“I’ve done a couple of good ones, actually, it’s funny. It seems like every time you play a winery it’s a nice venue and there’s nice food… It’s not the scrubby punk rock bar we might normally get booked into, you know?”

It’s 8:15pm in Missoula, Montana, and with his winery show set to kick off in less than an hour, Chris Shiflett ruminates about the release of third solo record West Coast Town.

“I’m really happy that it’s coming out soon, because once it does I can stop working on getting it ready,” he laughs, “which has been dominating my life in the past couple months. I made this record last summer, I want it to be out so people can hear it.”

The album’s a rich tapestry, reflecting on the musician’s childhood in Santa Barbara, California during the ‘70s and ‘80s before moving to Los Angeles.

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Traversing both new and old sonic waters is certainly difficult, but the two come together on this record with the help of Dave Cobb, who’s produced albums for the likes of Sturgill Simpson and Chris Stapleton. It was on Shiflett’s podcast Walking the Floor, a rich compilation of interviews with more than a few intriguing minds, where the musician went in cold to chat to one of the industry’s greats.

Reflecting on the podcast here, he vividly describes country legend Marty Stuart as having music “seeping from his pores”. The musician also tenderly remembers Merle Haggard, who along with The Strangers helped pioneer that classic ‘50s Bakersfield country twang. Melancholy creeps into his voice while he remembers the legend as “really nice and welcoming”, months before his sad passing on his 79th birthday.

Returning to his interview with Cobb, the producer felt that his experience of moving to his current hometown of Nashville was naturally tough because he didn’t know anyone. Yet Shiflett embodies a different perspective, reflecting on his own thoughts of leaving Santa Barbara.

“You know, it wasn’t hard because when I left, I was 18 and so ready to go. It was a funny experience that I had because even though I love Santa Barbara and recognise it as being the amazing place it was to grow up, when I was a kid and teenager I didn’t feel that way about it. I thought, ‘I live in a fucking Hick Town that’s so far away from everything cool’, and I just wanted to go to the big city where there’s rock ‘n’ roll and cool shit happening all the time (chuckles). I didn’t get how amazing Santa Barbara was, but I should now.

“It’s funny, I think about it sometimes. I’ve lived outside Santa Barbara longer than I actually lived there. It’s a very strange thing for me because I feel like I’m 100% there, but in reality I haven’t lived there since the late ‘80s.”

Then Shiflett suddenly puts on a dramatic voice, vowing, “Someday, I shall return!”.

Another important gap that Shiflett navigates in his life is the stylistic differences between country and rock music, and contemplating this he asserts, “The biggest one to me is in the lyrics.”

“Country lyrics are more like storytelling than vague poetry. That was a big focus for me getting these songs together. When I’d be writing the lyrics, I was thinking to myself, ‘What’s the point? What’s the overarching theme of this song?’. I wanted to hold myself to that account for all the songs, really.”

“I didn’t listen to country growing up, but it was a slow evolution,” the singer-songwriter concedes. “There was a certain point where I realised, ‘I’ve got to really live in this music for a while to wrap my head around it’, which is an ongoing process.”

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Shiflett knows that there’s a funny thing about processing records for the first time in childhood, before re-listening to them as an adult, and he chuckles candidly, “I listened to some really shitty music growing up.”

“So there are times where I’ll dig out some of the goofball heavy metal stuff from the ‘80s that I liked, and I’ll sort of have a nostalgia trip like, ‘Oh man, that makes me feel like I was 11’. But then the 45-year-old in me is like, ‘God that sounds shitty. What the fuck was I thinking?’”, he laughs heartily.

“At heart I’m a rock ‘n’ roll guitar player and always will be, but I’ve been playing this for long enough now that it’s influenced my approach to songwriting.”

It’s that rock core that takes flight in Seattle mainstays Foo Fighters. Yet Shiflett reminds us it’s the outside pursuits of every band member – with Dave Grohl releasing music with Tenacious D and Queens of the Stone Age, and Taylor Hawkins recording drums on Coheed and Cambria’s fourth album – that “makes what we do in Foo Fighters stronger”.

Here he takes us back to their fourth record, 2002’s One by One, when the seeds of his desire to experiment on his own were sown.

“I remember there were two attempts at making the record,” Shiflett starts, “and after the first shelved attempt that was the time I felt, ‘I’ve got a little time on my hands. I’ll just book some studio time, record these songs and see what happens’. That was for a band I had for a little while called Jackson United.

“I did a couple albums and then had these songs that were more acoustic-based and a little Americana flavoured. I just started recording them out at our studio with my friend Lou (Robinson, RCA Music Group), and that became the first Dead Peasants album. I’ve just been going down that road ever since.”

Our chat shifts back to the present with West Coast Town as the musician reflects on his current transitions as a songwriter. Working with Cobb was clearly a huge part of moving forward. Yet according to the artist, that wasn’t the only one.

“Making this record out in Nashville was definitely a step in that direction,” Shiflett muses. “I wanted to make a really strong one, and I knew I could get my songs as far as I could get them, but I wanted input from somebody else to make them even better. I talked to Dave and he said he could do it, he’s based in Nashville so of course we were going to do it out there. I told him I didn’t have a band I was bringing with me, and he was like, ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ve got guys out here all the time’.

“So that was definitely a big leaving of my comfort zone, I spent about a month in Nashville. We recorded the album in three weeks and it was fantastic. But I think it was really helpful to be out of town, and all I did was work on my record. I would just wake up in the morning, drink some coffee, tweak the lyrics a little bit and maybe work out my guitar parts for that day before going into the studio… I was 100% focused on making the best record I could.

“When I was trying to lean a little too vintage country sounding, he’d (Cobb) be like, ‘You can’t make a record where you sound like 1965, you’ll be ridiculed. You’ve got to make it sound like now’.

“My natural fantasy would be like, ‘Turn up the fucking reverb and I’m going to play this bone-dry, clean thing!” Shiflett hollers. “He was like, ‘No put this crazy fuzz on it and make it sound weird’.

Walk the line between old-school country cool and vibrant, modern Americana by grabbing West Coast Town here, out April 14 via SideOneDummy Records/Cooking Vinyl Australia.

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