Joe Stamm of the Joe Stamm Band wrote the group’s latest single in a beat up truck in the middle of nowhere, but it couldn’t have happened any other way.
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“Writing ‘Wild Imagination’ was a bit of a rite of passage for me,” Stamm tells American Songwriter of the track, which premieres below. “I was camping by myself outside Sparta, Wisconsin, staying in this tiny old camper that my buddy’s grandparents owned, trying to write songs. I got through the first day on some Dinty Moore, a bag of little powdered donuts and the better part of a case of Busch Light. But I wrote three songs, and one of those was ‘Wild Imagination.’”
The final product is a foot-stomping outlaw country number that traces a night of boozy shenanigans.
“I remember chunking on a G chord and singing, ‘I booked this woman on down at the station / She had liquor on her breath and a wild imagination,’” says Stamm. “The rest of the story just kind of unfolded itself out onto the pages in my notebook.”
“Wild Imagination” is the second single off the self-described “black dirt country-rock” band’s forthcoming debut album, The Good & the Crooked (& the High & the Horny), after “Good Times.”
“Hangovers have never been an excuse for me – I’ve always tried to push through them and force myself to be productive,” he told B-Sides & Badlands of the lead single. “That’s what I was doing one day last year. I was sitting on a bench at the gym, starin’ at my sunken eyes in one of those mirrors they have wrapped around the walls in them places, and I thought, ‘The good times are running me down…they’re keeping me down.’ I immediately got up, drove home, pulled the blinds and wrote [this song]. This is one of them pounding headaches, blankets over the windows, watching reruns of Cheers, what am I doing with my life kinda songs.”
“Good Times” may have been the first glimpse of the band’s new record, but Stamm says that “Wild Imagination” marked a turning point in his approach to songwriting.
“Growing up, there were topics you just didn’t play with,” he explains. “But I remember feeling a sense of creative freedom as I wrote ‘Wild Imagination’…that I could tell such a story and I didn’t have to cower under darkening skies waiting for lightning to strike. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that experience. And as a result, I don’t think I’ll ever stop writing whatever the fuck I want. This whole record—The Good & the Crooked (& the High & the Horny)—is the product of that very sentiment.”
The Good & the Crooked (& the High & the Horny) comes after a recent live album called Stories: Live & Unplugged, 2019’s Songs Without A Home, 2018’s Dandelion Woman, and 2016’s Feel Like Me. More recently Stamm released an ode to John Prine, called “Goodbye, John,” after Prine passed away earlier this year. The Lacon, IL-based band is rounded out by guitarist Dave Glover, bassist Bruce Moser, and drummer Tim Fiers.
The Good & the Crooked (& The High & the Horny) is out Sept. 25.
