Interview by Carson Colenbaugh
Before we begin, let’s meet the band—
Spencer Ford is a vocalist, guitarist, and dual citizen of the USA & Jamaica from Atlanta, Georgia.
Trent Jones is a guitarist and recovering League of Legends player from San Antonio, Texas.
Jack Dratch is a current drummer and former teenage keys virtuoso from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Poppy Geoghan is a bassist and survivor of his high school football team’s offensive line from Baltimore, Maryland.
Spencer, could you tell us a brief origin story of how you all met? How did Pump Action come together?
We met as freshmen at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. Poppy and I met pretty early on during orientation and became fast friends when we found that we were in the same major. A few weeks into school starting, Pop heard me play at an open mic, really liked my voice and my writing, and decided he wanted to put a group together to play at the next opportunity. He told me that the bass professor was hyping up a freshman drummer from Philly that came in, so we got together and worked out a cover of Chris Stapleton’s “I Was Wrong” for the subsequent open mic. The three of us decided to start a band together, and thus Pump Action was born. Very soon after that, Pop and Jack told me that another classmate of ours was an absolute monster on the guitar and that we should consider adding him in. Unbeknownst to me, they had already asked him to join. I’m glad they did though, because our sound wouldn’t have been complete without him.
That was all first semester of our freshman year. By second semester, the four of us had decided to get a house together off campus for the coming year. COVID hit halfway through our second semester and sent us home, but by that time, we’d already secured our place together for sophomore year. We moved in together in fall of 2020, and haven’t stopped playing together since!
Compared to other cities, Nashville is not typically associated with rock or funk, but if anyone takes even a couple seconds to dig into our history, they’ll find that we have as deep an association with genres other than Country as we do with those honky tonk tunes. I’m thinking especially of the legacy of Jefferson Street and of Bob Dylan’s 1966 album Blonde on Blonde. As a funk-influenced rock group working in Nashville today, do you feel that you adapted quickly to the music landscape, or are you still figuring out your place and people? I’m betting there’s a little bit of both in this story.
Definitely a little bit of both. I certainly feel like the scene is ready and willing to accept a band like us and a sound like ours, but I feel as though the infrastructure for non-country acts is not as well-established in Nashville. It certainly takes a little bit more digging to find open mics, venues, and events that allow for us to do our thing, but once you’re in, you’re in with pretty much everyone here. Thankfully, it’s a city that really thrives on community, and we’ve been lucky to find some like-minded individuals that are ready to push us forward in our journey.
When I was lucky enough to be a Pump Action audience member most recently, I saw you at The 5 Spot in East Nashville. Your sound really filled-out the room there, and even though I loved your music already, I found myself absolutely transfixed from the moment you started. Is there a type of venue you’re always excited to play?
Well thank you! We try to take live performance seriously. In a day and age when there are a lot of artists making their living almost exclusively with recorded music, we want to make sure that our live show is just as much of a part of the fan experience.
I’m not sure there’s a specific type of venue that we love to play. Truly, we’re lucky in a city like Nashville to have venues where the audience is actually there to see a show as opposed to being at a bar, eating, or participating in another activity. Any room where the focus of the event is the music is an exciting place for us to play.
Most importantly, is there a spot in Nashville where someone should absolutely see you perform if they get the opportunity?
Hopefully the Ryman soon!
More seriously, we like to take full advantage of the stage we’re given anywhere we play, so try not to miss out on a show if you can!
As a literary publication, Nashville Review is focused on publishing the best poetry & prose that lands in our submission piles. How has written literature played a role in evolving your work as songwriters? As performers?
Where to begin!
Songwriting is a medium that is almost entirely dependent on the economic use of language to convey complex concepts effectively. Lyric writing in and of itself is an attempt to fit years or decades of the human experience into a three-and-a-half-minute package that fits extremely well on top of melody. In my opinion, the most effective way to study how to do this is to go to the written word. The measure of a truly great lyric is if it stands alone without the “distraction” of melody, harmony, and production, so naturally, the best way to study the construction of a great lyric is to study the written word that was intended to be consumed without the luxury of music to carry its message. I was a very avid reader as a kid, so the ability of language to paint vivid pictures is something that I have been familiar with for a long time. The construction and craftsmanship associated with the mechanics of poetry also really inspire my songwriting. I even have some pretty deep-cut literary references in some songs if you wanna dig into some lyrics, like in the bridge section of “Strangers.”
(Reader, had I bet money on that particular reference, I would’ve lost. If you guessed an allusion to John Donne and his wife Anne More, you’re today’s winner.)
Lightning Round—
Do you have a special relationship with any author or their work? I’d love to get a book recommendation from everyone if possible!
I personally love any play written by August Wilson. I did a huge project on his works my senior year of high school.
I know for a fact Jack really loves The Alchemist and Pop is very into the Lord of the Rings series. Trent mostly reads Twitter posts about Miami Hurricanes football, if that counts. Great philosophy to be gleaned from there.
What’s an influence on your music that even a die-hard fan might find surprising?
Kendrick Lamar. The greatest artist of our generation.
Can you share a Spotify link to the Pump Action song that’s most likely to make someone reading this an instant admirer?
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Pump Action is a rock band from Miami, Florida currently living and working in Nashville, Tennessee. Their most recent singles are “Euphoria” & “Leave My Girl Alone,” and their most recent EP is Coronation. They can be found on Instagram, Spotify, and elsewhere.
Carson Colenbaugh is a writer from Kennesaw, Georgia. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, North American Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is currently an MFA Candidate in Poetry at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches creative writing and serves as the music editor at Nashville Review.