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It happened during an ordinary refueling stop for the Dirty River Boys, the band on its way from Austin to Tulsa to kick off a six date run. The van pulled up at a gas station and its occupants scattered, with Colton James hopping on his skateboard and heading over to a grocery store for a rotisserie chicken.
But the board hit an oil patch and went flying, and the bassist found himself not just down, but possibly out. “I see him at the van and he’s got a bone about to pop out of his shoulder, and our tour manager is on the phone,” recalls drummer Travis Stearns.
So the band retreated to Austin, where an ER doc told James he had a shattered collarbone and would need surgery. In the meantime, they outfitted him with a sling. For a moment the band contemplated scratching its upcoming six-date run, because for a stand-up bassist, a collarbone tends to be necessary equipment. “Every time I lifted my arms to play the bass I could just feel the bones crunching on each other,” he says.
But he didn’t want to force his bandmates to cancel shows. Why don’t I play the electric bass instead, he wondered, while sitting in a chair? Wouldn’t that work? The band agreed, and they were off again. “That was a long bumpy drive with a broken collarbone,” James wryly recalls. “Didn’t even stop to get any medication on the way—that was a bad idea. “ But that’s the Dirty River Boys ethos. Playing upwards of 200 dates a year, giving heartfelt, unrestrained performances, and winning over a loyal audience show- by-show, it takes a lot more than a few broken bones to stop them.
Perhaps that has a little something to do with the band’s hometown. El Paso, home of the “dirty river” known as the Rio Grande, is a place of schemers and strivers—not all of them on the right side of the law. Perhaps the quintessential American border town, the place locals call “El Chuco” is practically one city with its Mexican twin, Ciudad Juárez. Viewed from the air, only the path of the river delineates where one ends and the other begins.
It was against this backdrop that Nino Cooper, Marco Gutierrez and Travis Stearns came of age, playing music in various bands, dreaming of recording at Sonic Ranch—the mammoth residential studio just outside town—and hearing wild stories of drug wars and lawlessness from just a few miles away.
Fast forward a decade or so and Cooper had returned to El Paso from Southern California, where he’d abandoned a corporate career. Armed with an acoustic guitar and armload of originals and covers, he began playing anywhere that would have him, including restaurants and hotel lobbies. Stearns quickly jumped aboard to provide percussion, but venues weren’t crazy about a loud drum kit. So
Stearns dropped the kit and picked up the cajón, a simple, box-like instrument common south of the border. Marco Gutierrez, veteran of a number of local bands, soon rounded out the trio, and gigs in hotels and restaurants soon became bookings in El Paso’s handful of live-music clubs, which after awhile led to trips out of town. “There’s definitely a lot of talent in El Paso,” Cooper says. “But being in a band, it’s hard to get out of there because it’s a nine-hour drive to get anywhere.” Young, hungry and—literally—driven, the trio nonetheless buckled up for long van rides and soon began venturing to Austin, San Antonio, Tulsa and points beyond. Meanwhile a hard-driving roots-acoustic sound—which at the time, wouldn’t sound out of place on a playlist with the Avett Brothers and Mumford and Sons—began getting battle tested over an endless string of shows and hundreds of broken cajón heads.
Along the way The Dirty River Boys notched a number of significant milestones, opening for legend Willie Nelson several times, and selling out the famed Gruene Hall in New Braunfels, Texas. Having left the El Paso restaurants far behind, the band continued to grow, adding stand-up bassist Colton James and functioning just a bit more like a conventional rock band, though one without the usual dynamic.
Indeed, The Dirty River Boys have an incredible number of strengths. All four members have a hand in the songwriting, and all four sing as well, while members often switch off instruments during shows. This isn’t just a vehicle for a songwriting frontman, with an interchangeable crew of instrumentalists bringing those ideas to life.
And so, after a pair of EPs and an album, “Science of Flight,” that served as a tour calling card, the time couldn’t be better for an anthemic, hook-laden declaration of intent, served up to an audience beyond DRB’s Texas diehards. And thanks to the golden-eared production assistance of Chris “Frenchie” Smith, that’s exactly what “The Dirty River Boys” is.
The record is both a cohesive statement and a dizzying testament to the band’s capabilities, as it shifts gears between genres with the skill of a long-haul trucker. There’s traditional, honky-tonk country (“Didn’t Make The Cut”), Flogging Molly- style Celtic rock (“Sailed Away”) and an all-out greasy road rocker (“Highway Love”) and you get the feeling the ’Boys are just getting warmed up.
No matter the genre, the band has a knack for imbuing every one of their songs with undeniable hooks, from the “whoah-ohs” that punctuate first single “Thought I’d Let You Know” to the power-chord riff that forms the foundation of El Paso scene-setter “Down By The River” (co-written with Ray Wylie Hubbard).
“It’s an anthem record,” Cooper says. “That’s what we were working for. We wanted to showcase our individuality, and all the vocals, and just capture the choruses and those chants.”
“We let all of our influences show,” Gutierrez adds. “So we really have trouble saying ‘this is rock’ or ‘this is country,’ or whatever. And we’re not Texas Country either, even though we get thrown in there. Americana is really what it is— because it’s a melting pot of music.”
This self-titled record—tracked at The Bubble in Austin and, yes, Sonic Ranch outside El Paso—was the first time the band had taken time off to record, rather than booking a few studio days between shows, and the effort paid off. “We just buckled down and focused,” Cooper recalls. “We didn’t want to cut any corners.”
And now, with its best record in hand, the band plans to venture much further afield from El Paso, and stay on the road. After all, with border checkpoints on every road out of town, leaving town can be a hassle.
Sometimes, in fact, more of a hassle than you might have expected. Not so long ago, the band found itself on the end of an “enhanced search,” with everyone asked to step out of the van while U.S. Customs and Border Protection brought a dog through it. “Then this guy pulls Travis out and we hear him just tearing into Travis,” recalls Gutierrez.
“Then the guy walks up to us and asks ‘which of you guys are from El Paso?’” Gutierrez continues. “We raise our hands, then we go to the side of the van. In a split-second he goes from mad dog to ‘El Paso Chuco,’ giving us the love, saying ‘Hey, are you the Dirty River Boys? I saw y’all at the State Line a few weeks ago. I’m sorry mijos, I was just doing my job.’ Just in a split second, the El Paso love.”
“He asked us for CDs, so we gave CDs to the Border Patrol agents and autographed them and everything,” Cooper adds, chuckling. “Now, every time we go through there, we say, yeah, y’all have a few of our CDs. We’re good.”
Ever since the members of San Antonio-forged, Tex-Mex/Pop-Rock outfit The Last Bandoleros can remember, they’ve been surrounded by dynamic and diverse musical influences. From Diego’s early Rock ‘n’ Roll collection to Emilio’s Beatles re-issues and the Tex-Mex music of their father to the Country-Blues of Jerry’s guitar tabs and Derek’s Jangly Brit-Rock records, the sounds around the members of The Last Bandoleros have always had an urgency and emphasis on songs and songwriting.
It’s no wonder that when Diego Navaira (bass & vocals), Emilio Navaira (drums & vocals) and Jerry Fuentes (guitar & vocals) — all three raised in the studios and vibrant live scene of San Antonio — joined with New York native Derek James (guitar & vocals) to form The Last Bandoleros, their combined experiences led them to create a compelling, contemporary and quintessential American sound.
Often joined by a button accordionist on stage, The Last Bandoleros mesh 1 part Tex-Mex, 1 part Brit-Pop and 2 parts Country/Rock, to write and perform driving songs brimming with melody informed by a unique amalgam of influences that only young Americans growing up a stone’s throw away from the Rio Grande might have absorbed.
“I grew up idolizing Texas legends Doug Sahm and Flaco Jimenez,” says Jerry, “and, at the same time, wanted to learn every song in the Rock canon including The Beatles and The Eagles.”
“My dad [GRAMMY-award winning Conjunto superstar Emilio Navaira, Sr.] turned me on to Van Halen and ZZ Top,” says Diego. “And, we were obviously surrounded by Tejano music since birth,” adds Emilio.
To be sure, a consummate command of their instruments is another of The Last Bandoleros’ calling cards.
“Jerry won a San Antonio guitar competition when he was 13,” shares Derek, “We love charting out ambitious harmonies. You’ll see every member in our band singing when you come to one of our shows.”
The group has sold-out New York City’s Rockwood Music Hall as headliner and opened for Canadian chanteuse Feist at Webster Hall (NYC). They’ve performed live with Sting and also feature as backing vocalists on his new single “I Can’t Stop Thinking About You” currently climbing the AAA radio and iTunes rock charts. Tour dates with The Mavericks, Marc Broussard and Los Lonely Boys have also kept The Last Bandoleros busy even as they prepare to release their debut EP via Warner Music Nashville. Accolades for the band’s musicality and energetic performances have been pouring in:
TasteOfCountry.com called their song “Where Do You Go?” “instantly catchy” while CMChatLive.com described it as “bright,” “explosive” and “memorable.”
HITS Magazine wrote “the musical verve and joyous energy on display in this tune is pretty irresistible” dubbing it “Tex-Mex meets harmony-rich Beatlesque pop, with a healthy dollop of boy-pop charisma.”
The Last Bandoleros combine their unique cultural experiences with a rare musical camaraderie to deliver exuberance and joy both essential and contagious. And, in today’s fast-moving world of instantaneous information and converging influences, their original yet universal sound might just be best labeled “great music.”
Vandoliers are the next wave of Texas music. The six-piece Dallas-Fort Worth group channels all that makes this vast state unique: tradition, modernity, audacity, grit, and—of course—size. Forever puts it all together for an enthralling ride down a fresh Lone Star highway.
Produced and recorded by Adam Hill (Low Cut Connie, The Bo-Keys, Deer Tick, Don Bryant, Zeshan B) at American Recording Studios in Memphis, TN, the band’s third album (and first with Bloodshot) Forever is a mix of youthful and defiant punk, rugged Red Dirt country, and vibrant Tejano. The full-length’s 10 songs blend emblematic rock ‘n’ roll with bold horns, violin, and a slather of twang reflecting where the band is from, where they’ve been and, eventually, where they’ll be headed. It’s regional and universal all the same.
“I wrote a series of songs about my life and gave it to the best musicians I know to flesh out,” says lead singer and guitarist Joshua Fleming. “I spent over a year writing by myself, with friends and mentors, and we spent just as long filling out arrangements and writing scores. We wrote horn and fiddle parts on a trio tour through the mountains of New Mexico, Wyoming and Montana.”
One of those mentors is fellow Dallas-Fort Worth musician Rhett Miller of Old 97’s. The influence and tutelage of Miller and his bandmates helped sharpen Vandoliers’ Texas-bred, roots-based punk rock.
“Before the band started diving into the new material, I sent Rhett a bunch of acoustic phone demos,” says Fleming. “Being the amazing person he is, he sent me back a 3,000-word email of advice that read like a master class in the art of songwriting. Beyond their influence musically, they’ve really taken us under their wing, letting us play shows with them and giving us all kinds of advice along the way.”
While tracking alongside the muddy path that country-punk bands like Old 97’s, Jason and the Scorchers, and the True Believers blazed in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Vandoliers define their own style; no one else is upending the genre quite like them. There are familiar ingredients—Fleming’s raspy vocals, rousing sing-along choruses, and an infectious energy (like on the rippin’ “Sixteen Years”)—that lay down the foundation on Forever. But it’s the ancillary instrumentation that separates them from others. When they seamlessly inject punk rock with ‘60 and ‘70s country grime (“Tumbleweed”), old-timey fiddlin’ (“Miles and Miles”), Tex-Mex horn and violin (“Fallen Again”), and heartfelt balladry (“Cigarettes in the Rain”), a rich new sound emerges. References to the Texas Tornados, Social Distortion, Deer Tick, and Calexico can be made, but none fully capture the soul of the self-proclaimed “Converse cowboys.”
For a band that spends more than half the year on the road, “forever” is their credo of hope and determination—“VFFV” (Vandoliers Forever, Forever Vandoliers) is tattooed on the six members’ arms as an emblem of their solidarity and commitment to the collective, through good times and, more significantly, the tough ones. The album’s lyrics center on themes of dedication (“Sixteen Years”), being known as middle finger-throwing rabble rousers (“Troublemaker”), seizing adventure while traveling (“Nowhere Fast”), and addressing anxiety and depression (“Fallen Again”). When they return home from tour, broke and empty, they humbly look to their families for support (“Bottom Dollar Boy”), and unconditional love—despite their unconventional career paths—(“Tumbleweed”). Thus recharged, they can hit the road again, to spread the Vandoliers’ message with renewed fervor.
Formed in 2015, Vandoliers are Fleming, bassist Mark Moncrieff, drummer Guyton Sanders, fiddler Travis Curry, electric guitarist Dustin Fleming, and multi-instrumentalist Cory Graves. Their first two albums Ameri-Kinda (2016) and The Native (2017) were released on State Fair Records.
If there’s one lesson to be gleaned from Neon Cross, the newest release from singer, songwriter and guitarist Jaime Wyatt, it’s that life, in all its inherent messiness, goes on. And through it all—good times and bad, triumph and trouble, dreaming and desperation—Wyatt continues, to borrow the title of one of her new songs, just L I V I N.
To be sure, there’s a whole lot of livin’ in the 11 tracks on Neon Cross, from the whisky-soaked honky tonks outlined in the heated and hungry title track, where Wyatt, with “pitiful perfume, dark glasses, gold liquor and alligator shoes,” plies her trade from the stage, to the mountains of pain, regret and loss baked into the slow-burning soul groove of “By Your Side,” which the artist says she wrote “after my dad died and my best friend overdosed, and I wasn’t able to show up for either of them because I was loaded,” to the stark solitude of “Sweet Mess,” where Wyatt, in the throes of a crumbling relationship, opines that “just like all the rest, I’ll be forgotten.”
CHUCK MEAD is a Country singer with a rock n roll heart. He’s also a renowned songwriter, producer, music director, musicologist and architect behind the rebirth of Lower Broadway and the Global Neo Traditional Country music movement.
This Kansas native, has been at the forefront of what has come to be known as Americana Music for the better part of 25 years. Perhaps best known for co-founding the famed ‘90s Alternative Country quintet, BR5-49, whos 7 albums garnered a CMA Award for Best International Touring Act and three Grammy nominations, helped build an indelible bridge between authentic American Roots music and millions of fans worldwide.
Since then he’s toured the globe, entertained thousands on the high seas, released 4 solo albums, made 137 appearances on the Grand Ole Opry, co-produced critically acclaimed tribute albums to Johnny Cash & Waylon Jennings, acted as Musical Director/Supervisor/Producer of the Broadway hit musical Million Dollar Quartet AND the companion CMT television show Sun Records.
With a deep connection to Memphis and a burning desire to keep building musical bridges, Chuck packed up the band and took time out of his crazy schedule last summer to record his fourth solo album with Matt Ross-Spang (Margo Price/John Prine/Jason Isbell/Al Green) at legendary Sam Phillips Recording Studios, the result of which, ‘Close To Home’, was released June 21, 2019 on Plowboy Records.
Jason Hawk Harris hit rock bottom during the writing and recording of his debut full-length Love & the Dark. In the last few years, the Houston-born-and-raised, Los Angeles-based musician endured life-altering hardships—illness, death, familial strife, and addiction—yet from these trials, a luxuriant and confident vision of art country emerged.
With an unlikely background, Harris is a singer/guitarist/songwriter who walks his own line, one that touches on Lyle Lovett’s lyrical frankness, John Moreland’s punk cerebralism and Judee Sill’s mysticism and orchestral sensibility. There’s even the literary and sonic audacity of an early Steve Earle, an outlaw unafraid to embrace harmony.
Jason’s grandfather exposed him to country music at an early age, and his family celebrated holidays with group sing-alongs. In his teens, Harris began listening to punk, indie rock, and, notably, Queen. In some part inspired by the instrumental flair of Freddie Mercury & Co., he later took the educational plunge into classical composition and was eventually wait-listed for the master’s program at UCLA, when things took a turn.
While touring and performing in the indie folk band The Show Ponies, Jason started writing his own songs, intuitively returning to his country roots but incorporating his classical and rock ‘n’ roll performance skills. He released his first solo offering, the Formaldehyde, Tobacco and Tulips EP in 2017 and hit the road.
Meanwhile, his world fell apart: his mother died from complications of alcoholism; his father went bankrupt after being sued by the King of Morocco; his sister was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and gave birth to a premature son with cerebral palsy; and—subsequently—Jason got sidetracked by his own vices.
Love & the Dark is not THAT country narrative, though; that of surviving through pain. But it’s not NOT that either. This is his personal narrative on death, struggle, and addiction, of a life deconstructed and reassembled. From the opener, “The Smoke and the Stars,” it’s apparent this album will take you to compelling new places. An ache, a longing, claws its way out of the speakers, the gradual drone blossoming through without rigid genre designs. You can hear the essence of classical music in a long crescendo; you can feel his Houston upbringing in JHH’s soulful and humid inflection; you can sense his Los Angeles home in the sharp and risky dynamics. You can also hear the joy and exquisite desperation when he swings for the fences, belting “Maybe I was just waiting for you, to get through the grapevine, tear down that door, and let me live in those green eyes of yours.
On “Cussing at the Light,” the classic “drink-you-off-my-mind” trope has an updated countrypolitan vibe with its precise harmonies courtesy of Natalie Nicoles, and later a raucous teenage urgency rumbles through the punchy “I’m Afraid.” The buoyant roots-pop “Red Room Blues,” featuring vocals by folk/bluegrass maven Rachel Baiman, touches antecedents stretching from Jason Isbell to Nick Lowe.
In the dark balladry of “Phantom Limb” (also sung with Baiman), when he softly describes his mother’s funeral through keenly personal details, “I got this shirt. Smells like the viewing/ Formaldehyde, tobacco and tulips/ I’ve washed it ten times, and it won’t come out,” he takes us to the bottom with him.
While his music acknowledges mortality, pain, and hardship, it’s also Jason Hawk Harris’s way of working through it. Love & The Dark is a hypnotically convincing album; you can feel the unknown, but you need not fear it.
The Bobby Lees are a young, bone-shaking garage rock band out of Woodstock, New York. Their raw and unapologetic energy promises to make you feel alive. Find them and see for yourself. Their recent album ‘SKIN SUIT’ was produced by underground punk legend Jon Spencer of the Blues Explosion and was released via Alive Naturalsound Records in 2020. Henry Rollins said, “The Bobby Lees' Skin Suit album is wild and different. I dug it immediately. Dangerous music is good for you." The Bobby Lees have played with The Chats, HELMET, The Black Lips, Future Islands, Boss Hog, Shannon and the Clams and Murphy’s Law.
"Rock and roll's been very very good to me," Rhett Miller sings on "Longer Than You've Been Alive," an epic six-minute stream-of-consciousness meditation on his life in music. It's a rare moment of pulling back the curtain, on both the excesses and tedium of the world of a touring musician, and it's the perfect way to open the Old 97's 2014 album, 'Most Messed Up.'
"I wrote that song very quickly and didn’t rewrite one word of it," Miller explains. "It's sort of a thesis statement not just for this record, but for my life's work."
To say that rock and roll has been good to the Old 97's (guitarist/vocalist Miller, bassist/vocalist Murry Hammond, guitarist Ken Bethea, and drummer Philip Peeples) would be an understatement. The band emerged from Dallas twenty years ago at the forefront of a musical movement blending rootsy, country-influenced songwriting with punk rock energy and delivery. The New York Times has described their major label debut, 'Too Far To Care,' as "a cornerstone of the 'alternative country' movement…[that] leaned more toward the Clash than the Carter Family." They've released a slew of records since then, garnering praise from NPR and Billboard to SPIN and Rolling Stone, who hailed the band as "four Texans raised on the Beatles and Johnny Cash in equal measures, whose shiny melodies, and fatalistic character studies, do their forefathers proud." The band performed on television from Letterman to Austin City Limits and had their music appear in countless film and TV soundtracks (they appeared as themselves in the Vince Vaughn/Jennifer Aniston movie 'The Break Up'). Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan told The Hollywood Reporter that he put the band on a continuous loop on his iPod while writing the show's final scene.
'Most Messed Up' finds the Old 97's at their raucous, boozy best, all swagger and heart. Titles like "Wasted," "Intervention," "Wheels Off," "Let's Get Drunk And Get It On," and "Most Messed Up" hint at the kind of narrators Miller likes to inhabit, men who possess an appetite for indulgence and won't let a few bad decisions get in the way of a good story.
"A few people in my life said, 'You can't sing 'Let's get drunk and get it on,'" Miller remembers. "I said, 'What do you mean? I've been singing that sentiment for 20 years! I was just never so straightforward about it.'"
It was a trip to Music City that inspired Miller to throw away his inhibitions as songwriter and cut right to the heart of things.
"For me, this record really started in Nashville on a co-write session with John McElroy," he says. "I really admired his wheels off approach to songwriting, And I liked the idea he had for how he thought I should interact with my audience. He said, 'I think your fans want you to walk up to the mic and say fuck.' It was liberating." It reminded me that I don’t have to be too serious or too sincere or heartfelt. I just have to have fun and be honest. I felt like I kind of had free reign to go ahead and write these songs that were bawdier and more adult-themed."
The magic in Miller's songwriting lies in the depth that he lends his characters. Upon closer inspection, the hard partying and endless pursuit of a good time often reveals itself to be a band-aid covering up deeper wounds and emotional scars.
"There's a lot of darkness hidden in this record," he explains. "One of the big Old 97's tricks is when we write about something kind of dark and depressing, it works best when it's a fun sounding song. So it's not until the third or fourth listen that you realize the narrator of this song is a complete disaster."
If that description calls to mind The Replacements, it's no coincidence. Miller is a fan of the Minneapolis cult heroes, and now counts Tommy Stinson among his own friends and fans. Best known as bassist for the Mats and more recently Guns 'n' Roses, Stinson joined the Old 97's in the studio in Austin, Texas, to lay down electric guitar on ## tracks, elevating the sense of reckless musical abandon to new heights and lending the album an air of the Rolling Stones' double-guitar attack. It's a collaboration Miller never would have even imagined in 1994 when the band released their debut.
"We didn’t think we'd last until the year 1997," Miller laughs. "We thought the name would get a little weird when it became 1997, but we decided none of our bands had ever lasted that long, so let's not even worry about it. But as it all started to unfold, we realized we could maybe make a living doing this, and we were all really conscious of wanting to be a career band. It was way more important to us to maintain a really high level of quality, at the expense, perhaps, of having hit singles or fitting in with the trends of the time, and I'm glad we did that."
Twenty years on, it's safe to say rock and roll has indeed been very, very good to the Old 97's.
Nikki Lane’s latest album Highway Queen, saw the young Nashville singer emerge as one of country and rock’s most gifted songwriters. Co produced by Lane and fellow singer-songwriter, Jonathan Tyler, this emotional tour-de-force was recorded at Matt Pence’s Echo Lab studio in Denton, Texas as well as at Club Roar with Collin Dupuis in Nashville, Tennessee. Blending potent lyrics, unbridled blues guitars, and vintage Sixties country-pop swagger, Lane’s new music will resonate as easily with Lana Del Rey and Jenny Lewis fans as those of Neil Young and Tom Petty.
Highway Queen is a journey through heartbreak that takes exquisite turns. The record begins with a whiskey-soaked homage to Lane’s hometown (“700,000 Rednecks”) and ends on the profoundly raw “Forever Lasts Forever,” where Lane mourns a failed marriage – the “lighter shade of skin” left behind from her wedding ring. On “Forever” and the confessional “Muddy Waters,” Lane’s lyrics align her with perceptive songwriters like Nick Lowe and Cass McCombs. Elsewhere, “Companion” is pure Everly Brothers’ dreaminess (“I would spend a lifetime/ Playing catch you if I can”). She goes on a Vegas bender on the rollicking “Jackpot,” fights last-call blues (“Foolish Heart”) and tosses off brazen one liners at a backroom piano (“Big Mouth”).
“Love is the most unavoidable thing in the world,” Lane says. “The person you pick could be half set-up to destroy your life with their own habits – I’ve certainly experienced that before and taken way too long to get out of that mistake.”
In 2014, Lane’s second album All or Nothin’ (New West) solidified her sandpaper voice beneath a ten-gallon hat as the new sound and look of outlaw country music. Produced by Dan Auerbach, the record’s bluesy Western guitars paired with Lane’s Dusty Springfield-esque voice earned glowing reviews from NPR, the Guardian and Rolling Stone. In three years since her Walk of Shame debut, Lane said she was living most of the year on the road.
Growing up, Lane used to watch her father pave asphalt during blistering South Carolina summers. She’d sit on the roller (“what helps smooth out the asphalt”) next to a guy named Rooster and divvy out Hardee’s lunch orders for the workers. “My father thought he was a country singer,” Lane laughs. “He partied hard at night, but by 6:30 AM he was out on the roads in 100-degree weather.” That’s the southern work ethic, she says. “We didn’t have a lot of money, but I was privileged with the knowledge of how to work hard, how to learn and to succeed when things aren’t set up for me.” Creativity was an unthinkable luxury, she adds. “When people told me I should try to get a record deal for songs I was writing, I was like, ‘that’s cute – I’ve got to be at work at 10 A.M.’”
“Becoming a songwriter is one of the most selfish things I’ve ever done,” Lane says plainly. She describes writing her first song at age 25 like it was a necessary act of self-preservation after a devastating breakup. Many of her early songs, she said on Shame and Nothin’, were about the fleetingness of relationships she believed were permanent, she says. Lane’s main line of work in those days was a fashion entrepreneur (she’s currently the owner of Nashville’s vintage clothing boutique High Class Hillbilly). It brought her to cities around the country, New York to Los Angeles to Nashville. And like a true wanderer, Lane’s sound crisscrosses musical genres with ease, while the lonesome romantic in her remains. Even a soft song like, “Send The Sun,” with its lilting downward strum, is flush with bittersweet emotion. “Darling, we’re staring at the same moon,” Lane sings lovingly. “I used to say that to my ex,” she says with cheerful stoicism, “to try to brighten the long nights, stay positive.”
“Lay You Down” is one of those unexpected moments for Lane. “That song was inspired by something Levon Helm’s wife posted on Facebook when he was sick with cancer,” Lane says. “I was just so moved by her telling the world how much love he felt from people writing to them, and moved that because of the Internet, I was able to see that love – even from a distance.” The song became surreal for Lane and her band when her longtime guitarist, Alex Munoz, was diagnosed with cancer while they were playing it. “It deepened my perspective and the importance of keeping everyone safe,” says Lane.
On the record cover, Lane looks out on wide, unowned Texan plains, leaning on the fearsome horns of a massive steer. Wearing a vintage Victorian dress, the stark photo invokes a time before highways existed. The symbolism isn’t lost on Lane. Highway Queen was a pioneering moment for her as an artist.
“I was always a smart girl, always had to yell to be heard,” she says, “But this was the first time in my career where I decided how things were going to go; I was willing to take the heat.” Lane included the bonus track “Champion” as a small testament to that empowerment. “It makes a point,” Lane says with a smile, “That I appreciate what you’re saying, but get the fuck out of my way.”
Blue Water Highway comes from the working class, coastal town background that has informed the work of so many of rock’s greatest writers and artists. They take their name from the roadway that links their hometown of Lake Jackson, Texas to Galveston, where the cops, the teachers, the baristas and the chemical plant workers travel to work hard and to play hard, blowing off steam, dancing to their favorite bands. Blue Water Highway’s music is the soundtrack for their lives.
“Best Friend” is the first single from their upcoming album Heartbreak City, coming out on Blue Water Highway Records/Thirty Tigers on June 8th. With a hook that’s a mile wide, it chronicles the lives, loves and friendships that sustain us. Said lead singer Zack Kibodeaux, “We wrote this as a band, and we wanted to tap into that feeling of that special friendship where you know you can count on one another. Even though I wrote characters that are not the band members, our relationship definitely informed the writing of the lyrics.”
Blue Water Highway was started by two best friends from high school - Kibodeaux (lead vocals, guitar) and Greg Essington (guitar). They were later joined by Catherine Clark (keyboards), Jared Wilson (drums) and Kyle James Smith (bass). They will be touring relentlessly to support Heartbreak City, so look for them in a town near you soon.
Rewind to January 2017. Whitney Rose was primed to release her first recording of the year,
South Texas Suite , a countrypolitan valentine to her hometown of Austin, Texas. Days before
the EP hit the streets and Rose kicked off a four-month worldwide tour, the burgeoning
songwriting force packed her boots for Nashville, where she entered BlackBird Studio A to
reconvene with the Mavericks’ Raul Malo . In one short week, Rose, Malo and co-producer Niko
Bolas crafted her acclaimed latest effort, Rule 62. Rose, a unique and inimitable writer and
performer has been highly lauded for her work. Rose and her seasoned band have performed
nearly four hundred shows in the past two years gaining international notoriety. Here is what
people are saying:
“Whitney Rose is making country music gold.” - THE FADER
This Texas-based singer's 21st-century update of classic country's most cherished ideals –
boot-stomping rhythms and take-no-guff lyrics – is rich with sly wisdom, its full-bodied
arrangements putting the spotlight on her sweetly tart soprano." - ROLLING STONE
"This is her singular vision. And with two terrific worldwide releases to her name, she’s just
getting started... She pens nine of the eleven tracks, all of which tap into a stylized yet never
clichéd, ’60s-influenced era in country." - AMERICAN SONGWRITER
"Rose has acquired a deft talent for penning timeless material...Rule 62 suggests she’s firmly
etched her identity in a genre that begs for singularity simply to stand out." - PASTE
"Meticulous in every respect. On Rule 62 she channels her inner Bobbie Gentry... In short, Rose
does not limit herself, or want to be pigeonholed. She's doing it her way." - NO DEPRESSION
"All performances on Rule 62 are delivered with a casual assurance that gives the record the
feeling of an old favorite; it feels like a record that you've lived with for years, in the best possible
sense." - ALLMUSIC
"Whitney Rose elevates herself by writing and selecting songs that do what all the best classic
country artists did: say something in a way that’s never been said before, giving perspective to
universal emotions and moments, and making you feel something deeper than simple
nostalgia." - SAVING COUNTRY MUSIC
Lucette is the moniker of Canadian artist Lauren Gillis, a soulful and emotive singer who self-describes her music as “country infused dream-pop”. Her two albums vary from dark folk and southern gothic tales to what Rolling Stone describes as “a bold expansion of Lucette’s melodic sensibilities...that avoid the rootsy clichés of Americana music.”
Lucette’s first album, Black is the Color, was produced by Dave Cobb and led to her opening for Sturgill Simpson on his Metamodern Sounds of Country Music tour. Her song “Bobby Reid” was featured as the title track on the critically acclaimed Netflix special “Nanette” and the single “Black is the Color” was featured on “South of Hell” and “The Vampire Diaries”. Her second album, Deluxe Hotel Room, was produced by Simpson, whose no-nonsense instruction to her was, “Sing it like you mean it.” The two connected with the intent of making art, timeless yet fresh.
Lucette has toured the United States, Canada, and the UK with artists such as Joe Ely, David Ramirez, The Secret Sisters, and Netflix documentary star Rodriguez. Following the release of Deluxe Hotel Room she performed her own headlining tour in the summer of 2019.
In today’s musical culture, the word “authenticity” has pretty much lost all meaning. What used to represent something bona fide and true is now just watered-down marketing speak, stamped onto press releases without a second thought. Born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1983, JP Harris doesn’t fancy himself a musician as much as he does a carpenter who writes country songs. However, his stranger-than-fiction story begins after the eighth grade, when he left home on a Greyhound bus in the middle of a summer night. And he’s never looked back.
For over a decade, Harris traveled the country, often alone, hitchhiking and hopping freight trains while making his living as a farm laborer, shepherd, woodsman, and carpenter, among many other titles. Still an in-demand carpenter to this day, Harris has been writing and performing country music for nearly ten years, releasing his debut album, I’ll Keep Calling, in 2012. He followed that release with Home Is Where the Hurt Is in 2014, which only saw his star rise both among country fans and critics at major outlets like Rolling Stone. Even Eagles frontman Don Henley referenced Harris in a 2015 interview with Hey Reverb saying that Harris made “thoughtful, authentic music.”
With his forthcoming album Sometimes Dogs Bark at Nothing, Harris is back after a four-year hiatus to remind folks what a lifetime dedicated to country music looks and sounds like. Sure to please fans of his hardscrabble earlier work, this new collection of songs finds the acclaimed songwriter and vocalist stretching himself both musically and personally.
It was one of the tougher albums Harris has put together, with a number of disappointing false starts that would eventually yield a unique situation from which he could work. “I feel like I was trying to make this record for two or three years before we actually got around to making it,” Harris says. “I had written at least half of the songs a couple years before we got close to a plan of how to make it. A lot of things changed in my life between when I made my previous album and when we decided to go into the studio last year to make this one. It was really important to wait for the right situation to coalesce before I dove into making something new.”
In addition to taking a little more time planning Sometimes Dogs Bark at Nothing, Harris also drastically changed his approach to recording. Working with producer and Old Crow Medicine Show member, Morgan Jahnig, Harris tapped a handful of his favorite players, sent them acoustic demos, and gave some pretty unconventional instructions: “Take five days to think about these songs. Please write notes of whatever ideas come to mind. Please don’t talk to each other about it. Let’s all just get in the studio on day one and compare notes as we go.”
The resulting sessions featured a palpable spontaneity and creative energy, both of which manifest in an album that’s real, raw, and more akin to his live performance than anything Harris has put out thus far. “We took a counter-intuitive approach,” he says. “We had no pre-production. There were no rehearsals. We basically had a whole studio full of multi-instrumentalists, a six-piece band total, for the whole recording session. Everybody played at least two instruments. It was a really interesting way to do it and I think it helped us avoid anybody, including myself, overthinking the songs.”
Sometimes Dogs Bark at Nothing opens with “JP”s Florida Blues #1,” a hard driving country rock number that details some of Harris’ darker days touring Florida with his band, the Tough Choices. “This track is special to me in many ways,” he says. “Not only was it fun as hell to record, but for me, it’s a humorous way to process a very real and very dark stretch of time from my past. Once I was far enough away from it, the story became a little easier to recount in a near comical fashion.”
“Lady in the Spotlight,” an affecting song with layered strings, turns a critical eye to the stark gender imbalance and the seamy, predatory side of music industry. “It’s the story of a small town girl, who buys a one-way flight to California with a guitar, only to find that her body and not her talent is the only way she can leverage her dreams into being,” he says. “It’s a tale that many could imagine being true back in the 1960s or 70s, and I believe that many music fans assume that as an industry we are past that time without realizing it is a very cruel reality faced by many female artists even today.”
Another album highlight is “When I Quit Drinking,” which, as its title suggests, is a tender look at one of Harris’ most personal struggles. Gossamer strands of pedal steel complement the gentle quaver in his voice, underpinning some of his most personal lyrics to date. “As some of my songwriting becomes more introspective or true-to-life, I tried to offer something universally identifiable in this one,” he says. “Though almost all of my songs are from my own life, I also feel the right to keep some things my personal business. With this song I was able to vocalize one of my own struggles, with the hope that it helps someone else through theirs.”
And, after years of writing and playing, he’s more in love with country music than ever before. He sums up his hopes for the album simply: “I’m just hoping that me coming to the table without gimmicks or cool-looking costumes or fancy vintage jeans—just the grubby guy I am with a sleeveless shirt and a pair of boots on—is enough to get people into the music.”
Daniel Markham has been writing compelling songs for over 20 years now. Ranging from the Alt. Country heavy hitters of his youth to the sprawling soundscapes in recent years, Markha has never been one to be held down by genres. Still, there was always a correlation between those albums that made it distinctly Daniel Markham. His 4th LP, Burnout, takes a match to all those amalgamations and torches all remnants of his past through a blistering set of 12 songs
"It used to be called boogie-woogie. It used to be called rhythm & blues. Now, they call it rock & roll"
Chuck Berry’s words are at the very heart of roots rock & roll 5-piece, The 40 Acre Mule. The self-described “rhythm & blues outfit” are a powerhouse of vintage revival with a reputation for seamlessly blurring the lines between country, soul and rock audiences with songwriting that borders between blues drenched heartbreak and an old school riot in the streets.
Influenced by the pillars of Rhythm & Blues like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley and Ray Charles and inspired by recent artists such as J.D. McPherson, Nathaniel Rateliff and Gary Clark Jr., The 40 Acre Mule – J. Isaiah Evans: Guitar & Vocals, Robert Anderson: Drums, Tim Cooper: Bass, Chris Evetts: Baritone Sax & Percussion, and John Pedigo: Guitar & Vocals – quickly built their own unique sound by blending vintage Rock & Roll, Rhythm & Blues, Soul and just a touch of Country. It was a sound that soon caught on with The James Hunter Six, The Reverend Horton Heat, Eleven Hundred Springs, Ken Bethea of Old 97's, Alejandro Escovedo, Rosie Flores and more.
Since forming in Dallas, Texas in 2015, The 40 Acre Mule has built a loyal following the old-fashioned way, they earned it. Playing countless bars and packed clubs, they watched crowds grow mainly by word of mouth. As the crowds caught on, so did the likes of legendary promoter Scott Beggs and Jim Heat (The Reverend Horton Heat) who gave The 40 Acre Mule their first break with an opening slot at a SOLD-OUT show at Dallas’ legendary Bomb Factory. From there, opportunities to open for more superstars of roots music came along helping The 40 Acre Mule spread their brand of Rhythm & Blues music.
Playing to such diverse crowds has made their fanbase explode. "We’ve gone from 10 or 15 friends in a dive bar on a Tuesday to playing full-on festivals without even having an album out yet. That says something. I think we’re making music that people from all walks of life…country fans, soul fans, rockabilly fans…find comfortable and familiar. It’s because all those genres can trace their roots to Rhythm & Blues, the very backbone of Rock & Roll," J. Isaiah Evans says.
After years of putting in the work, The 40 Acre Mule followed in the footsteps of good friends and emerging Americana stars, Vandoliers and Joshua Ray Walker, and signed with State Fair Records. After that, the good times kept rollin’ with appearances at Gruene Hall, The Continental Club, Dallas' HomeGrown Festival and more! Now, with their debut album GOODNIGHT & GOOD LUCK climbing the charts, The 40 Acre Mule are poised to shake up the Americana world.
In late 2011, Matt Myers, Zak Appleby and Shane Cody started playing music together in a historic home in New Albany, Indiana dubbed “The Green House.” Its rooms were adorned with relics from times past, so it was no surprise that songs such as “Penitentiary” bounced off the walls. Nostalgic sounds from their first album seemed to serve as a welcome escape for listeners from the relentless demands of the digital age. But if you asked any one of the guys, they were ‘just having fun.’
Houndmouth signed with legendary indie label Rough Trade Records in 2012. From The Hills Below The City landed them on several world-famous platforms such as fellow lovable Hoosier, David Letterman’s stage. When vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter Matt Myers first spoke with big-name producer Dave Cobb prior to working together on their sophomore LP Little Neon Limelight, the two laughingly agreed to “not make another fucking boring Americana record.” A natural sounding album captured in a familiar fashion came together, except this time with a #1 adult alternative radio single in “Sedona.” “I never once thought of us as an Americana band,” says drummer Shane Cody. “The four of us were just a rock band, but some of us had Southern accents,” he laughs. Cue Golden Age, the third album featuring some of the band’s most innovative and experimental songs yet. Coining the term “retro future,” Houndmouth combined creative songwriting with avant-garde instrumentation like the synthesized roar of an actual black jaguar on the track “Black Jaguar.”
The band finds themselves recording and also touring their upcoming untitled fourth album expected to release in 2020. From their humble start, genre-defining hits, and experimentation, Houndmouth has and continues to make their impactful felt with the unique take on storytelling through music.
A garage rock diva whose music merges the sounds of doo wop and '60s rock with the bold attitude of indie and underground sounds, Shannon Shaw first gained an audience as the leader of the group Shannon & the Clams. Born and raised in Northern California, Shaw grew up on a musical diet of '50s and '60s oldies, and while studying art in the 2000s, she fell in with like-minded musicians to form Shannon & the Clams, rising through the indie rock underground on the strength of albums like 2013's Dreams in the Rat House and 2015's Gone by the Dawn. An alliance with Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys led to him producing 2018's Onion, as well as Shaw's solo debut, a country-accented set titled Shannon in Nashville.
Shannon Shaw was born on May 21, 1983. She grew up in Napa, a community in Northern California, where her father was a firefighter and her mother worked at a psychiatric hospital. Shaw grew up in a Mormon household, where one of the few radio stations her parents approved of played nothing but oldies from the '50s and '60s. As a teenager, Shaw was a misfit who spent much of her time avoiding the jocks who enjoyed making her life difficult. When she was 15, Shaw's boyfriend gave her a bass guitar, a Danelectro with silver glitter finish, but she didn't take to it at first, and it wasn't until she was 25 that she gave the instrument a second chance, learning to play and write songs after a tumultuous breakup.
Around this time, Shaw was attending the California College of the Arts in the East Bay Area, where she met Cody Blanchard; they didn't get along well at first, but after watching a video project he'd made, Shaw decided she'd found a kindred spirit, and they struck up a friendship. Blanchard played guitar and shared Shaw's taste for vintage sounds, and before long they decided to form a band. Recruiting fellow CCA student Ian Amberson to play drums, the first lineup of Shannon & the Clams debuted in 2008. The following year, they released their debut EP, Hunk Hunt, and a full-length album, I Wanna Go Home, was dropped by Oakland-based indie 1-2-3-4 Go! Records before 2009 was out.
Soon, Shaw was doing double duty, fronting Shannon & the Clams and playing bass in another Bay Area retro garage band, Hunx & His Punx. 1-2-3-4 Go! brought out the second Shannon & the Clams album, Sleep Talk, in 2011, and the group dropped a number of singles through 2012. Shannon & the Clams next struck a deal with the Sub Pop-distributed Hardly Art label, which released their third album, Dreams in the Rat House, in 2013, and in 2014 the band played a tour of Australia. By the time Hardly Art brought out 2015's Gone by the Dawn, the group had gone through some changes; Nate Mahan replaced Ian Amberson on drums, and they expanded to a quartet with the addition of Will Sprott on keyboards.
After learning that Shannon & the Clams' Australian tour happened in part because the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach, a fan of the band, had recommended them to a festival promoter in the Antipodes, Shaw and Auerbach struck up a friendship, and Auerbach proved to be a valuable ally to the group. First, Auerbach signed Shannon & the Clams to his Easy Eye Sound label, and produced their fifth album, Onion, released in February 2018. Four months later, Easy Eye premiered Shaw's first solo album. Shannon in Nashville teamed Shaw with a studio band that included veteran session men Gene Chrisman and Bobby Wood, and saw her adding country and pop accents to her retro garage sound.
Blood Harmony. Whether it’s The Beach Boys, Bee Gees or First Aid Kit, that sibling vocal blend is the secret sauce in some of the most spine-tingling moments in popular music. The Cactus Blossoms – Minneapolis-based brothers Page Burkum and Jack Torrey – offer compelling evidence that this tradition is alive and well, with a deceptively unadorned musical approach that offers “creative turns of phrase, gorgeous harmonies, and an ageless sound” (NPR All Things Considered), not to mention spine tingles aplenty. Their 2016 debut You’re Dreaming, a stunning and transporting collection of original songs, earned high praise from Rolling Stone and Vice Noisey, tour stints with Kacey Musgraves and Lucius, and a perfectly cast performance on the third season of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Now their unlikely rise continues with new album Easy Way, to be released on their own label Walkie Talkie Records.
While many bands would have been content to stick with the winning formula of their debut, the Blossoms refused to repeat themselves. If You’re Dreaming celebrated their vintage country and rock influences, Easy Way reveals a songwriting style that has changed, evolved, and gotten more modern. Dan Auerbach, another artist who knows from bedrock influences, co-wrote two songs on the album. “Dan’s love for songwriting was inspiring, just the kick in the pants we needed to start writing again after being on the road,” says Page.
The brothers’ decision to produce the new album themselves no doubt led to the new sound. “We wanted the freedom to experiment with our own weird ideas,” says Jack, “We used to joke that the working title album should be Expensive Demos.” As they crisscrossed the nation on tour, the brothers would stop through Alex Hall’s Reliable Recorders studio in Chicago to chase the new sound they were after. The result joins together what would otherwise be distant corners of the American songbook. Both the traditional twang of Chicago pedal steel guitarist Joel Paterson (Devil in a Woodpile, The Western Elstons) and the primal wail of free jazz saxophonist Michael Lewis (Bon Iver, Andrew Bird) are at home on the album. Just as they did with their debut, the brothers found a voice all their own.
Four-piece from Los Angeles. Punk wing dong gaze porn pop cop chop proto shoes progs clogs hogs fuzzy wuzzy soaked hugs and slugs.
My name is Katherine Paul and I am Black Belt Eagle Scout.
I grew up on the Swinomish Indian Reservation in NW Washington state, learning to play piano, guitar and drums in my adolescent years. The very first form of music that I can remember experiencing was the sound of my dad singing native chants to coo me to sleep as a baby. I grew up around powwows and the songs my grandfather and grandmother sang with my family in their drum group. This is what shapes how I create music: with passion and from the heart.
After the release of Mother of My Children, I felt awake and desperately wanted to put new music out into the world. I had no real intent behind At the Party With My Brown Friends except creating songs around what was going on in my life. In the past few years, the reciprocal love I experienced within friendships is what has been keeping me going. A lot of what is in this album deals with love, desire and friendship.
The lead single, “At the Party,” starts off with a quintessential BBES guitar lick, heading into booming and abundant drums and vocals. The lines ‘How is it real? We will always sing’ came out of me one evening when I was crafting the song in my bedroom. Within my conscious self, there is always a sense of questioning the legitimacy of the world when you grow up on an Indian reservation. We are all at the party (the world), trying to navigate ourselves within a good or bad situation. I happen to be at the party with my brown friends- Indigenous, Black, POC who always have my back while we walk throughout this event called life.
I started writing “My Heart Dreams” the summer after I initially put out MOMC, writing the guitar chords in a friend’s apartment on Ohlone land. I had been in a transitional part of my life, leaving one love and wanting to find another so much so that I felt like my heart was dreaming about it along with my brain at night. I have an obsession with dreams, mainly because I cannot remember most of mine and often times that leaves me frustrated not knowing that part of myself. I would wake up and be overcome with anxiety about not knowing what had gone down in my brain so much so that I started feeling like my heart dreamt more than my mind, thus becoming the line, my heart dreams.
I wrote “Going To The Beach With Haley” one day when I was out on a coastal trip with my friend Haley Heynderickx. We loaded up her car with our blankets and instruments and drove straight to a beach where we sat and listened to the waves and young families with their babies on the beach. I had brought my mini casio keyboard that had an array of beats I used when writing songs. The beat that’s on the song just stuck there along with the main guitar part. Initially written on an old acoustic guitar my mom bought me, the song really transformed in the studio where I added drums and other melodies to create the song.
Throughout the course of my writing and playing around this record, most of these songs deal with relationships I have either with loved ones or friends. I think it low key has to do with my anthropology degree, but also the fact that writing and playing guitar in my bedroom just makes everything feel better for me. For the longest time, I wanted to convey my feelings around coming out to my family. It had been a good experience for me and while I know it is not always that way when kids decide to tell their family, I think that we can open our hearts more for that. I would watch youtube videos of moms being proud of their kids surrounding their sexuality and gender identity and I really wanted to raise my voice to say, ‘my family too!’ What started with trying to sound so literal in this song ended up turning into a song about how much I love my mom and how our connection is eternal. “You’re Me and I’m You” is about being one with your mother, since we all were a part of their bodies at one point. It’s me trying to explore who she is and who I am with my love for people.
Federale is a seven-piece ensemble based in Portland, OR. Spearheaded by longtime Brian Jonestown Massacre bassist Collin Hegna, the band was conceived as an outlet to channel inspiration from ‘60s & ‘70s European soundtracks, particularly those from Italy made famous by the Spaghetti Western & Giallo genres.
As a mournful whistle carves through fevered melancholia, the first stirrings of No Justice‘s title track evoke the mean streets and rusted prairies of a blighted small folk roiling with palpable desperation. Embracing the enormous scope of orchestral cinematic production while subduing the bombast of electrified riffage, Collin Hegna has honed a taut, gleaming precision from his passion project’s signature sound. When his honeyed baritone waltzes with the operatic wizardry of bandmate Maria Karlin, the finely-etched lyrical depths fortify Federale’s cinematic sway.
Spare yet sumptuous, distilling the lean, gritty essence of grindhouse anomie and wielding orchestral flourishes of widescreen delicacy, No Justice feels like the defining statement of a band fully-realized – a sultry, restless stormcloud arising from the darkness at the edge of town to draw forth the fated reckoning.
Harmony is king in Motel Radio. The four piece, dual front man indie band from New Orleans builds silky, melodic guitar waves for their stacked vocals to surf across. Breezy yet intentional, pop-minded yet psychedelic; their tunes are as likely to stick with young songwriters as they are veteran deadheads.
In New Orleans, music wafts through the windows night and day. From the side- sticking second lines to the croons of the troubadours on Royal Street, Motel
Radio draws inspiration from the sounds of their home city while adding their own indie flair to the pot. The group spent the past year writing and recording their debut full-length Siesta Del Sol with producer, engineer, and neighbor Eric Heigle. They split time between Heigle’s studio (Wix Mix Productions) and their own home studio a block away to produce the dynamic 10 song LP, which will
release in July of 2019. The record will be accompanied by a five week summer tour supporting Austin-based indie band Summer Salt.
The album title “Siesta Del Sol “ was derived from a jukebox song the band heard at a bar in Marfa, TX during their first tour of the west coast. It was a nostalgic and defining moment for the group: four musicians who had started as college roommates simultaneously felt a cosmic emotion and awareness of what they’d been building together. They realized they were chasing something bigger than themselves as they continued their journey west.
Since their last release (Desert Surf Films EP 2016), the band has played festivals across the U.S. (New Orleans Jazz Fest, Firefly Festival, Voodoo, and SXSW to name a few), and opened for artists like Kurt Vile, Moon Taxi, Drive By Truckers, Dylan LeBlanc and Summer Salt.
Pacific Range is rooted in the beautiful, sunshiny-coast of California. The band’s style takes from many influences ranging from The Allman Brothers and Grateful Dead, to The Band and The Flying Burrito Brothers. Seamus Turner (guitar & vocals) and Nate Ward (drums) met around 2013 while studying music at Chico State. After jamming together and discovering a strong musical connection they formed the band Dakota Cree. They utilized the university’s recording studio to record an EP and soon began performing for different school events and playing local clubs around town.
The group went through several incarnations, graduations, and moves and eventually landed in Los Angeles. They evolved into a five-piece with bassist Cameron Wehrle, keyboardist & guitarist Stewart Forgey and singer Jade. Cameron met Nate and Seamus at the Hotel Cafe and bonded with them over a love for the Allman Brothers. He then brought along Stewart, a high school friend of Cameron’s, and ex-band-mate from the group Echophonix. Last but definitely not least, Jade, joined through a chance encounter, completing the full Range.
In March their debut, double-LP, High Upon the Mountain, was released through Curation Records. The record was produced by Dan Horne (Circles Around the Sun) and features special guests such as Duane Betts, Nikki Segal, Clay Finch and Sam Blasucci (Mapache). Give it a listen to get a feel for the band’s sound and follow them on Instagram and Facebook to see what they’re up to. Have a blessed day : )
White Rose Motor Oil, a two-piece, female-fronted alt-country/garage country/cow-punk band from Denver, features married couple Eryn DeSomer (guitars and vocals) and Keith Hoerig-DeSomer (drums).
Eryn and Keith have been active in the Denver music scene for over 10 years, previously as members of The Hollyfelds and The Jekylls. In 2018, they formed White Rose Motor Oil and released their first EP, "Suburban Horses," followed by the release of their second EP, "One For The Ages," in 2019. The full-length album "You Can't Kill Ghosts" was released in 2020, as was the EP "Broken Heart Holiday." "Country Pop," their album of cover songs which were originally recorded in the 60s and 70s, was released in 2021.
Together, Eryn and Keith have:
- Had music featured on many TV shows, including NBC's "The Voice," The History Channel's "American Pickers" and other well-known shows.
- Performed hundreds of shows in numerous states, opening for acts like: The Eli Young Band, Old Dominion, Southern Culture On The Skids, Robert Earl Keen, Junior Brown, Dale Watson, Los Straitjackets, Slim Cessna's Auto Club, The Railbenders, William Clark Green and many others.
- Eryn has performed with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra on a project which included Nathaniel Rateliff.
- Won five Westword Music Showcase awards in the country category, as well as winning a "Best Of Denver" award from that same publication for "Best Band Playing Country The Way It Was Meant To Be Played."
- Have released over five full-length albums worth of original recorded material.
Stick your head out the window and sniff the air: there’s a blizzard of badness brewing, and it’s not blowing over anytime soon. Sure, the political leaders, bullies, and other villains of various venoms are dominating the headlines, but these days the list of troublemakers extends well beyond the usual suspects.
From their home base in the Heartland, Tulsa, Oklahoma’s BRONCHO have a unique vantage point from which to survey the sins. Churning out thoughtful, nuanced rock and roll with an art school spirit and a punk rock heart since 2010, the band’s fourth album, Bad Behavior, finds them leaning into their strengths for their strongest effort yet. Following the catchy, playful vibe of previous albums Can’t Get Past the Lips(2011) and Just Enough Hip to BeWoman(2014), as well as the deliberate sonic intent of 2016’s sludgy, moodier art piece Double Vanity, the new record reveals BRONCHO’s fly-on-the-crumbling-wall vision of our moral climate, complete with a reenergized, accessible sound and the charmingly sardonic, smiling-while-sneering delivery of singer and bandleader Ryan Lindsey.
“It’s a reflection of the current world: everybody’s been acting badly over the last few years so we made a record about it,” Lindsey says. “There are multiple ways of portraying something as ‘bad,’ and there are moments of self-reflection throughout the record as though we could be talking about ourselves—but not necessarily. It’s observational, like we’re looking through muddy binoculars from a distance. It’s a blurry mirror image of the times from where we sit.”
Lindsey (vocals/guitar) and the band—Nathan Price (drums), Ben King (guitar), and Penny Pitchlynn (bass)—are a tight unit who have seen their songs featured at influential TV and radio and have toured the U.S. andEurope, including arenas with the likes of Queens of the Stone Age, The Growlers, Portugal.The Man, and Cage The Elephant. In the gritty warehouse district of Downtown Tulsa they have carved out a physical place for themselves, an industrial blank space where BRONCHO can experiment with sounds, performance, visuals, and more. It’s where they recorded Bad Behavior with producer Chad Copelin in the first half of 2018, a controlled process that allowed them to work at their own pace and by their own standards, almost like a secret club.
Bad Behavior slinks and purrs with a sense of lascivious flirtation. Lindsey sings with a mischievous twinkle in his voice, peppering his verses with suggestive uh-ohs and ahhs and at times barely pushing out his words to the point of whispering. Lines like “You caught me in the weekend/You caught me with your boyfriend” (“Weekend”) and “I got a thing for your mother/I got a thing to teach your father” (“Family Values”) match the primal pulse of the songs’ moods and vibes, and their pop sensibilities create a world where T. Rex, Tom Petty, The Cars, and The Strokes collide. “Keep It in Line” chimes along to a driving, pepped-up beat and serves as both the album’s catchiest moment and its closest swerve toward ethical commentary, as Lindsey’s narrator demands to be reminded of his place in the world while attempting to submit to his misgivings. The result is less an act of penance and more of honest reproach, an ultimate judgment that is matched in its directness only by the following track, “Sandman,” an overt yearning for pleasure that Lindsey calls the band’s answer to The Chordettes classic “Mr. Sandman.”
The record is filled with references to religion, sin, drugs, vice, and scandal bubbling just under the surface. It’s a palette familiar to anyone who has ever turned on the evening news, which Lindsey admits was a huge influence on him. “Through the writing process I watched a lot of CNN, and man there’s a lot of bad behavior there,” he says. “Not to mention that there’s a company making money off of people watching their depiction of it all. From an entertainer’s standpoint I get what they’re doing, calling everything ‘breaking news’ and keeping people glued, but taking up that kind of space can’t be good for society. Although it’s pretty fun to watch.”
Can all this unsavory activity exist without taking sides? Lindsey holds tight to his role as a relayer and is comfortable with leaving it to the audience to cast their own lot. “We’re assuming that everybody is coming from a certain set of values, but ultimately that’s impossible,” he says. “There’s a lot of people who think a certain way about the world and aren’t as shocked by these things. Maybe we’re simply trying to start the conversation. The best news is just a report of what’s going on, without bias. This record is a non-biased, non-profit reporting on what’s going on in the world. Part of it’s an exploration in solving those problems, on a personal level and ultimately on a cultural level.”
Bad Behavior represents a picture of a band that have crushed their own commercial expectations and are doing what they want to do at their own pace. They’ve cleaned the slate and quietly made a return with urgent, bonafide pop songs. If you want to catch a whiff of Bad Behavior, simply stick your head out the window and breathe.
Starcrawler is an American rock band from Los Angeles, formed in 2015. The band consists of lead singer Arrow de Wilde, guitarist Henri Cash, bassist Tim Franco and drummer Austin Smith. They have released two studio albums, Starcrawler and Devour You.
Starcrawler lead singer Arrow de Wilde and guitarist Henri Cash both attended Los Angeles' Grand Arts High School. De Wilde is the daughter of photographer Autumn de Wilde and drummer Aaron Sperske.
Upheaval and change are themes spread throughout the songs on Printer’s Devil, the latest Ratboys LP, out February 28, 2020 via Topshelf Records. But all the while, singer-songwriter Julia Steiner embraces moments of uncertainty as a necessary part of growing. Steiner recalls a David Byrne lyric, “I’m lost, but I’m not afraid” as inspiration for the transformative outlook, considering the line a personal mantra while writing Ratboys’ third full-length record. “There’s definitely a lot of uncertainty about what’s next, but I like to think that, in the midst of creating a lot of vulnerability for ourselves, we’re confident and becoming more self-assured.”
Steiner wrote the record with guitarist Dave Sagan while she was experiencing a dramatic shift in her own foundations, demoing out songs in her Louisville, Kentucky childhood home, which had just been sold and emptied out. “Demoing there was almost too intense,” Steiner says. “I kept writing in my journal that it feels like we shouldn’t be there. I don’t know if that feeling made its way directly into the lyrics, but to me the songs will always be connected to that sense of home and time passing.”
With years of touring under their belts, Steiner and Sagan have welcomed a newly consistent four-piece lineup, after years of shuffling through drummers. The band’s comfortable core -- which sees Steiner and Sagan backed by drummer Marcus Nuccio and bassist Sean Neumann -- is tangible across Printer’s Devil. What started as an acoustic duo has finally transformed into a full-scale indie-rock band with a clear identity. The rhythm section brings the band not only consistency, but a jolt in line with Steiner and Sagan’s growing sonic aspirations: Printer’s Devil was recorded live at Decade Music Studios in Chicago and was produced by the band and engineer Erik Rasmussen. Big-chorus power pop songs like “Alien with a Sleep Mask On” and “Anj” sound massive and larger than life, while the band’s dynamics beautifully thread together intimate folk songs like “A Vision” and devastating alt-country tracks like “Listening,” showcasing a rare range that invites listeners to imagine the band blowing out a 2,000-cap room or playing quietly next to you in the living room.
Building off their previous albums—AOID (2015) and GN (2017), which feature bright, youthful Americana narratives centered around soft vocal cadences and fluid, melodic lead guitars—Ratboys captures the bombastic, electrified fun of their live show in a bottle on Printer’s Devil and showcases their growing chemistry as a tight-knit group. Through all the change that fueled the record, Ratboys’ latest album Printer’s Devil finds a band that’s truly grown into itself and is just getting started.
Get Gone, the potent debut album by the Shreveport, Louisiana natives in Seratones, makes a strong case that this little-known corner of the state is fertile ground, musically speaking. A.J. Haynes (vocals), Connor Davis (guitar), Adam Davis (bass) and Jesse Gabriel (drums) serve up a combination of Southern musicality, garage rock ferocity, and general badassery.
Haynes’s powerful singing voice, first honed at Brownsville Baptist Church in Columbia, Louisiana at age 6, rings across every track. Davis’s bass and Gabriel’s playing propel every song with the grit, energy, and rawness of punk, the feeling of soul, and occasionally, a little jazz swing. The other Davis offers a clinic in guitar riffs, from swaggering blues to searing interstellar leads.
Recorded at Dial Back Sound studios in Mississippi, Get Gone is all live takes, a portrait of the Seratones in their element. Add the soul and swagger of a juke joint with the electricity coursing through a basement DIY show, and you’d begin to approach the experience of seeing this foursome live. The well-paced, multi-faceted set showcases a band dedicated to sonic exploration. “Don’t Need It,” which opens with a muscular swing and tight guitar lines, builds into a monster finish with a nasty corkscrew of a guitar line. “Sun,” a brawny thrasher, courses with huge, raw voltage riffs. “Chandelier,” a mid-tempo burner and vocal workout by Haynes, goes from croon to a crescendo that would shake any crystals hanging from the rafters.
Shared history in the city’s music scene brought the Seratones together a few years ago. All four had played together with one or another in various local punk bands, bonding through all-ages basement shows, gigs at skate parks and BBQ joints, and late nights listening to jazz and blues records. In a city of multiple genres, no fixed musical identity and a flood of cover bands, these adventurous musicians carved out their own path, personifying the do-it-yourself ethos. The group was quickly recognized after forming, winning the Louisiana Music Prize in 2013.
“Shreveport is always shifting its identity,” says Haynes. “You can do a lot of different things when it seems like every band is its own genre.”
Seratones’s music, created with collaborative songwriting and spontaneous creativity, is certainly their own, due perhaps in part to Shreveport’s unique sonic geography. The city sits at a nexus roughly equidistant from Memphis soul, Mississippi Delta Blues, and New Orleans jazz, with Texas swing located just over the nearby state border. The band’s sound draws from those touch points and more, ranging from Black Sabbath’s Paranoid to Kind of Blue. They’ll happily connect the dots between Ornette Coleman and Jello Biafra.
Seratones have different names for the amalgamation of styles found on their debut: Their own “expression of freedom,” music that’s “all about waking people up,” a safe space to feel what you want. However you choose to describe it, Get Gone is unexpected and unbowed, a head-snapping showcase of the twin pillars of Southern music, restlessness and resourcefulness.
by Patrick Sisson
Spacey but not alienating, loud yet still light, painting panoramic sound against a moving melodic backdrop, Moving Panoramas make boot gaze dream rock from Austin, Texas, led by songwriter Leslie Sisson. It all began in Brooklyn, where Leslie lived while playing in a number of touring bands. She came back to her home state of Texas to be closer to her family after navigating through a series of life changing, traumatic events. This led to an array of content that shaped the birth of the band. The 2015 debut LP 'One' and 2019 sophomore LP ‘In Two’ (both via Modern Outsider Records) received international acclaim and reached #1 radio charts. A third LP is in the works now.
"The best band in Texas right now" - Houston Press
“The ingredients and the sentiment might be simple, but the outcome is disarmingly complex" - NPR
"Moving Panoramas have been honing an expansive sound that is rooted in slithering guitar work and crisp vocals" - KCRW
"In Warpaint's ballpark, or Best Coast's hazy dream pop territory" - The Guardian
"Conjuring a big yet intimate sound reminiscent of Nineties output from Brit indie 4AD" - Austin Chronicle
“Capable of selling a stylish, shimmery, harmony-laden pop song (think Warpaint or Dum Dum Girls) they've tapped into a driving, propulsive urgency on their new material" - Billboard
Chicago's Panda Riot started when Brian Cook and Rebecca Scott began collaborating on soundtracks for short films. What started as atmospheric instrumentals soon transformed into full fledged dream pop songs. Now a four-piece with Cory Osborne on bass and José Alejandro Rodriguez on drums, their latest release, Infinity Maps, is a hallucinatory blend of pop, dance, and noise, filled with crashing guitars, candy sweet melodies, and break-beat inspired drums.
Velvet Starlings is a 60s infused garage rock ‘n’ roll band hailing from Los Angeles and the beach cities of Southern California.
Velvet Starlings is becoming a staple in the blossoming neo psychedelic garage rock scene on the West Coast, with several tours under their belt, internationally and across the country. The band was founded by young lead singer, guitarist & organ player Christian Gisborne who is known for his dynamic live stage performance, concert attendance record and impressive Lego collection. Velvet Starlings is rounded out by drummer Foster Poling and bassist Hudson Polling. In 2019, the group met in line outside of a Cage The Elephant show - and with their shared love of The Who & Sponge Bob, they decided to jam in a “beach fuzz psych garage” direction with a big cheeky nod to the UK invasion.
During the fall of 2020, Christian Gisborne produced, engineered and mixed Velvet Starlings’ debut LP, titled Technicolour Shakedown, which reflects a variety of rock n roll influences, from Thee Oh Sees, Arctic Monkeys to early Jack White. The LP drops in June, with the first single, “Back Of The Train” out on April 9, 2021, and two follow up singles, “Technicolour Shakedown” and “She Said (She Said)”.
Velvet Starlings’ previous EPs have received high marks globally, with each hitting #5 on FMQB Specialty Radio Charts, #1 on KROQ Local’s Only, BBC in the UK and many international radio stations online and terrestrial. Velvet Starlings is set to play Canadian Music Week in 2021 and has been featured in many international and domestic festivals, including Summerfest in Milwaukee. Christian Gisborne and Velvet Starlings are endorsed by Ernie Ball.
