The Shitdels Release ‘Where​’​s Your Head?’ on Big Neck Records

Big Neck Records recently announced an upcoming LP, Where’s Your Head?, from The Shitdels. The band started as Jordan Wayne’s bedroom project with his wife, Katelyn, shortly after they moved to Nashville from Memphis in 2015. A handful of the songs were leftover from Wayne’s Memphis garage/psych band The Blackberries (aka Whoa, Blackberries or just Blackberries) and the rest were kind of written/recorded in that vein.

Wayne comments:

“I was discovering a way to just write about stuff around me. Spiders, people dressed up funny, dogs, etc. I didn’t have a band together yet, so I played all the parts on our first recordings.”

Their buddy Mike Bibbs had a band called Modern Convenience (also a Memphis transplant). He and Katelyn had known each other for several years, and they got him to play bass with them. Wayne taught his wife the organ parts on an old Farfisa he found in his attic when he lived in Toledo. Mike brought in another friend, Carlos Ortiz, on drums.

Scheduling practice time was proving to be pretty difficult. Katelyn was at the grocery store one day and saw Ryan Sweeney, who she recognized from Cheap Time (they used to crash at her house when they played Memphis). She convinced Wayne to get in touch with him to play drums. Wayne sent him some songs, and he was into them, so they jammed a few times and started playing shows.

Their self-titled cassette was released in 2017 on What’s for Breakfast Records, and Wayne immediately started writing and recording songs for the Shape-Shift Faces LP (one-man band style again for efficiency) and the Baghwan Bop EP (first recording with all band members). Baghwan came out first in February 2019, then SSF in December. It seemed like they were picking up speed. They had an LP and a tour in the works! Playing a lot of exciting shows with some really cool bands from the midwest/midsouth area. Then Covid happened, and everything just kind of halted.

“I kept writing songs and reflected on our previous releases. The psych part just wasn’t happening and my wife would only play with us part-time due to her anxiety,” says Wayne.

They were a four-piece half of the time and a three-piece the other half, and they had a back up bass player, Kiley Wells, that was playing more and more shows with them. They knew Kiley from his band The Mumzies and working at Fond Object Records. This became their current, more permanent lineup. Wayne, Sweeney, and Kiley.

The Shitdels ‘Where’s Your Head?’ album artwork