“We discovered that we like eating, and we like drinking, and we like making music, preferably all at the same time,” - Jeff Gregory
For many people the ongoing pandemic has been a rollercoaster ride, but for Jeff Gregory and his band The Runout it was the catalyst for a creative community which birthed the band’s latest album With Your Eyes Closed. Early on, as artists found their footing online with live streaming to replace live in-person shows, Gregory and his wife Kelley hit upon a simple format of the two of them, a guitar and occasional piano, repeated on Wednesday nights, that resonated with them and a core group of friends and fans.
“The pandemic really had us down, so Kelley and I found something to do to make ourselves happy and remember what singing together in high school was like,” Jeff Gregory says.
The Runout was already a band with a couple recording sessions and a first album out, along with a number of live shows featuring an evolving lineup that currently includes Mike Scarboro on drums, Moses Andrews on bass guitar, keyboards, and organ, and Chris Compton on electric guitar alongside Jeff and Kelley Gregory. But as the pandemic dragged on and Gregory took some soul-searching, nonmusical personal time, the community drew him back in, he says.
“Thank God for Chris Compton, Patrick Leitner, Lang Owen, all of those guys asked me to get involved on their projects, just a song here and there,” Gregory says. “It spurred me on to wanting to do music again myself.”
The community that gathered around the Gregorys shared one crucial thing, and, surprisingly, it wasn’t music–it was food.
“We discovered that we like eating, and we like drinking, and we like making music, preferably all at the same time,” Gregory says. “It sounds silly, but a lesson we’ve learned is that when you have friendship, and good vibes, then you can have some creativity and exploration in what you’re doing.”
The musical result of this camaraderie was The Runout’s latest album With Your Eyes Closed. The record pulls together the intimate feeling of those livestream nights with an expanded lineup that allows for full band arrangements. The tracks progress through deceptively feel-good anthems such as the bouncy Americana-esque opener, “Feelings,” and more raucous, rocking rave-ups like “Coffee and Weed.” Gregory also delves into deeper territory on tracks like the ethereal “Crooked Canyon,” a metaphorical journey to the center of one’s psyche that’s equal parts terrifying and glorious in its imagery.
Gregory has that rarest of qualities–the ability to turn a clever phrase, but also imbue its delivery with raw, honest emotion that connects on a deeper level than the average pop song. The centerpiece of the album is “Give Up,” an irresistible tune that began life on those now long-ago livestreams with just Jeff and Kelly harmonizing to an acoustic guitar. The album version adds shimmering electric guitar to the natural connection their voices make on lyrics that anyone in a long-term relationship can relate to: “I’ve been wanting to give up, I’ve been thinking it through…it seems I need a few more hours down this road with you.”
Those few more hours have become months now, in pandemic times. In lieu of a club gig for the album release, The Runout staged a mini-festival they dubbed “Stump Fire Fest” at a friend’s property. They invited a hundred of their fans and friends to come celebrate outdoors with them, a culmination of the community that had sustained the band to that point.
“We’re thankful for that community,” Gregory says now. “We weren’t really aware of it until that night–I think it was the result of the pandemic filtering out everything that didn’t matter, and the music was what was left.”
The Stump Fire Fest may have set an unrepeatable precedent; in addition to the Runout, several other bands played on a small stage built just for the night, poet Al Black read between sets, and Dick Moons and his drum circle formed up around a nearby campfire as participants ate, drank, and moved between the different moving parts of the evening.
“It really crossed scenes and generations,” Gregory says of the festival. “It wrapped up what had been a really meaningful time of making the record, too–Hanging out with Chris Compton, Sean Thomson, Patrick Leitner, Moses Andrews, that meant more to me than I realized at the time.”
It’s the mentality of helping others, Gregory concludes, that has to survive the pandemic.
“People are wondering what’s going on in the world right now, and the answer is that nobody knows,” He says, “So what must our response be? It has to be art.”