Feed Your Passions: Nuke the Soup Takes Rock Reflection Deeper

Mark Davison was surfing in the Dominican Republic, when a song rolled in, wave after wave. Davison would surf, dash for his phone to sing the next snatch of lyrics, and then surf some more. It was the beginning of Deeper (release: May 30, 2018), the latest from Davison’s project Nuke the Soup. His first release in nine years, Deeper reveals Davison’s profound rock songwriting skill and meditates on mortality and its torments and joys.

Recorded on bright, rich analog equipment by a group of wildly talented master musicians--like drummer Chester Thompson (Zappa, Genesis) and guitarist Gerry Leonard (David Bowie)--and produced by Brendan Canty (Fugazi drummer) and Kevin Killen (Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush), Deeper opens with the media’s commercialization of human tragedy (“Network”), only to shift toward a call to turn off the news and engage more powerfully with life and its breakers. The album moves from personal reflections on relationships and aging (“Better Than I Was”), addiction (“Bugs”), and the state of the world (“Island”), to the witty political send up/love anthem, “Hillary.” The tone never plunges into darkness but stays remarkably buoyant.

“I did not set out to write an album with a recurring theme as dark as mortality, but that’s where the muse led. And I followed it deeper and deeper,” Davison says. “I never sit down and write a song. I have to be distracted and let the creativity come. Surfing worked great for that. I had a leftover song from the first Nuke the Soup record. I started to sense a theme there, and decided to write the whole record around the song and theme ‘Deeper.’”

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Artists often write about mortality and its life implications when they’ve had a brush with death. Davison is no exception, “except with me, I was writing about this stuff and then it took over,” he notes.

“After a big number birthday, in the middle of a bunch of family stuff and stressing over mixes, I started having serious anxiety, to the point of almost panic. I never experienced anything like that. A couple of good friends had died suddenly, and I had this feeling of impending doom. It felt like a rite of passage, coming to grips with my mortality,” notes Davison. “Fortunately, there was a minor health issue I addressed and that was it. I read about anxiety and learned to understand it, and I kept writing and recording to push through it.”

Davison has been crafting songs for decades and “always has something rolling around in my head.” With songwriting partner Woody Lissauer, he saw some mainstream success with Cubic Feet. He worked again with Lissauer on “Oceans and Mountains,” a song inspired by “Feel of the Ocean,” but finished in the mountains of Colorado and on a windswept beach, tying Davison’s two sources of inspiring beauty together in a tender tribute.

Five albums and two decades passed, as Davison honed his craft. There were always songs that didn’t quite fit into the band’s sound, however. These orphan songs coalesced into Nuke the Soup and often spring from Davison’s love of water and outdoor sports, which serve as metaphors for life’s dynamics. (As for the name, one day, while eating lunch at a restaurant his sister requested their server “nuke the soup,” as it was tepid. Davison laughed out loud and said that was his next band name, in all its quirky and nihilist glory.) 

The songs have a tight, sparkling sound powered by Davison’s collection of vintage studio gear, the tubes and amps and tape machines that made great rock records. “My studio is in the basement and it’s a museum,” he laughs. “It’s all 80s and earlier tech. You hear the analog and vintage instruments.”

As Davison wrote and recorded over two years, the atmosphere in the US shifted dramatically. “What we were going through was on my mind all the time. I couldn’t avoid it,” says Davison. “That runs through the album.” It added to the weightiness of the songs he was working on, and pushed him to revisit some old material and consider it in a new light. “Island,” for example, started out years ago as a song about personal alienation, but morphed into a call for more awareness of our global interconnectedness.

And then there’s “Hillary,” a song that started out light and went deeper. An ode to the complexities of loving a certain public figure, the song went from gentle snark to genuine (if funny) sadness. “Gerry added to the song and pulled it in a different direction. It was straight ahead, major 7 chords and then a blues section, but Gerry added these longing steel guitar notes until it started sounding so emotional and wistful,” Davison recalls. “It got a little too sad, even. We pulled that back and we found a nice balance between emotion of Gerry’s guitar and the buoyancy of the track.”

That wistful bounce runs through many of the songs, especially the ska-infused “Feed the Fire,” suggesting the bounty and thrill of life goes on, despite the shadows. “The album starts with the news, escapes the news to go surfing, then dives into the larger issues in life,” Davison reflects. “By the last songs, you make a decision to turn off the news and feed the fire, to fight complacency and feed your passions.” It was something Davison himself had to do, starting with that day in the waves two years ago.