17 July 30 - August 5, 2026 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents ▼ LOCAL MUSIC REMEMBERING CHAD LOVELL THE LOCAL MUSIC SCENE REMEMBERS COURSE OF EMPIRE DUMMER AND DEEP ELLUM PILLAR. BY SCOTT TUCKER O n Tuesday, July 21, longtime Deep Ellum musician and cultural main- stay Chad Lovell passed away after suffering for the better part of a decade from a traumatic head injury sustained in a fall in 2019. “[It was] unclear how much of the world around him he could take in, but was frequently visited by his band mates, friends and family,” wrote his friend, Steve Gaddis, in a memorial post on Facebook. “We were all waiting for that miraculous news that Chad had become communica- tive, and he was his old self again. But it was never to be. It’s tough to accept that he is gone, but his eternal pulse beats on.” Lovell’s influence on the Dallas music scene can’t be overstated, and a plethora of tributes on social media platforms, includ- ing his 1,800-member “Official Chad Lov- ell Update” Facebook page, have poured in from friends and musicians alike. Starting his professional music career as one of two drummers for the legendary Dallas band Course of Empire, Lovell, along with musicians Mike Graff, Vaughn Stevenson, Paul Semrad and Michael Jer- ome, came to be a dominant force in local alternative music, securing several record deals and releasing three albums while touring extensively. Alongside contempo- raries such as Toadies, Ugly Mus-Tard, Tripping Daisy and Slow Roosevelt, Course of Empire helped define Deep El- lum’s heyday. “Chad and I were good friends in the ‘90s,” says Ugly Mus-Tard drummer Fred Rush. “Our band’s first big show was opening for Course of Empire at Trees, completely sold out. If it wasn’t for Course of Empire, Ugly Must-Tard wouldn’t have had our big start. Chad was a great and powerful drummer, but what stuck out to me the most was how great a part-writer he was.”In 1998, after 10 years, Course of Empire disbanded. Although Lovell had cemented his status as an ac- complished drummer and seasoned musi- cian in the city by then, he shifted his focus to audio engineering, working be- hind the soundboard at Club Clearview and then at The Curtain Club. Lovell was a key player in a distinct co- hort of sound engineers, working dili- gently to help build the next generation of Deep Ellum rock bands, including The Feds, The Orange and The House Harkon- nen. In this role, Lovell acted as both a mentor and tastemaker, often critiquing, connecting and sharing the important in- sights he had gained through his extensive experience, arguably helping keep local rock music alive in Deep Ellum in the late 2000s. Lovell had a rare talent for know- ing which producers were the perfect fit for each band, ultimately growing their following. “Chad Lovell had an enormous impact on the Dallas music scene,” says Sonic Dropper studio owner, producer and friend of Lovell, Jim King. “Not only through Course of Empire, but through the countless musicians he connected with bandmates, gigs and opportunities. In 2004, he introduced me to The House Harkonnen, beginning a musical family that forever changed my life, all because of Chad.”The House Harkonnen would go on to record multiple albums with King and take the distinct honor of becoming “the loudest band in Deep Ellum,” all with the help of Lovell behind the soundboard. Through his work, Lovell’s life ex- tended beyond his talent as a musician, transforming his efforts into a conduit of genuine Deep Ellum culture. It may be said that Lovell was not only an accom- plished drummer and sound engineer with a spiderweb network, but a practi- tioner of social sculpture, sharing, wield- ing and taste-making. He did it all for the simple love of music.“Chad just loved art and creativity and being part of it,” says Lovell’s longtime friend and Course of Empire bandmate, Mike Graff. “He touched a lot of people and was the con- nection between generations of Deep El- lum musicians. He really believed in Deep Ellum and gave everything he had to make bands sound good. It was a labor of love, and he touched a lot of people doing it.”Lovell was also deeply loved by his family, who made every effort possible to keep him both safe and comfortable dur- ing his years-long recovery, epitomizing patience, resilience and grace. ▼ DENTON BANDS GONE FISHIN’ DENTON’S FISHBOY TURNS CUL- DE-SACS, ANXIETIES AND SMALL EVERYDAY ACTS OF COURAGE INTO ONE LOVINGLY WEIRD RECORD ON “BRAVEST NEIGHBOR.” E ric Michener has spent the better part of 30 years writing songs about Denton — its alleys, its cul-de-sacs, the neighbors he passes on his morning walks and the stories he imagines for them. On “Bravest Neighbor,” his eighth album as Fishboy, he turns that instinct into a full- blown concept record: twelve intercon- nected songs following a fictional North Denton neighborhood, where every charac- ter nominates someone else on the block as the bravest person they know. The frame is a notebook found in a little free library in someone’s yard. The narrators keep chang- ing. And the bravery, it turns out, is never where anyone expects it. It’s a fitting origin, because Michener has spent decades convinced that the whole uni- verse he needs is within walking distance. “If I’m an expert in anything,” he told us, “It is the things that are outside of my front door.” An introvert who sings to his cul-de-sac Michener is quick to describe himself as “an introverted artist with a huge imposter syndrome,” which is a wonderfully honest thing for a man who’s been mythologizing a single Texas town for decades. Fishboy started as a high-school art project in the 1990s. Eight studio albums, stacks of comic books and a fistful of gloriously strange local traditions later, he’s still pointing his tele- scope at the same worn-in 1970s neighbor- hoods, still finding galaxies in them. The magic trick of “Bravest Neighbor” is empathy disguised as eavesdropping. Every one of the album’s songs is a neighbor telling a story about another neighbor — and every narrator eventually tips their hand, revealing the isolation, heartbreak, embarrassment, or anxiety they were hiding behind someone else’s tale. The characters all have names starting with “D,” a small, obsessive flourish that pays off in a climactic neighborhood chase worthy of a Coen brothers short. There’s Danny DaChamp — a shut-in artist so fixated on his neighbor Diana’s jacket that he watches it through the blinds and writes songs about it — who still admits, “Some days I gotta fake a little courage for a step outside.” There’s that jacket itself, an actual garment passed between residents, patched and re- patched, borrowed and re-borrowed, until it becomes a kind of shared talisman. There’s Decatur, dispensing sticky-note wisdom like “it’s not a problem till it’s a problem.” And there’s the shut-in obsessing over his neigh- bor’s coat, terrified of the sidewalk. These aren’t grand acts of heroism. They’re the courage it takes to answer the door. Michener believes that smallness is ex- actly the point. He writes on the assumption that “every idea and every feeling is at least shared by one other person.” Nobody, he in- sists, feels brave in the moment. The bravery only shows up later, in the retelling — which is the whole reason the notebook exists. Sticky notes, turntables and a cast of heavyweights Here’s where the mad-scientist part comes in. To build the album, Michener covered a folding closet door in sticky notes, pairing each character with a musical style until the whole thing looked less like a songwriting session and more like a detective’s evidence wall. Move a note, swap a genre, watch a shut-in become a punk-like song and Scott Tucker Sean Leseman, left, with Chad Lovell, right, outside The Curtain Club in 2019. ▼ Music >> p18
