Moon Taxi: Silver Linings
Almost 20 years after Trevor Terndrup and Tommy Putnam rolled into the inaugural Bonnaroo as wide-eyed fans, Moon Taxi are ready to inject that festival’s kaleidoscopic spirit into a socially distanced world.
Moon Taxi were gearing up for a whirlwind year promoting their latest LP, Silver Dream, when the world came to a sudden, unexpected halt.
“We were thinking about releasing Silver Dream quarter one or quarter two of this year, and then COVID happened,” Moon Taxi bassist Tommy Putnam says at the tail end of 2020, a few weeks before the LP’s eventual January 2021 release. “Then it became this conversation, like: ‘Do you put out a record or do you sit on it? Can you support it? Is it smart to put out a record right now?’ There were all these things going through our heads, and we just decided to wait a little while.”
By the time that the Nashville-based, festival-weaned rock band decided to temporarily pause the release of their long-awaited follow-up to 2018’s Let the Record Play, which contained breakout single “Two High,” they had already been working on Silver Dream for well over a year.
“We’re always on this perpetual cycle of touring, writing, producing and thinking about the next record, so it’s hard to pinpoint when the start of this next album cycle was,” frontman Trevor Terndrup explains.
Considering the volatility of Silver Dream’s schedule, it is understandable that the band is somewhat hard-pressed to pinpoint when exactly they began working toward the LP. However, Terndrup looks back on a songwriting retreat as a clear turning point. In the late summer of 2018, Terndrup, keyboardist Wes Bailey and lead guitarist Spencer Thomson traveled to Los Angeles to worked with mix of songwriters, including Chris Seefried (Fitz and the Tantrums, The Kooks) and Christian Medice (lovelytheband, Halsey).
“It was a different person every single day,” Terndrup says. “The previous label we were on had us on the schedule and it was exceedingly prolific. We wrote the majority of the album material during that trip.” Terndrup estimates that seven of the album’s 12 cuts were initially conceived or built upon during that retreat, though they “already had a good head start” on a few of them.
Even with some song ideas in tow, the Moon Taxi members were eager to listen to the collaborators’ advice, which ranged from song to song and writer to writer. Terndrup explains: “With some writers, they’ll come in and listen to what we have and they’ll be like, ‘OK, well this would be a good addition’ or [they’ll say,] ‘This is how you finish it,’ or ‘This is how you write verse two.’” He chuckles and adds, “Verse two is usually the hard one to do.”
While the band took advantage of the opportunity to collaborate on Silver Dream, the record is still undeniably their own. It was recorded entirely in Nashville. (Some sessions took place at the majestic Blackbird Studio, while the majority was recorded at Thomson’s home studio.) And even though much of the material was developed during the writing retreat, Moon Taxi invited spontaneity in the studio. In the press materials for the record, Terndrup notes, “The line was kind of blurred between the writing and production, where we were doing both in the same moment.”
The approach paid off: Silver Dream pushes the band’s sound further than ever before, boasting elements of rootsy folk, pop-guitar rock and electronica. But rather than simply jumping between styles, song to song, many of the tracks, such as the standout “Hometown Heroes,” manage to seamlessly blend all of the above. But even with these new textures layered atop one another, Silver Dream still retains the elements that made Moon Taxi, well, Moon Taxi.
“It’s about feeling even more comfortable in your skin and feeling comfortable to take some risks,” Terndrup says. “I do see this record as our best, as far as being the most cohesive from song to song. Sometimes with Moon Taxi records—and I like this about them—they can change genres on a dime. This one is a little more cohesive sonically than some of our past records have been, which will translate great in a live setting.”
“We have all these moves forward without actually dismissing our past Moon Taxi selves,” Putnam adds. “We’re still the same band and the same sound, just a little better.”
“I’d say way better,” Terndrup quips.
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Moon Taxi have been slowly evolving and fine-tuning their sound since they formed in earnest in 2006, while the members were students at Nashville’s Belmont University. On their very first day on campus, childhood friends Terndrup and Putnam had a chance encounter with Thomson, who happened to be assigned to their first-year dormitory.
“My first impression of him was: ‘God, this guy can play. I want to stick around him and learn as much as I can,’” Terndrup told Relix in 2018. The band’s lineup—Terndrup, Putnam, Thomson, Bailey and drummer Tyler Ritter—has remained the same since their undergrad days, which has allowed the quintet to grow and change as a group, building on their collective sonic aesthetic. And that consistency is what really allowed the Silver Dream sessions to remain so spontaneous.
But Moon Taxi’s roots actually run deeper than Belmont University. Terndrup and Putnam, who both hail from Birmingham, Ala., used to perform in local talent shows under the moniker Apex when they were teenagers. After graduating from high school in 2002, the two young musicians also drove to Manchester, Tenn. together to attend the very first Bonnaroo, which featured Widespread Panic, Trey Anastasio, Phil Lesh & Friends with Bob Weir, The String Cheese Incident, Ben Harper and many others.
“We were just wide-eyed and looking for a new experience. We found it immediately,” recalls Terndrup. (In fact, Terndrup fondly remembers visiting the Relix booth at that inaugural festival. “You guys had a little tent set up and you were giving away these lighters that had bottle openers on the bottom of them, and I’d never seen this before. It blew my 18-year[1]old mind,” he says with a laugh.)
That early exposure to Bonnaroo and the greater jam scene clearly rubbed off on the young musicians. From their nascent days, Moon Taxi were a favorite in the Southeast live-music scene, and they ultimately opened for bands such as Umphrey’s McGee, Gov’t Mule and The New Mastersounds before booking headlining tours of their own. Within a few years, they were actually playing at Bonnaroo, rather than simply attending it as fans.
“We had wanted to play it since the first year that it was put on, but I don’t feel like we were ready as a band,” Terndrup says. They appeared at the festival for the first time in 2012, two years after a near miss. “We entered the Battle of the Bands to try and get into it [in 2010], but the judges really wanted their friend’s band in there,” recalls Putnam. However, in retrospect, Putnam and Terndrup agree that it was actually a blessing that the festival passed on them back then. “We didn’t win but, had we won that, we would have been playing a very small stage,” Putnam explains. “But then, two years later, we got booked on a real stage, Thursday night, as the sun was going out.
“We had gotten a lot bigger around the Southeast in those two years too,” he continues. “Everyone was bringing their friends like, ‘Yo, check out this band.’ And that was really the beginning for us”
“It was a milestone in the history of Moon Taxi,” Terndrup notes of their Bonnaroo debut. They returned to the festival in 2015 on the heels of their Daybreaker record—ascending to the Which Stage—and played the same marquee space in 2018 in front of what Putnam calls an “infinity crowd.”
“As Tommy like to say, you cannot see to the end of the crowd when you look out,” Terndrup explains.
The longtime friends and bandmates look back on that experience of losing the Battle of the Bands as an important lesson in the trajectory of becoming a full-time band. “The one thing I tell people is that a lot of stuff is going to go wrong,” says Putnam, bluntly. “You just got to get over those hurdles and all kinds of stuff that happens like that and just keep going for it.”
“It’s probably best that we didn’t win that competition show because it was good to wait and build up our fanbase and build up our songwriting skills too,” adds Terndrup. “To where, when we did have our proper Bonnaroo debut, it was epic. So I would say: Embrace those mistakes.”
“You can make mistakes,” Putnam admits. “You just don’t want to make the same mistake twice.”
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Although all of the material on Silver Dream was written far before the COVID-19 pandemic, the album is rife with songs that can be retrofitted to the current moment.
“What’s funny about the record is that it’s uncanny how many of the songs are so appropriate for this year,” Putnam observes. He points to the aforementioned standout track “Hometown Heroes” as an example. The number was actually written about Terndrup and Putnam’s friendship, a nostalgic track with a wistful chorus: “Yeah, we go way back where we started from/ We were hometown heroes high enough for everyone.”
However, when they originally put out the tune in March of 2020, “Hometown Heroes” took on a different meaning. “[That was] the first song we put out from Silver Dream in March, which feels like a lifetime ago,” Terndrup recalls. “But right before we released it, a tornado ripped through Nashville.”
“It rolled right past Trevor’s house,” Putnam adds. “And then, miles down the road in another part of the city, it rolled right past my house.”
Terndrup was uplifted to see the community come together on the heels of the natural disaster. “It was like, ‘Wow, all these people in our neighborhood are just helping each other out, like little hometown heroes!’” he says. “That was not the intention at all when we wrote it. The song’s actually about the friendship Tommy and I have. But it’s not our job to tell people how to interpret it, and I love that it’s kind of taken on a life of its own.”
Another album highlight, “Light Up,” went through a similar metamorphosis.
The song contains a prescient line: “Yeah, it’s been a hard year for me too.” As they realized that the selection could be an anthem for the state of the world, the band went so far as to print T-shirts with that lyric on them. “It was the most 2020 lyric before 2020 even happened,” Terndrup says with a laugh. “I guess we kind of foresaw this kind of stuff going down.”
And, on “Keep It Together,” Terndrup evokes a sense of tragedy: “How do I keep it, keep it/ Together with a hole in my heart.” Elsewhere, on “Above the Water,” the band explores the theme of perseverance, a fitting message in these trying times: “I barely know how to swim/ But I’m trying to stay afloat… Oh it never lets go, it’s just getting harder/ But you keep my head above the water.”
Even though their album is well[1]suited for a quarantine release, like most bands, Moon Taxi long for the days when they could tour behind an album. “I was already done with the record and was ready to go out there and play it live for people,” Terndrup notes. “I had already switched my mindset from writing a record to going out and presenting it to people. We’ve always thrived in a live environment and I just feel like if there’s one tragedy of Moon Taxi right now, it’s that we haven’t been able to get out there and show these songs to people in a live setting.”
With that said, the band has certainly been keeping busy during the pandemic. Besides sorting out the album’s release schedule, Moon Taxi headlined a livestream to promote voter registration at their alma mater, appeared at a benefit show supporting the National Independent Venue Association, celebrated Silver Dreams with a virtual release party at Brooklyn Bowl Nashville, and even performed a socially distanced proper concert in Atlanta.
Both Putnam and Terndrup note that in order to have safe live events these days, it must be planned to a tee. “It was safe—everybody backstage got tested beforehand, and I could tell that they were monitoring the pods really closely,” the bassist says of the Atlanta show. “You’ve got to be methodical and intentional with everything that you’re doing.”
Terndrup has also offered a few solo livestreams through his Facebook and Instagram pages, which have proved to be surprisingly educational. “I really got into doing more loop-type stuff during those performances. It was a good chance for me to hone that craft a little bit,” he says.
“As far as other artists doing it, it was kind of cool to see glimpses of their own personal life.”
But Terndrup notes that while intimate performances such as those were popular early on in quarantine, they have dwindled as time has gone on. “It was novel at first— all the livestreams were great—but then it just kind of felt like we all moved on.”
Despite the hurdles of COVID-19, Moon Taxi are primed to hit the ground running when live shows eventually return. The band has long been a force on the road, bringing a jamband sensibility to an indie[1]rock audience. But, Putnam also expresses his empathy for younger, greener bands that were just coming up when the pandemic hit.
“There’s probably a lot of young bands that’ll read this, and they probably got hit the hardest,” he says. “I always think back to 2010 when we were just starting to get momentum; what if COVID had happened that year to us, you know? It might have just wrecked us—we might not be playing music today.”
But Putnam still remains optimistic. “I just hope that those bands pick up where they left off when they can,” he offers. “It’s been tough but we’re almost out of it. So, hopefully, everything will just pick up right where it left off.”
