BEHOLD THE BRAVE
Hometown guys return with new album to their credit
Clayton Davis, Zack Randolph, Jeremiah Thompson and Joel Parks introduced their band, Behold the Brave, in Chattanooga in 2010, playing gigs at the former Warehouse and other venues around town before moving to Nashville in 2015.
The hometown sons return Saturday night to play Revelry Room, 41 Station St., one of the first stops on a summer tour supporting their self-titled debut album.
“Chattanooga is the one spot that knows our whole timeline, everywhere else we are just a band nobody has heard of. Chattanooga is our hometown and is important to us,” says Davis of their excitement over Saturday night’s homecoming.
The four guys grew up in Chattanooga — Davis graduating from Ooltewah High, Thompson from Soddy-Daisy High, Randolph from Silverdale Academy and Parks from home school — but didn’t meet until attending Lee University.
“Zack, Joel and I played together with another guy we met at Lee. Jeremiah was playing in another band before we met him,” Davis recalls of how Behold the Brave was formed.
“At first we played in Chattanooga once or twice a week, built a following, picked up speed and got a manager and couple of team members. We talked and decided to place ourselves in a bigger pond,” says Davis of the move to Music City. “There’s a lot of competition, but there’s also a lot to be learned about the music industry there.”
Once in Nashville, they took the music they’d played at their Chattanooga gigs and began fine-tuning, tweaking each of the album’s nine tracks.
“We found out we were going to record with Matt Goldman at Glow in the Dark Studio, so we were stoked about that. More than anything we wanted to write songs to impress him,” says Davis.
After two years in production, the album “Behold the Brave” dropped last week on July 7. Its first single, “Great American Challenge,” was released June 16.
“Great American Challenge” is an introspective look at accepting responsibility for yourself, finding how to put your education to use after school is completed.
“When we started writing songs it was right after college. No one ever tells you about that time — growing up you just hear ‘Go to college.’ When you get out, nobody ever explains to you what happens then. At that point in our lives, it was like ‘Well, what do we do now? We’ve done all the steps in our lives everyone told us to do.’
“There’s this idea that here in America, you go to college, get out and get a good job. We realized it’s not that easy. You learn you still have a lot of growing up to do,” Davis explains.
The quartet says this album is a pivotal point not just in their music, but their lives.
“We were young and reckless, and I think the music is a fun representation of that. Looking back, the album’s purpose was to convey that easy-going, happy, doing-it-for-thefun-of-it feeling.”
“Behold the Brave” is available on iTunes, Amazon and Target.com. The band will have vinyl copies for purchase at Revelry Room.
“We were young and reckless, and I think the music is a fun representation of that. Looking back, the album’s purpose was to convey that easy-going, happy, doing-it-for-the-fun-of-it feeling.” — CLAYTON DAVIS