Courtesy The Holy Ghost Electric Show.
The set descended into madness. The bassist leapt down from his perch atop his amplifier and stepped into the crowd, playing wildly before letting the fans join in and strum the instrument. The drummer stood up to wail on his kit while the lead guitarist grabbed a shard of his drumstick and struck it against his guitar before smacking it against the amp to distort the sound. The trombonist carried a floor tom into the crowd, and after beating it he stabbed the stick through the head of the drum.
Despite the almost punk rock style of some of the more energetic moments of their shows, the wild stage presence doesn’t take away from the quality of the music played by The Holy Ghost Electric Show. With mature songwriting and a style pulled from influences of multiple genres, The Holy Ghost Electric Show is able to combine proficient, skillful music with a thrilling live show. The six-piece is made up of Cody Rogers doing rhythm guitar and vocals, Will Shirley on lead guitar, Jake Rogers playing acoustic guitar, Austin Wheeler on the drums, Connor Wroten on bass and Jesse James playing the trombone. The band is from northeast Mississippi, and they released their debut album, “The Great American,” Jan. 30.
Rogers’ music career started when he began playing small acoustic solo sets in his hometown of Corinth. He played in local bars and record stores at first, but slowly the band started building up members, including Rogers’ brother, who had often played with him.
“It eventually became a band that was worth having that title, because it was kind of ironic calling myself The Holy Ghost Electric Show when I was playing an acoustic guitar by myself,” Rogers said. “Not really much electricity or much of a show, but it was just me by myself for a long time.”
Rogers came up with the name by taking a King James version of the Bible, as well as a book of poetry by Arthur Rimbaud and mixing lines and words together until they stuck, eventually landing on The Holy Ghost Electric Show.
“I have a whole list somewhere of all the other ones I was playing with and that was by far the best one, so that says a lot about the other ones,” Rogers said.
The band has been playing around Mississippi since 2010, and started playing regularly in Oxford in 2012. The band has also played shows in Alabama, Arkansas and major cities like Nashville and Memphis.
“A lot of people would call our music folk rock or something like that, but when we write a song we never set out to write a genre,” Rogers said. “Each one of us has so many influences from so many artists it’s hard to stick to one thing.”
These influences include Neutral Milk Hotel, Deafheaven, Bob Dylan, My Bloody Valentine, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash, Tom Waits, Hank Williams Senior and Modest Mouse.
Despite having such a broad range of influences, the band successfully melds these in the songwriting process.
“Cody writes most of it. He’s a gifted writer,” Wheeler said. “He writes a riff first, which isn’t always very convoluted, but it’s what everyone else does with it that changes it. We jam on it for about an hour. That’s how you write a song, you just play on it. We just craft around that base riff. Even in a live show Cody is like the eye of a hurricane. While we all go to cloud nine, he’s our tether to reality.”
“We usually just tell everybody ‘Play what feels good.’ It’s very relaxed and easygoing. It’s one of my favorite parts of all of this actually, is the songwriting process and discovering the song,” Rogers said. “When you have a bunch of guys with you, and they’re as talented as the guys I play with, I might come up with the foundation blocks and stuff but they’ll take it places I never thought about it going.”
After using these techniques to write their songs, the band went to the studio to record their work.
“We had a weekend in 2013, before winter break, where we just went in there and recorded all of my drums in one day,” Wheeler said. “Beautiful place, but we got all our stuff done — we were extremely efficient about it.”
“Four weeks later when we got out for winter break we had an entire week in January where we just all got out there and just stayed there for a week, and we committed all day for a week, every day, to just work on the album. We worked with Winn McElroy, he recorded all of The Weeks albums up until their newest one, and he recorded Light Beam Rider. He’s done a lot of good work.”
“Winn McElroy is a wonderful guy that we bounced off immediately,” Rogers said. “He had the same work ethic that we did, and also had the same type of humor as we did. From day one we were all friends and having a good time. There were very few snags in the process, and the few snags there were, were really out of anybody’s hands, it wasn’t because of egos clashing or people wanting things different ways. I loved that process, and can’t wait to return.”
The recording process culminated in “The Great American,” a concept album with multiple themes.
“It’s about growing older and seeing your past and everything, the limit of your childhood totally disappearing, and seeing your parents grow older,” Rogers said of the album. “The things you thought were innocent are no longer innocent.”
Wheeler explicated on another theme of the album.
“It’s about kind of this idea that America never really existed in its idealistic form for a large proportion of people,” he said.
The Holy Ghost Electric Show has a second album planned as well as several songs already written.
“We’ve already got most of the new album written out, but we don’t need to go right back to the studio when this one just got out in January, we need to boost it as much as possible,” Wheeler said.
“When we do go back it’s gonna be another thematic concept album. It’s gonna revolve around growing up in a small town, each song will be a different person’s story,” Wheeler said. “We all grew up in small towns where the gap between the power elite and the normal people is just huge.”
The band has already played with The Weeks and The Lumineers and plans to do a lot of touring this summer. With members still in college, it can be difficult to tour frequently.
“We’re planning on doing some major touring over the summer, because we can’t let the album wither up and die; we have to continually promote it,” Wheeler said. “A booking agency called us and said they wanted to put us on a bunch of festivals on the eastern seaboard, so we’ll hopefully be going up the East Coast, and probably be doing some folk festivals.”
