U.S., the Sun Parade lads are most satisfied when their music conjures a Route 9 basement show somewhere along the fold of the map that delivered Dinosaur Jr. and The Pixies ??? a cellar in which everyone is sweaty and dancing and in love or something like it, and by 3 a.m. the rhythm section is shaking the house and you can???t tell the band from the crowd.

Sun Parade will be on the road through 2017, packing a full-length rock release produced in Brooklyn by Ian Hersey of Rubblebucket. The band has supported Lake Street Dive, Dr. Dog, Born Ruffians, and And The Kids. National Public Radio picked ???Heart???s Out??? ??? the title track of the band???s EP ??? for Songs We Love, and wrote that Sun Parade is ???crafting the kinds of traditional guitar-pop songs that people might still be singing 50 years down the road.???

Sun Parade is Chris Marlon Jennings, raccoon-teur, and Jeff Lewis, Mainer, both on guitar and vocals; Karl Helander on drums, vocals, and ambient barking; Max Wareham on bass and astral physics; and Eli Salus-Kleiner, newly at the keys. The band???s personal obsessions and projects range from British folk ballads to Motown; collectively their music is most influenced by the mutineers??? pantheon ??? Dr. Dog, The Clash, Beastie Boys, Nirvana, The Beatles.

Chris Jennings and Jeff Lewis are longtime collaborators. Jennings (???Cheer Up???) writes by and large in the language of existential howl, wherein life, love and the pursuit of happiness are a highway pile-up with the distinct possibility of dancing. Lewis (???Brain Drain???) is lately spinning ethereal, psychedelic glowing pop benevolence, songs sung into an old Fostex and sent out into the world in strands of metaphysic werewolves and sunshine. The dichotomy between the writers builds a sort of outliers??? love fest, a condition Oscar Wilde once described as living in the gutter with stardust falling on us.