For his first proper solo album in seven years, Peter Holsapple reconvened with an old friend: influential ’80s producer Don Dixon (R.E.M., Smithereens). And from the sounds of it, he’s also rekindled the same passion for lead guitar that informed his early days with longtime foil Chris Stamey in the dB’s, the ultimate cult band for fans of power pop and Southern-tinged new wave.
Starting in the late ’70s, the dB’s made several critically acclaimed, if commercially disappointing, albums, touring the U.S. and England. Holsapple later joined the Continental Drifters, a sort of pre-Americana supergroup that also included Mark Walton (Dream Syndicate), Susan Cowsill (Holsapple’s ex-wife) and Vicki Peterson (Bangles), among others.
During that post-dB’s period, Holsapple bounced around quite a bit, moving from North Carolina to New York to Los Angeles to New Orleans before finding his way back to where he started. The Face Of 68 (Label 51) was produced by Dixon in Holsapple’s home studio in Durham, with Rob Ladd (Connells) on drums and Robert Sledge (Ben Folds Five) on bass. Grammy nominee Jason Richmond engineered the four-day session, with Dixon taking everything back to his home studio in Canton, Ohio, for mixing.
Holsapple works his way through each track below.
—Hobart Rowland
1) “Anytime Soon”
“Some songs come to me music first, some words first. This is the former, and I had to work the story carefully around what I heard as a slippery arrangement. The lyrics are an appraisal of another lost love, with a slight peppering of sweet recollections. You gotta hang onto those days at the beach in your memory—or they’ll disappear completely.”
2) “The Face Of 68”
“It’s the album’s title song, but like a couple other tunes herein, it had some different lyrics at one point. I finally decided on ‘The Face Of 68 and constructed it around the title. To paraphrase the Stooges: ‘Last year, I was 68/Most of it was pretty great/This year, I turned 69/That’s OK, that’s just fine.’ In 1968, the British pop press named Peter Frampton—with his winning demeanor and classic good looks—‘the face of ’68.’ It crossed my mind to get in touch with Peter’s management to see if he’d consider playing the short guitar solo in the middle of the song himself. After brief contact with them, we never heard back, so it’s me hitting the licks in the song. Peter’s a busy guy—we totally understand.”
3) “Larger Than Life”
“I have a lot of trouble processing death. In the case of this song, it’s about my friend Carlo Nuccio, one of the founders of the Continental Drifters, who passed away in 2022. His death tore a hole in his family and his New Orleans and global friends. I needed to write it as a partial conversation with Carlo, that he let us know from the other side that he’s OK and watching over us—and maybe impart a little about what it all means anyway.”
4) “My Idea #49”
“On my Music Memos app, it saves each entry as ‘My Idea # … whatever.’ This one happened to be number 49. Once in a blue moon, you get inspired to write a set of lyrics from a potential title, which was the case here. I also like laundry lists. Dixon had Rob sit out in the ‘list’ section, then go back for a few passes of that ramshackle stuff you hear on the mix. It was sublime.”
5) “High, High Horse”
“I was telling someone recently that I hope I’m writing a different kind of song from the ones I wrote when I was 22. Experience and loss will do that to you. This is a look at how it used to be for me—and how it is now. It’s a balance between the enthusiastic rock-boy flâneur and the late-middle-aged family man … and then facing that toward whatever future’s left. Otherwise, it’s got a groovy, somewhat soulful Southern sound, and you can dance to it. This features the lovely and talented Mark Simonsen on organ, my longtime friend and the co-producer of ‘Don’t Mention The War’ several years ago.”
6) “That Kind Of Guy”
“He’s me, he’s you, he’s someone we all know or knew. I’ve been on both sides of the record counter since I was about 14, when I started working at Reznick’s Thruway in Winston-Salem. I learned, I absorbed, I read every magazine, I wrote, I played, I sang. Mostly, I listened. I know how you become that kind of guy—and I still am. My mind is cluttered with things like the declension of the Mayall, Butterfield and Savoy Brown lineups through the early 1980s, yet I can scarcely remember my own phone number anymore.”
7) “One For The Book”
“The title came from a remark I made to Continental Drifters biographer Sean Kelly as he neared the end of the editing process for White Noise And Lightning: The Continental Drifters Story (2024). It’s a true story that happened to the Drifters—one that was very twisted, with good intentions and bad medicine mixing up to make for an insane episode with an unhappy ending. In the beautiful, peaceful world of that band these days, it seemed like an anomalous scenario—and it didn’t make the cut.”
8) “Fireflies”
“I love subtraction. Can you tell? Less is best. This song kicked around for a few years while I was working on the arrangement. It had a fury of its own in the studio, a tribute to the great playing of Rob Ladd and Robert Sledge, with whom there’d been no rehearsal prior to entering the doors of Overdub Lane in Durham. Proof positive that a great rhythm section will get you where you want to go in comfort and with speed. The lyrics are a fever dream of Louisiana somewhere many years ago, before waking to someone else’s disconnected recollections of the same thing.”
9) “See About You”
“Just checking in on a friend—it’s what friends do. ‘Come See About Me’ by the Supremes was the obvious jumping off point for the lyrics. But I heard the phrase again in a gospel song many years later, and it stuck with me.”
10) “So Sad About Sam”
“In Winston-Salem, one of the greatest guitarists of our generation was Sam Moss. I say ‘our’ generation, but he was actually a few years older than me. I think of him as our Mike Bloomfield—blues-immersed, but with jazz, country and what-have-you mixed in. He was a mentor and inspiration to decades’ worth of musicians in the area. His guitar store (‘conveniently located near Sam’s house’) was a salon for pickers, and conversations ranged freely. When Sam took his own life in 2007, the musicians who knew, loved and admired him were gutted. For me, the relief from grief is to write a song (see ‘Larger Than Life’). I hope it’s perceived by Sam’s friends as a tribute.”
11) “She And Me”
“A love song to my wife and probably the most power-poppy track on the whole record. I couldn’t have imagined making this album without her support, help and suggestions.”
