Photo credit: Rick Ebbers
Buffalo Gospel's Ryan Necci
Ryan Necci and his friend Josh Tovar both grew up fans of country music, but they had different ways of expressing their fandom. “Ever since elementary school, I’ve been a fan of country music,” Necci says, “but it was always like, ‘ssshhhhh, don’t say that out loud.’” Tovar, on the other hand, was never shy about his love of country. “He was so confident in it,” Necci recalls. “He’d walk around like, ‘Fuck it, this is exactly what I love, and this is the most badass music in the world when it’s done right.’”
It was Tovar’s enthusiasm that helped give Necci the confidence he needed to start his own band, Buffalo Gospel, a bluegrass-leaning group with a decidedly more country-western edge than most of Milwaukee’s alt-country bands. And so when Tovar died in 2014 from brain cancer, Necci was gutted, both emotionally and creatively.
“He was kind of the guy who really helped me get this project going and the first guy to get me excited about my writing,” Necci says. “When he passed away, that really took a lot of the wind out of my sails.” Necci’s plans to write and record a second Buffalo Gospel album were put on hold, he says, “because I was in no condition to be writing.”
Necci says he only regained some momentum when he met the man he now cites as his other great muse, Chris Porterfield of perhaps Milwaukee’s most prominent folk-rock band, Field Report. The two struck up a fast friendship. “He sort of came about at the right time to ignite that fire again of wanting to write and wanting to create, whether he knew he was doing it or not,” Necci says. “He was a big supporter, like Josh was. It was right when I needed someone to sort of swoop in and champion what I was doing.”
Necci and Porterfield had led parallel lives in some respects. Both lived in Eau Claire, Wis., at the same time, though they ran in different circles (Necci had been ingrained in the jam scene up there). Necci had been a fan of Field Report since their first album, and Porterfield says when he first saw Necci perform he was blown away by his talent.
“He’s a star,” Porterfield says of Necci. “Something happens when he’s on stage. He becomes a different person. It’s very much like an Incredible Hulk kind of transformation; it’s incredible. All it’s going to take is one person in Nashville to see Buffalo Gospel and realize this band is incredibly legit and incredibly marketable, and they’re going to be on the Chris Stapleton path.”
Since he was between Field Report albums at the time, Porterfield came to moonlight as a kind of unofficial member of Buffalo Gospel, sitting in on their shows and helping Necci workshop the songs that would become the group’s new album, On the First Bell.
“I remember sitting in Chris’s basement, and we were listening to some demos that didn’t make the record, and he asked me pretty plainly, ‘Have you ever written about Josh? Have you ever processed that?’” Necci recalls. “We ended by agreeing that it’ll happen when it happens, and that I shouldn’t be afraid to let that into my songwriting, and within a couple months the floodgates just kind of opened. Music has always been kind of a therapy for me, and this album became my way of processing losing Josh. I had never lost a friend close to my age before—I’d never really lost a close friend before—and I was just dealing with a mountain of things that I didn’t know how to process. This record is very much me trying to work my way through all of it.”
Despite its foundation in tragedy, On the First Bell is rarely outright sorrowful. The songs are pained and passionate but less focused on grief than resilience. They’re also a good deal leaner and more direct than those on Buffalo Gospel’s debut, something Necci credits Porterfield for.
“The biggest thing he taught me to do is not have to say everything in a song,” Necci says. “I learned you can cut out a few verses and leave everything to the imagination and still have a great song. That’s the big difference between the albums. The first album had more of a folk feel where if I wrote seven verses, the song had seven verses. For this one it was like, ‘If the songs are running over four minutes, is this essential?’”
Porterfield says for his part, he mostly tried to stay out of Necci’s way.
“I think sometimes talented people just need to be reminded that they’re talented,” Porterfield says. “I think that, spending time together, I’ve maybe helped him how to be a better band leader and to be what the other musicians need or want. I think he maybe learned how to sort of head up an operation in addition to tightening his songwriting, but honestly, his instincts are killer. He’s got killer instincts. His talent is honestly blinding and pretty near limitless. Every now and then you need somebody from the outside who can show you that.”
Buffalo Gospel play an album release show at Anodyne Coffee Saturday, May 5 at 7:30 with Joseph Huber.
