Working together as Moonrisers, guitarist Libby DeCamp and drummer Adam Schreiber make music rooted in the past yet engaged with the present. They play instruments with long histories—she a Slingerland May Bell parlor guitar from the ‘30s, he a hundred-year-old calfskin drumkit—and they find inspiration in close readings of late nineteenth-century poets and early twentieth-century naturalists. Recorded in a Nashville house that predates country music, their debut, Harsh & Exciting, is a new and nuanced take on old and earthy musical styles: folk, blues, jazz, gospel, even cowboy songs.
“It’s an instrumental record, but it reads more like a landscape,” says DeCamp. “There’s a lot of space in it. Nature is at the heart of what we were hearing and what we were trying to convey. And we wanted to connect with that kind of timelessness in nature through our old, rickety instruments.” Harsh & Exciting is at its core a showcase for two very distinctive players and thinkers, who over the course of ten songs devise countless ways to combine the thump and jangle of Schreiber’s drums with the rich, deep tones of DeCamp’s guitar. On “Muddy Shores” they churn up a noisy, bluesy stride, but then make “All Your Hiding” sound ruminative and precarious–like the slightest distraction might break the reverie. There is so much space on the album, but it never sounds empty. Instead, the pair are reluctant to fill in the dark corners where a listener’s imagination might find footing. “You’re conditioned as creators as musicians to make sure you’re always dazzling someone,” says Schreiber. “We wanted to do the opposite of that. We wanted to pull people in.”
Based in Michigan, the couple have been playing together for 12 years, but individually they’ve been making music for much longer. Now a busy session player who has worked with Stevie Nicks, Madi Diaz, and Luke Sital-Singh, among others, Schreiber started out as a pre-teen in a band with his siblings before moving on to his own solo career, but didn’t start doing session work until the pandemic hit. “I was posting short clips of me playing drums everyday,” he says. “People started finding them online and asking me to record. From there I haven’t really stopped.” Meanwhile, DeCamp has been making a name for herself as a singer-songwriter whose 2021 debut, Westward and Faster, revealed her to be a bold guitarist and an insightful lyricist. “We’ve both had long, mixed journeys,” she says.
Whenever they were home together, they would make music in their living room, often playing whatever instruments were at hand and never with any intention of releasing or even recording it. They jammed merely for the sake of creating something together in the moment. “We’d both been putting so much pressure on ourselves to make our own things work,” says Schreiber. “We didn’t even consider that the stuff we were playing together was anything to put on a record. We weren’t even really playing songs. It all just felt like an emotional expression.” They developed a natural chemistry, each drawing something out of the other player—a quality that’s apparent on Harsh & Exciting closer, “Start On Foot.” “I had this low, repeating guitar refrain in my head, and it had a really lonesome quality to it,” says DeCamp. “Adam added a chugging-forward momentum, and it sounded more like a bass than a drum part. Together, they sounded like a lonesome cowboy facing a long trek home.”
Those living room jam sessions intensified during the pandemic, when touring was an impossibility, and the couple began uploading videos to their social media. Dan Auerbach, singer/guitarist for The Black Keys and mastermind behind the eclectic Easy Eye Sound label, became obsessed with their performances and invited them down to Nashville. Schreiber played drums for Easy Eye Sound artists Hermanos Gutiérrez and Robert Finley, and Auerbach invited DeCamp and Schreiber to play their first public show at the label’s annual Fish Fry. One of the duo’s earliest recordings, “Tall Shadow,” was included on the 2023 compilation Tell Everybody! 21st Century Juke Joint Blues from Easy Eye Sound.
DeCamp and Schreiber quickly cut an album together at Auerbach’s studio in Nashville, and then he hoodwinked them into recording it again. “We were going down to mix the album,” says Schreiber, “and while we were there, Dan said he wanted to get a few alternate takes at this place they call the Honky Chateau. It’s a house from 1908 that belongs to this photographer and artist named Buddy Jackson. It’s right in the middle of Nashville, but it’s a completely separate world. It felt a bit like being in a time capsule.” Setting up and playing in different rooms from each other, the newly christened Moonrisers played through all their songs—including a new medley of Washington Phillips tunes—over the course of three days. Without the pressure of an official studio take, the performances were looser, with the larger world occasionally bleeding into the recordings. “When you’re recording in a place like that,” says Schreiber, “a car might go by or you might hear a siren and you have to stop and let it go by. But this is probably the first time I’ve ever recorded in a place where they just let life continue around them, whether it was outside noise or people walking around during takes.”
These performances captured an out-of-time quality in the music, as if the recordings could have been made at any point in the last century. It was immediately obvious that this was the album they truly needed to make. They found the title Harsh & Exciting in a poem by Mary Oliver and brought in bluegrass greats Tim O’Brien and Chris Scruggs to add trills of mandolin, smears of pedal steel, and plucks of banjo. “On the previous version, everything was crystal clear and in your face, but this is the complete opposite,” says DeCamp. “It has a sense of mystery. Some of the sounds are off in the distance, and it’s hard to tell sometimes what’s part of the house and what we’re playing. Dan just saw something in us that he knew would work well in that place.”
Such an old and storied structure was the perfect setting for Moonrisers’ music, which is steeped in the past but never beholden to it. Together, DeCamp and Schreiber created a song cycle of sorts, representing one leg of a longer journey: a cycle of departures and arrivals with no known destination. Kicking off with the loud thump of a drum and a low roar of a guitar, “Circle Of The Seasons” has the rhythm and momentum of a hopped train taking them who knows where, while “I Came Here To Be Alone,” the album’s quietest and most delicate composition, sounds like a moment’s respite from the hard road. “When Moonrisers was coming together,” says DeCamp, “we were both doing a lot of introspection, a lot of deep dives into writers like Walt Whitman and Edwin Way Teale. Those writers really helped us in our personal life, and it was a huge healing process because we realized that you can read a Whitman poem and swear it’s about what’s going on right now.”
There is no known destination for Moonrisers, which started out as nothing more than a casual jam session but has transformed into something compelling, original, and even healing. DeCamp and Schreiber are trying to let the project be whatever it needs to be, unburdened by too many creative expectations or professional pressures. “This album feels hopeful to me,” says DeCamp, “so we’re just going to take it wherever it goes.”
