Days of the New

The Arc of Days of the New

The pivots — what forced Days of the New to reinvent.

1. 01

   The Green Studio Autocracy

   After booting Vest, Taul, and Whitener straight off the road in 1998, Meeks seized total control to build Days of the New II. He hired session musicians like drummer Ray Rizzo and uncredited local singers including a young Nicole Scherzinger, spending fourteen months layering full orchestra strings, choir arrangements, and world instruments. The 1999 album abandoned easy radio hits for sprawling, cinematic acoustic art-rock like 'Enemy' and 'The Weapon & the Wound'. It was arrogant and deeply ambitious, cutting ties with the alt-rock mainstream just to see how far one kid could stretch an orchestra.

2. 02

   The Red Compromise

   By early 2000, Meeks hit the studio in Louisville aiming for an even more theatrical, progressive rock direction with bassist Mike Huettig and Rizzo. Interscope hated the uncommercial sprawl, demanding rewrites and trucking in producer Ron Aniello to remix and salvage radio singles for the 2001 release of Days of the New III. Electric guitars finally bled into tracks like 'Hang On to This', but the finished cut sounded like an artist actively fighting his corporate minders. The label Outpost folded underneath the release, Meeks struggled hard with addiction, and the project drifted off the map.

3. 03

   The Archival Drift

   Decades of erratic live dates, aborted reunions, and scrapped studio sessions finally yielded the 2021 archival release Illusion Is Now. It captured an unvarnished, stripped-down Meeks wrestling with the acoustic skeletons of his past without the lavish orchestral budgets of the Outpost days. The record served as a raw document of survival rather than a radio comeback. It proved that despite thirty years of personal turmoil, his percussive right hand was the only engine that ever truly mattered in this band.

Influences

• Alice in Chains — Meeks took the dark, layered acoustic template of Jar of Flies directly into his rhythm work. You hear it across 'Touch, Peel and Stand' in the gloomy, dropped tunings and minor-key vocal harmonies. It showed him that acoustic records could hit harder than metal tracks.
• The Doors — Jim Morrison's low, brooding vocal delivery was the direct blueprint for Meeks' baritone phrasing. On 'Shelf in the Room', the loose, poetic cadence and deep register lean right into Morrison's dramatic delivery. It gave a southern Indiana kid a roadmap for theatrical rock frontman bravado.
• Dead Can Dance — Meeks explicitly cited their world music textures and atmospheric sweep as the catalyst for expanding his arrangements. The hand percussion, modal acoustic scales, and drone arrangements across the 1999 'Green' album lift straight from their neoclassical playbooks. It broke him out of standard three-chord grunge songwriting.
• Led Zeppelin — Jimmy Page's heavy acoustic picking on Led Zeppelin III served as the rhythmic engine for Meeks' entire guitar style. You can hear the aggressive, hard-strummed open tunings on 'The Down Town' biting directly from 'Bron-Y-Aur Stomp'. He took their folk-blues muscle and turned it into late-nineties alternative radio gold.
• Soundgarden — The weird, dissonant open tunings and heavy rhythmic syncopation came straight from Chris Cornell and Kim Thayil. Tracks like 'Die Born' rely on odd time signatures and tension-heavy chord voicings that mimic Badmotorfinger. It gave his acoustic arrangements a sinister, off-kilter edge.