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Zack Keim can find inspiration nearly anywhere. The Pittsburgh singer-songwriter hatched the hook for his 2022 single “Canyon” while driving around Washington, D.C. making food deliveries. “I was delivering Uber Eats, and I wrote that on my phone—just a voice memo,” Keim recalls. An insistent vocal refrain (“Can-yonnn!”) was all it took; Keim started strumming the melody on his guitar, and pretty soon the song blossomed into a buoyant folk-pop gem of a tune.
A few years later, “Canyon” is the galvanizing opener of Keim’s second album,
Battery Lane, a substantial leap forward from his 2017 debut
First Step. Steeped in yearning melodies, deceptively intricate arrangements, and songs that reckon with youthful heartbreak and self-discovery,
Battery Lane establishes Keim as a preternaturally gifted songwriter whose work bridges the gap between garage-rock scuzz and kaleidoscopic indie-folk reveries.
At 27, Keim has done enough performing for several lifetimes. Born and raised in the factory town of Blawnox, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, Keim first picked up a guitar at age 13, when he enjoyed pretending to play along with his dad’s
Beatles Anthology CD. He formed his earliest bands in middle school, performing
Strokes and
Arctic Monkeys covers to pubescent classmates. His life changed when he started sneaking out of the house to catch indie-rock concerts, particularly the acclaimed Pittsburgh group 1,2,3. “Seeing 1,2,3 definitely had an impact on me as a musician,” Keim says.
Keim’s father started taking him to local open mics around Pittsburgh. It was at one open stage that Keim met
Bob Powers, a veteran slide guitarist 40 years Keim’s senior who introduced him to garage-rock staples from the
Stooges to
Black Lips. Keim and Powers hit it off and, after working together on blues standards, formed the garage-punk outfit Nox Boys. Keim was just 16 when the band was signed to Get Hip Records, and his life became a whirlwind. Nox Boys rose through the local underground scene, released two gloriously scuzzy albums with
Get Hip, and toured nationwide and—more recently—Europe.
By 20, Keim yearned to create something of his own. His debut solo album,
First Step, arrived that spring on Get Hip’s Folk Series sublabel. An aching and sparse work of sixties folk classicism, First Step wore its vintage influences on its sleeve:
Bob Dylan,
Woody Guthrie,
Nick Drake. “A lot of artists, when they start out, their first record takes a lot of inspiration from people they listen to,” Keim reflects. By comparison, recent singles “Better Days” and “Maggie” find Keim expanding his musical parameters and locating a voice all his own.
Keim found new inspiration at a low point in the spring of 2020. His band’s West Coast tour had been canceled as the coronavirus swept across the country, forcing him to drive from San Diego straight back to Pittsburgh. Soon their first European tour was canceled, too. “That was a turning point, an epiphany for me,” Keim says. During that eventful spring, Keim became entranced by
Hamilton Leithauser and
Rostam Batmanglij’s
I Had a Dream That You Were Mine and
Tobias Jesso Jr
.’s LP. He also broke up with his longtime girlfriend, who wanted him to become a postman. “I didn’t want to give up on my childhood dream,” Keim says.
While living in Washington, D.C. and saddled with credit card debt from his canceled tours, Keim began delivering for Uber Eats to pay the bills, playing the occasional gig on the side (even at an abandoned subway station). Inspired by the lush textures of the Hamilton/Rostam album, he began pushing himself musically—taking piano lessons, experimenting with a sixties organ, playing synths and keys. He built a home studio in his room, and began buying new gear to stimulate his creativity. One night, while down and out in D.C., Keim performed some new songs on Instagram Live, which caught the attention of musician
Josh Sickels, formerly of
1,2,3. Keim began sharing his demos with Sickels and his ex-1,2,3 bandmate
Chad Monticue. In a surreal culmination of Keim’s teenage obsession with 1,2,3, the two musicians (who now comprise the duo
Animal Scream) enthusiastically agreed to produce Keim’s new material.
Battery Lane—named after the street he lived on in the D.C. area—represents the long-gestating result of that collaboration. The album, produced by
Animal Scream and
Jake Hanner, finds Keim’s songwriting talent in full bloom and arrangements richer than ever. The record veers fearlessly from the roaring rock & roll stomp of “25 Years,” a Strokes-inspired throwback to Keim’s garage-rock roots, to the elegant balladry of “Comet,” which finds the songwriter ruminating on the roiling chaos of the world while swooning vocal harmonies soothe his racing mind. There’s even an instrumental interlude, the pastoral “Woodley Park,” which takes influence from
Paul and
Linda McCartney’s
Ram.
On first single “Incredible,” Keim delivers a stately ballad of the romantic order, channeling his heartbreak into a gem that reflects his melodic instinct and burbles with vintage sonic layers, from twinkling piano to plaintive mellotron. "Stop foolin' around!/I'm torn up and upside down," Keim croons as the song hits a soul-inflected fever pitch.
That song’s lush drama contrasts with the raw, nostalgic rush of “Better Days,” which hearkens back to Keim’s garage-rock roots with what he describes as a “fast-paced
Ramones/
Beach Boys vibe”: pounding tempos, wall-of-sound harmonies, vintage six-string textures. Lyrically, the song summons the feeling of sitting in a cherry-colored diner seat, longing for better things in the past, a theme captured by the evocative music video, which was directed by
Matt Costa.
The album also includes a previously released Keim single, “Alice,” which was inspired by a first experience of romantic rejection. In middle school, Keim played in a
She & Him-esque duo with a girl in his school. Keim had a crush on the girl, who ultimately rejected him because she was dating his best friend; “Alice” recounts this formative heartbreak. Keim first recorded the song in GarageBand at age 16; here, “Alice” finally gets the raucous, exuberant rendition it deserves, replete with dense layers of slide guitar and a pounding percussive stomp. (Speaking of unconventional percussion, the track opens with the sound of Josh Sickels smacking a cement brick in the studio: “It sounds like a railroad,” Keim raves.)
If
Battery Lane serves as a loosely autobiographical narrative about Keim’s formative years, its title track, named after a street in Bethesda, MD, forms a pair with “Washington D.C.,” a kind of wistful elegy for Keim’s time in the titular city: “I’m staring down a city I don’t live in anymore/And I fell in love with living and remember life is short,” the singer muses.
Even at his most forlorn moments, Keim’s music is brightened by an inherent optimistic spirit. “We’re gonna be alright,” Keim repeats during the mantra-like outro of “Wash Away the Pain,” which he wrote following a trip to Las Vegas with a friend who was going through a personal crisis. It’s a rousing tune that combines psychedelic harmonies with glimmers of flamenco guitar. And on the closing “Comet,” Keim finds solace in romance as the world around him burns: “So hold onto me tight/As we explode into the night,” he croons.
For the wunderkind songwriter,
Battery Lane is an artistic coming-of-age, and a reintroduction of sorts. “I grew up listening to lots of indie rock and
1,2,3, but then I shifted into the hardcore garage direction,” Keim says. “Now I’m finding my voice as an artist.”