The Winter Sounds emerge from Nashville

Nomadic bandleader Patrick Keenan, far right, re-formed The Winter Sounds in Nashville for the moment. The group plans on coming to Knoxville on a regular basis.

For more than four years The Winter Sounds has performed throughout the Southeast and has two full-length albums to its credit, but in the past three months the act has undergone major renovation.

Originally based out of Athens, Ga., and then Greenville, S.C., Winter Sounds front man Patrick Keenan moved to Nashville where he reloaded the band from scratch using Nashville residents. The new band is up and running in its new home and is touring and collaborating on new material to be recorded this summer.

As the sole survivor of The Sounds' initial lineup, Keenan moved to Nashville late last summer and quickly networked through local shows and online classifieds site Craigslist to rebuild what is now a five-piece band.

"The current roster has been performing together for about three months now," Keenan explains. "I moved here in August, and it took until about now to get the whole group together and everyone up to speed. I feel very lucky for the group that I have, and looking back on it all, it did happen pretty fast, so that was nice."

Comfortable in his new surroundings, Keenan says the location is a new fit but offers a number of advantages.

"Nashville is a town built for music," says Keenan. "Everyone you meet, it seems, is involved in the music business in some form - producers, agents, promoters, writers, studio guns, performers - Nashville has them all. Realizing that everyone wants the same thing can be very intimidating at times, but you just have to work hard and stand out creatively.

"There is a side to it that is very focused on developing a product or an image in addition to making music. That's kind of new to me, at least to be in the mix of it. The best part of Nashville is that any night of the week, I could go see a fantastic band that I've wanted to catch my whole life but never happened to be playing in town."

With the change in guard has also come a change in the group's style. While true to its seamless blend of violin and synth, the shift to a dancy, poppier sound, Keenan admits, was distinct enough for him to consider a name change, but dedication to the group's longtime loyalists and an unwillingness to scrap years of work has kept the moniker safe for now.

"I've wanted to do this circus punk and folk sound for a while and just wanted live material that was infectious," says Keenan. "Lyrically and musically, I've been really into the idea of simple themes that resonate without complex and unnecessary layers. I hope that idea will come through in the new songs.

The Winter Sounds has accumulated a relatively large amount of new material in a short time and hopes to record a new full-length in July. The material will serve as the third album under the Winter Sounds banner, and the effort will be undertaken by Scott Solter, whose recording resume includes work with Spoon, St. Vincent and John Vanderslice. In the meantime, the band presents its new tracks at live shows and will re-release its last album "Church of the Haunted South" on vinyl in May. Included with the album will be an exclusive digital download for three of the band's new demos.

"There are lots of songs that feel ready to go, and as a group we've been working on them, and we've also started several from-scratch ideas that everyone is contributing to, so it's a little bit of both," Keenan says of the new work. "Fleshing out and trying to finish existing songs that haven't been recorded while learning old tunes for the road and also writing completely brand new stuff is a fun challenge."

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