In music, as in life, reinvention is always a moment away. Two soon-to-be-released albums from Richmond based songwriters—one an up-and-coming Americana bandleader, the other his septuagenarian father—show how rewarding embracing change can be.

If you were among the thousands who descended on Brown’s Island for the 2023 Friday Cheers performance by breakthrough Americana singer Sierra Ferrell, you might remember the enthusiastic shout-out she gave to local opener Chris Leggett & the Copper Line before launching into her song, “Rosemary.” Leggett and his backing trio have steadily been picking up steam in recent years, playing Brown’s Island for events like Friday Cheers and Dominion Energy Riverrock, opening for the likes of Ferrell, Neal Francis, The Wilder Blue, Cris Jacobs and other roots music luminaries.

But where Ferrell is cementing her status as one of the genre’s brightest stars, having recently taken home four trophies from this year’s Grammys ceremony, Leggett and company are drifting from that foundational set of sounds and influences. In fact, they’re on the verge of releasing their most versatile album yet. “To the Table, Let’s Be Fed” is out on Friday, March 7, and the following day, the Camel will host a release show in honor of these 10 songs, which reveal the range of Leggett and his bandmates’ collective tastes, as well as the new sonic possibilities opened up by a recent lineup change.

“We were never a country band,” Chris Leggett says. “Maybe we leaned a little bit more that way. I feel like we leaned a little bit more rock on this album.”

Or as drummer Dave Pierandri puts it, jokingly but decisively, “We’re not a country band anymore. Put that on the record!”

Ironically, the recording process that resulted in “To the Table, Let’s Be Fed” did start in the country. Initial drum, bass and guitar tracking took place over the course of three days in June at White Star Sound, the retreat-like studio nestled in the woods outside of Charlottesville. “It’s out in the middle of nowhere,” Leggett notes appreciatively. He’d long been eyeing White Star as a recording destination, in part because of its past clientele. “I love Jason Mraz and that’s where he recorded a bunch with [studio owner] Chris Keup. There’s just been a lot of good records out of White Star.”

The sessions doubled as a retreat. Leggett and his bandmates stayed at the studio’s guest residence, recording until the early evening, cooking pasta for one dinner, picking up barbecue in Gordonsville for another, staying up “probably too late,” as Leggett describes it. On one of those nights, they spent time passing the proverbial aux cable, reviving past musical-selves via Spotify. “We each played songs from our high school bands to each other,” Dave Pierandri recalls. Bassist Andrew Carper, the newest addition to the Copper Line, was impressed. “[He] was like, ‘Hey, you guys were in good high school bands.’”

A Copper lineup evolution

A compliment from Andrew Carper carries quite a bit of weight. In addition to being one of the most sought after instrumentalists in town, given notable stints on bass for Palm Palm, the Southern Belles, Deau Eyes, the Wilson Springs Hotel and many other groups, Carper served as producer on the last full-length Chris Leggett & the Copper Line album, 2022’s “From the Idle Mind.” He then succeeded Tucker Dean as the Copper Line’s bass player upon Dean’s decision to follow a job opportunity to New York.

Carper brought his experiences with some of Richmond’s premier rock bands to bear on the album “To the Table, Let’s Be Fed,” remaining an influential voice in the studio while making his presence felt as a player. He was intentional about carving out a new groove with Dave Pierandri in particular. Pierandri remembers Carper pushing for the rhythm section to really lock in on the album’s second track, “Good Southern Baptist,” a hard-charging glimpse of Leggett’s evolving religious outlook. “We were at practice,” Pierandri says. “I knew what [Carper] wanted, and I remember being like, ‘Alright, I think I got it in my head. I’ll work on it at home.’ He was like, ‘No, we’re gonna work on it right now.’ … like, ‘Let’s just keep doing it over and over again.’”

Carper’s playing also has provided a boost of polyphony. His use of chords has afforded his bandmates, particularly Leggett, who is increasingly opting for electric guitar over acoustic, and the group’s highly proficient six-string lead, Matt Elgin, more room to operate. Things really start to stretch out on the album’s first single, “All Riled Up for Nothing,” revealing the guitarists’ shared appreciation for the jam subgenre and echoing their inclusion in the lineup for WNRN’s fourth annual “Dead Air” Grateful Dead cover concert.

“I feel like a lot of the playing choices that [Carper] makes on the bass can free up the two of us to add a little bit more in terms of layer and texture that we maybe weren’t doing in the past,” Elgin says.

Other key contributors to “To the Table, Let’s Be Fed” joined the fray during follow-up tracking at Pet Moose Studios in Richmond. Though not a geographical escape like White Star, the cozy, if-you-know-you-know atmosphere at Pet Moose lent an ensconced feel to sessions engineered by Stewart Myers, known by many for his work with 1990s breakout band Agents of Good Roots. More recently, Myers has made an impact in roots music by recording ascendent Western Virginia alt-country act 49 Winchester. When the time came to bring in a keyboardist for overdubs, Myers lobbied for another local with a stellar track record: Daniel Clarke. Leggett calls Clarke’s work on the album “mind-blowing.”

“That dude has magic in his fingers,” Dave Pierandri affirms.

While a more conventional process might have included keys from the start, Clarke added to the album intuitively, reacting in real time to each in-progress track and developing accompaniment on the spot. “He’d never heard the songs,” Leggett says. “He came in, maybe listened to [each song] for a minute, and then by the second half, he’s already playing along to it. Then he takes a cut and it’s the craziest thing you’ve ever heard in your life.”

“It was wild watching him do all that, that quickly, that well,” Matt Elgin says. “But it was also stuff that became a crucial part of the track. It was a hook or something that really added to the song. He wasn’t just like filling out chords.”

Seasoned reflection

Even more wild? At the same time those songs were taking shape, Chris Leggett and his band were helping to usher a whole other full-length album into the world: a collection of compositions by Leggett’s father, Carlyle, who has been writing songs for the better part of a half century. That album is called “Time Spent,” and it’s scheduled for release on Friday, April 4.

“One of my good buddies’ dads passed away, and my dad turned 70 that same year,” Chris Leggett says, reflecting on his push to start work on “Time Spent.” “It was like, ‘Damn. It’s time to do this.’”

“I haven’t really done anything with any of the music much until I retired about five years ago,” says Carlyle Leggett, who speaks with a friendly drawl and sings with J.J. Cale’s unaffected breeziness. “Christopher was after me: ‘Do an album, Dad. Do an album.’ I didn’t have a clue how to do any of it, but he said, ‘I’ll back you up.’”

His son did more than that. In addition to singing harmonies and joining his bandmates as a session musician for periodic recording at Allen Bergendahl’s Rabid Ears studio, the younger Leggett took on the task of sifting through and selecting from a backlog of his father’s songs numbering in the hundreds. Carlyle has been writing since his early 20s, when he first picked up a guitar. He’s living proof of the theory John Prine offered about why his music was so accessible: “I play it in three chords so if they want to learn how to play guitar, they can play a John Prine song in a hurry.”

“My heroes were always people like Kris Kristofferson and John Prine,” Carlyle Leggett says. “I always admired them so much. And so I learned three chords, and I didn’t even know what I was doing, if I was even doing anything, but it felt good to sit down and put some lyrics together and to sing to it.”

There’s even a song called “John Prine” on “Time Spent” that weaves together lyrical references and song titles made famous by the singing mailman from Chicago. Carlyle’s writing has grown more prolific since his 2019 retirement from a career in the heating and cooling industry. Multiple songs on the album were written from a place of seasoned reflection. In “Handful of Sand,” for example, he laments “all the time I wasted searching for a pot of gold that wasn’t there,” concluding: “I’ve worked hard for things I can’t take with me / All that’s left is just a handful of sand.”

The younger Leggett was drawn to some of his father’s older compositions, including ones written around 40 years ago amid a tumultuous time when Carlyle’s life was beset by drinking, recovery programs and divorce. “Restlessness,” for example, was written after a particularly challenging addiction counseling session with a psychiatrist. The album’s striking third track, “Sleep in the Rain,” grew out of a moment when others’ encouragement to dry up was beginning to sink in, despite Leggett’s immediate refusal to heed the advice. “They tell me I’ve got to quit drinking to get rid of the pain / If that’s the only way out, I’d rather sleep in the rain.”

“I wasn’t okay, but at that time, I thought I was,” he says. “I sort of knew. I had gotten enough to know that I had to do something… I ain’t got wet enough to get out of the rain, but eventually, I’ve got to.”

Carlyle Leggett has been sober for about 37 years now, which means Chris, now in his early 30s, has never known that version of his dad. “When I did songs in the garage, I wondered if he even understood where they came from,” Carlyle says. “He does today. He pretty much understands all of that. I think that’s why he liked going back to those.”

“He’s kind of an open book,” Chris says of his dad. “When we were in the studio working on a song, he loved to tell the story of where he was when he wrote it, and what it was about and who he was talking to or where the ideas came from. That was all cool, because these were songs that I heard my whole life.”

A family tradition

Music was a constant presence for Chris Leggett growing up. It wasn’t unusual for his dad’s bandmates to come over for practice in the evenings, whether it was the Detonators—the band his dad was playing saxophone in when Chris’ mom introduced herself by handing over a business card with “Do you know ‘Smoke on the Water?’” written on the back—or CJ and the Nitros, a dive-bar blues band with a penchant for George Thorogood covers. While his dad never pushed him to become a musician, there were always drums, keyboards and guitars sitting around for Chris to pick up.

“Whenever [my dad] picked up a guitar, he always played ‘The Silver Tongued Devil and I’ by Kris Kristofferson,” Chris remembers. “Then he’d always play a song that he [was] working on.”

It wasn’t long before the son was following in his father’s footsteps. By his mid-teens, the younger Leggett was writing songs and gigging at some of Richmond’s more prominent venues, including Alley Katz and the National. Though he started on drums, he switched to his current instrument when his guitarist moved away. “I showed him, like, three chords, and he just went with that,” Carlyle says. “It was so much easier for him.”

While Carlyle did help his son by running sound at early shows and providing feedback on which instruments could stand to be turned up or down, he never felt compelled to offer guidance on songwriting. “Even when he first started,” Carlyle says, “I had that feeling like, ‘This is just so much better than what I could have ever done.’”

Less whiskey, more wisdom

Chris Leggett saw “To the Table, Let’s Be Fed” as an opportunity to progress even further. Where “From the Idle Mind” revelled in emitting whiskey fumes and ill-fated relationships, his new album points at longer-term thinking, or at the very least, a desire to change.

This transition is the subject of “Hunkered Down & Lonely,” one of a few songs about songwriting, in which he observes: “Lately finding inspiration doesn’t feel the same.” In “All Riled Up for Nothing,” he sings about “aging out, yet giving in.”

“[It’s] not a growing-up record,” he says, “but it’s kind of like, damn, you’re 30 years old now. It’s time to do some real shit and not talk about getting your heart broken and drinking all the time.”

It’s especially telling that the album’s daringly carefree exception, “Quit Your Job”—an anthem for anyone looking to trade the yoke of employment for an afternoon of riverside frivolity—is followed by “Get a Job,” a downtempo, back-to-reality companion. Leggett isn’t out to bum anyone out; instead, he’s painted an authentic portrait of life at a turning point. Or as he sings in “Cover Band,” the album’s closer and his favorite: “Often think of how each song could be my last / If I lose the will or brainpower and life moves too damn fast.”

It’s a timeless lyric beyond its author’s years and perfectly timely, taken in concert with his determination to document his father’s songwriting through the decades. Once both albums are available, you might even consider queueing up “Time Spent” just as “Cover Band” is drawing to a close. You’ll hear the multifaceted grace music can bring when seasons of change are swirling, and you’ll feel the unique fabric of music interwoven across generations.

“I have such a passion for it that, to see him do what he does,” Carlyle Leggett says, “it just really makes me proud.”

“To the Table, Let’s Be Fed” will be released Friday, March 7. To hear and purchase the album, visit chrisleggett.bandcamp.com. Chris Leggett & the Copper Line will perform at The Camel on Saturday, March 8. Jonathan Paige Brown Jr. will open and Space Koi will close the show with a late-night set. Doors open at 8 p.m. and music starts at 9 p.m. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased at thecamel.org. “Time Spent” is out Friday, April 4. For more information on the album’s release, visit instagram.com/carlyleleggett.