Kevin Bronson on May 23rd, 2019

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Back in the mid-Aughts, when his band the Broken West were fast becoming favorites in the Silver Lake scene, Ross Flournoy was about the most genial dude you could hoist a beer with. By the time he segued to Apex Manor, he was still That Guy. Apex Manor’s debut album, 2011’s “The Year of Magical Drinking,” was magical, indeed. The drinking, not so much.

The album faltered, Flournoy foundered and he sought refuge, rehab and rejuvenation with his parents in Memphis. But a funny thing happened on the way to a second career: Flournoy embraced sobriety, got work writing music for TV and film and moved back to Los Angeles. Finally, after having to “re-learn” how to write songs sober, he penned the music on “Heartbreak City,” the second Apex Manor album, coming out May 31 on Merge Records.

It’s a noisy beast of an album — think Dinosaur Jr.-grade beastly — made with bassist/producer Rob Barbato and drummer Dan Allaire.

||| Stream: “Where My Mind Goes”

While “Heartbreak City’s” caustic beauty owes to Barbato’s ace stewardship, Flournoy has others to thank for the album’s existence at all. In order, they would be his father Tom, pimento cheese, CNN and Merge Records.

In the Buzz Bands LA interview, Flournoy talks about his “sober Sherpa,” the tastiest cheese spread in the Southeast, where you can hear his music almost every night and … what … pimento cheese?

Buzz Bands LA: Let’s start with: The years of magical drinking didn’t turn out so magical right?

Ross Flournoy: No. I knew pretty early on that I was an alcoholic. I probably came to that realization that end of 2008, which was a good 2 1/2 years before I got sober. I remember I was visiting Memphis at Christmas, and I was driving my parents’ car in the middle of the day doing errands. I was turning on this busy street and thinking, “Oh.” I went 2 1/2 years knowing that and not really doing anything about it.

Was there one triggering incident or one person that convinced you to get help?

It was basically self-awareness … and that I thought I was gonna kill myself. Late July of 2011, I was just in a deep, dark hole. I was very depressed. I had tried to quit drinking on my own, but it lasted like three weeks. … I had a pretty strict drinking ritual. I would start at noon with a shot of Jack Daniels. Sometimes when I did that shot, I would throw it up. And then it was off to the races. Then one day I started doing vodka at 10, and over the next week it just felt like I was losing control of myself. I didn’t want to hurt myself, but it felt like there was some unconscious part of me that was going to seize control and kill me.

Were other things in your life doing poorly?

Yeah, the first Apex Manor record had come out in January of 2011 and it wasn’t doing that well. It wasn’t being licensed, I kept having tours get canceled. … It felt like it was cursed. And I was in a relationship that was on its very last legs. It felt like everything around me was falling apart, and I didn’t know what to do. So I started drinking more and more. And I had that feeling I was going to intentionally kill myself. That scared me into going into rehab, on my own. So I flew back to Memphis to visit my parents with the idea that I could come back to California and go into rehab. Then, I didn’t think I could make it back to California without something bad happening. So I just went to rehab. And I ended up staying in Memphis for almost three years.

Your family was supportive?

Yes. My dad got sober, too, in 2009. So he has two-plus years on me. He was like my sober Sherpa. My dad really showed me how to live without drinking.

What are some of the things he said?

Wake up early, exercise every day, keep yourself busy.

And it just so happened that right around that time he had just started this cheese business. That started to really grow, and that’s one of the reasons I stayed, to help with that. But on an unconscious level, I knew it was meant for me to move back to L.A. I knew I would always return, but it took a little longer than I thought it would.

Tell me about pimento cheese then …

I grew up very privileged, in Montecito, but then my parents lost everything around 2002. It happened during my senior year of college. My dad had started a company in Memphis, and because he was living in California and the company was back in Memphis, it got run into the ground. I went from having a lot and having a safety net to having parents who couldn’t even give me 20 bucks, in less than a year. It was pretty dark.

So he had reason to drink, too …

Yes, he did, and that exacerbated his drinking. But around the end of 2010, he got really into cooking and started playing around with his mom’s pimento cheese recipe. He has some friends who said, “This is really good, you should sell it.” He’s a good businessman with a keen sense of opportunity. Anyway, he started selling it at farmers markets, and then I moved back. I finished six weeks of outpatient treatment and then I started going to farmers markets every Saturday. That fall, we pitched the product to an independent grocer, who took it on. In a few years we were in stores throughout the Southeast, and we’re getting into Walmarts this year. Now [Tom’s Tiny Kitchen] includes cheese dips and quesos. It’s all in the family recipe.

That had to feel rewarding for your whole family.

There was a lot of good that came from me going home. One of the things was getting even closer with my parents, and to sort of participate in their redemption, as it were. To witness it, and be a part of it, was really something.

||| Stream: “Actual Size”

Why did you still feel compelled to come back to Southern California?

I love it. My grandparents are from here, my mom grew up here. Growing up in Santa Barbara, you’re only 90 miles away. I came down as a kid, so I was always comfortable in the city. … Although I didn’t go east of La Brea until I was 22.

That’s quite a confession …

Yeah, one night we were out drinking and I suddenly realized, “Oh, wow, the city keeps going east.”

So you came back in the spring of 2014, but you didn’t jump right back into doing a band. What did you have on your plate?

A very unusual but very fortunate thing happened while I was in Memphis. An old friend of mine who is a producer at CNN was in the process of creating a new daily news show, “The Lead with Jake Tapper.” They had commissioned people to write the theme, but everybody at the show hated it. So she asked me to take a crack at it. They wanted something that wasn’t traditionally newsy, they wanted it to sound indie-rock-ish. I sent over four 30-second snippets and they really liked one, so I developed that. And then the show launched. And by the time I moved, I was earning royalties.

You have a 30-second hit single …

In terms of money, it’s by far the most successful thing I’ve ever written. It’s funny, the actor Richard Kind did an interview with Uproxx where they asked what his most frequently played song was and he said “The theme song to ‘The Lead with Jake Tapper.’” I got a kick out of that.

Did this lead to other work composing?

It did. Between 2014 and 2017, I ended up scoring a couple low-budget movies and short films and writing for commercials. I was not really writing songs, just composing for pictures. A friend had hooked me up with this music house and they started sending me work.

But it was not lost on me that the reason I was doing that was because I liked the anonymity of it. I wasn’t ready to put myself out there. “The Year of Magical Drinking” got mixed reviews, and I took that very hard. It scared me from wanting to do this again for a long time. But another crucial part of the puzzle was that I had to re-learn how to write songs again. In the past, every song I’d written, I’d at least be buzzed. I had to learn to do that again, sober.

What was the breakthrough song?

It’s not even on the album. It’s a song called “Movie in My Mind.” I had been working on a low-budget teen horror flick and I thought it might work for that. The project fell apart, but I was already in that frame of my mind where I was going out to my studio every day and working. I thought, “What the fuck am I going to do?” And decided to try to write songs. I wrote one and kind of liked it and I wrote another one, and so on. And when I had 12 or 15 done, I called (CEO) Laura Ballance at Merge and said I think I’m ready to do this again. And she said, “Are you sure? You’ll have to go out on the road and do all the shit you didn’t like the first time.” I said, “Yeah, I wanna give it another go.”

Was another record part of your deal with Merge or was that just Merge being Merge?

It was Merge being Merge. Think about this for a minute: What other label on the fucking planet is going to let a guy who no one has heard of release his second album, eight years later? No one would do that, except for Merge. I can’t think of anyone else. It’s because it’s like a family. Look at Jim Putnam. He made that Mt. Wilson Repeater album on his own, and Laura heard about it and called him. … That’s how they treat people. If I were on any other label and wanted to make a second record, I would have had to put it out on my own.

||| Stream: “Asked & Answered”

So how much of all this is addressed directly on the record?

A few of the songs were inspired by a break-up, but … Let’s face it, I’m not smart enough to go in with a plan. I’m lucky if I get a song done. “Where My Mind Goes” — that I know is me assessing my anxiety. This tendency I’ve had my whole life to think that whatever the worst possible outcome is in any given situation is what will happen. Overall, though, it’s just a little snapshot of where I was in my life when I wrote the songs. All of that other stuff is hovering in the margins.

And then you decided to make the album, for lack of a better description, a consciously noisy beast.

And that I have to give credit to the producer, Rob Barbato. That was really his kind of aesthetic. We tracked the basics all live, with Dan Allaire on drums and Rob on bass. And it just turned into this noisy Dinosaur Jr. thing, and I just loved it. It was not how I envisioned it at all, but it was so thrilling to me. It just felt right.

Look, in my heart, I’m like a power-pop songwriter. Rob wanted to take that and not sand off the edges. There were a couple demos where I had a three-part harmony, and he said, “No. One-part harmony.” So I have these songs that feel like they could be Big Star songs but they have this aggression. And they’re really fun live. Loud and fast.

Speaking of live, who’s going to be playing with you at your record release?

For this show it’s Matty McLoughlin (The Soft Pack) on guitar, Andy Creighton (The World Record) on bass, Brian Cleary (Strange Parade) on keys and a killer young drummer named Hayley Brownell.

||| Live: Apex Manor celebrate their album release with a show May 30 at the Bootleg Theater, supported by Coastal Clouds and Near Beer. Tickets.

||| Previously: “The Year of Magical Drinking”