Singled Out: Chris Stamey (The DBs)'s 'Meet Me In Midtown'

07-14-2025

Indie rock icon and the DBs co-founder Chris Stamey just released his new solo album "Anything Is Possible", and to celebrate we asked him to tell us about the single "Meet Me In Midtown". Here is the story:

When I was writing "Meet Me in Midtown," the fourth single from my new album Anything Is Possible (Label 51 Recordings), I was mostly thinking about the days at the end of the pandemic, when the world was opening up shop again and people were tentatively tiptoeing out into public spaces once more, when you could say "let's meet up and grab a coffee" without inviting disaster. But there was another subtext going on, as I wrote in the liner notes:

"Tony Hatch wrote the classic "Downtown" from a hotel's window in Times Square, mistaking these environs for the wilds of bohemian Greenwich Village! When I heard the song on AM radio as a child, I didn't know any better, either. But living later in the real downtown, in the days of CBGB, Lydia Lunch, and the Mudd Club, I realized he'd missed the boat. I started to imagine the song he might have written if he'd cottoned on to where he was! In the end, I think it also evokes the seedy mystique of the bars around Wall Street, after the stockbrokers abscond for Connecticut each night, so maybe I also missed the boat, geographically."

So, the song was one thing when it was just me pounding it out on the piano and trying to get the right notes under my fingers and the right words on a napkin and thinking about correcting Mr. Hatch. And it was another when I started recording it. I found it had a lot of room for references to other recordings, even if as Easter eggs that only I'd know about. Here are some of them:

Jimi Hendrix loved the sounds of the studio, and his "Crosstown Traffic" (another song about downtown) has a severely maxed-out compressor on a low grand piano octave. The piano sounds so awesome! When I heard it, I fell in love with that sound. So I put a bit of "Crosstown" into the piano sound of this song (and "Downtown" shared this abuse of a compressor, which makes the piano sound atomic.) It made me think of recording in the late 70s with Chilton, who later said that when it came to compressors, he was at that time like a "kid in a candy shop," turning the Fairchild (deluxe tube compressor at Ardent Studios) knobs until it hurt.

Then, thinking more about downtown sounds, I was reminded of "Summer in the City" by the Lovin' Spoonful, another sonic revelation of my youth: "You mean you can put traffic noises and other sound effects on a music record, they let you do that??" So I dialed in some recordings of trucks rolling by, moving in stereo in the background from one side to the other, on the intro, ending, choruses. They work here like the roar of a dozen double basses at the back of an orchestra in a nineteenth-century symphony (or so I kid myself).

I started to think about specific urban hangouts. Of course Maxwell's in Hoboken, my local pub, where I practically lived in the 80s (although I didn't put those sounds on here, Steve Fallon would have had to howl like a coyote I think?). Orange County Social Club in Carrboro, NC. (I'm sure you have your own entries here.) But also the bohemian subterranean dive where Jack Lemmon and the other warlocks and witches hung out in Bell Book and Candle came to mind. This brought me to a childhood fave, "Hernando's Hideaway," a 50s song from Pajama Game about a famous Memphis, Tenn., nightclub where Elvis hung out that was made into a hit by Archie Bleyer-and I put some of its "ooh-lay" vibe into the "oohs" on the bridges of my own "Midtown" song. And made a leap forward in time to the "Midtown scene" of Memphis later, in the mid 70s, as pictured so vividly by William Eggleston, the TGIF Fridays shot that evoked debauchery on the back of the Big Star record Radio City.

There was a time in early rock 'n' roll where you couldn't have a hit unless you had a tenor sax solo! Crazy to think of that now. I think it was partially because skinny guitar strings hadn't been invented (or at least made widely available), and the strings were probably flatwound to boot. So bending notes on guitar was pretty nigh impossible. Saxes could sound more vocal, could bend into the pitch. In any case, with the way my recording was developing, I thought a sax solo, from my super talented friend Matt Douglas (oft seen onstage with Mountain Goats) might be the ticket, and I suggested he go slightly bebop, in the style of the stacked "sax soli" breaks of 40s big bands (although it's only slightly stacked here). I just love what he played, it sounds so fluid and unexpected.

None of these thoughts would have mattered much if I wasn't able to capture the right groove in the studio, if the bones of the beast weren't cool. Here, it's courtesy of Charles Cleaver (on the Hatch-ian hypercompressed grand piano) and Dan Davis on drums, with me on guitar (and bass, added later). The icing came when carousers Marshall Crenshaw, Robert Sledge, Lynn Blakey, Matt McMichaels, and Rachel Kiel joined in to embrace the "one more for my baby" vibe and chime in on the refrains.

I'm pretty happy with the lyrics for this, too, especially the "toucan in a cage" line. And I think the "pounding shoes" line dials back, however obliquely, to my first single, "The Summer Sun," another city song, one that inverts gravity with the personification of the "pavement slapping my feet."

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more here