ABOUT THIS RECORD:
Do you want to take a leap of faith?

Rock Eupora, the moniker for Mississippi-bred, Nashville-based artist Clayton Waller, has always been a heart-on-your-sleeve musical endeavor. From his earliest recordings, Waller has never been afraid to ask the big, searching questions of life. Catchy, hooky pop sensibilities have similarly been a consistent through-line in Rock Eupora’s catalogue.

These defining features are still present in Pick At The Scab, Rock Eupora’s latest full-length album, and yet, something feels different.

“I wanted to let the songs breathe a bit,” Waller says of his mindset while writing the material that would become the songs for Pick At The Scab. “I gravitate towards writing up-beat, high energy songs, but this time around, I decided to lean back a little and let the songs speak for themselves.”

In Pick At The Scab, the listener hears Waller opening sores–admitting personal struggles, asking existential questions, exploring new sonic territory–and exposing them to the light, reaching beyond himself with emotionally honest lyrics and ambitious musical arrangements. “Feels like I’m going out on a limb with a crack in it over and over again,” he admits on the back side of the album.

“I have the tendency to want to fix or heal myself,” Waller says, reflecting on the inspiration behind the LP. “This album is very much me trying to ‘pick at the scab’ of my life. The motive is generally pure: I want to clear the scab away so as to speed up the healing process. We all know that picking at a scab usually results in a reopened wound and a bloody mess, further delaying the healing process. And yet we keep picking.”

Rock Eupora began when Waller was a senior in college. Each subsequent release has seen a broadening of scope and range, and Pick At The Scab is the logical successor to that tradition. Alongside every familiar influence––The Shins, Band of Horses, The Beach Boys––is a new friend, a Baby Huey, a Steely Dan, an Elizabeth Cotten, and, yes, even a Beyonce. Put simply, on Pick At The Scab, Rock Eupora is arriving at a destination: Waller, now thirty, has chosen to feel everything, instead of fighting to suppress or ignore the unpleasant or unknown. In so doing, in “feeling all of myself,” Waller has painted a rich, multivariate self-portrait. Through experimentation with new songs and sounds, confronting painful personal issues head-on, striving to find the balance between despair and joy, silliness and seriousness, heartbreak and love, the personal and the universal, Pick At The Scab delivers a full-bodied expression of what it means to live and to feel alive, an experience meant to be felt in a music venue together with others just as much as it can be heard between one’s own ears.

The art print bundle comes with a numbered, limited edition, high quality 12x16” art print of the full painting used on the album cover, by artist Georganna Greene. Art print will ship separately in its own protective packaging.

Tracklisting:

1. I Love You Because I Want To

2. Intimacy

3. New Perspective

4. Nothing Ever Happens

5. I Will Never Be Happy

6. Island Intermission (Just A Taste)

7. Can You Feel The Weight?

8. I Don’t Want To Feel Anything Anymore

9. I Would Tell You

10. The Accuser

11. Ode To My Friends