About The Dirty River Boys

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.”

About Vandoliers

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.

About JAIME WYATT

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.”

About Chuck Mead

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.

About Jason Hawk Harris

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.

Margo Cilker

MARGO CILKER is a woman who drinks deeply of life, and her debut record Pohorylle, released in November 2021 on Portland label Fluff and Gravy, is brimming with it. For the last seven years, the Eastern Oregon songwriter, who NPR calls one of “11 Oregon Artists to Watch” has split her time between the road and various outposts across the world, from Enterprise, OR to the Basque Country of Spain, forging a path that is at once deeply rooted and ever-changing.

As Pohorylle traverses through the geography of Cilker’s memories—a touring musician’s tapestry of dive bars and breathtaking natural beauty—love is apparent, as is its inevitable partner: loss. For what bigger heartbreak is there than to be a fervent lover who must always keep moving? Cilker seems keenly aware of the precarious footing upon which love stands, and at many turns, the record circles something that is staggeringly beautiful and slipping away.

“I am a woman split between places,” Cilker sings on the album’s wistful closer, touching for a brief moment upon the vast dichotomies of her selfhood and her profession, and the negotiation that she conducts between them.

“I’m just very inquisitive. I’m a very curious person. Why are things this way? Do they have to stay this way? You know, how can things change?” Cilker asks. It is this part of her nature that expands Pohorylle into the complex journey that it is: her ability to crack open a moment of desperation and lay it out on a table to catch a careful light.

Pohorylle, which carries gentle nods to Lucinda Williams, Townes Van Zandt, and Gillian Welch, shines under the instincts of producer Sera Cahoone, whom Cilker first came across in 2019 while planning her first full-length. “I was trying to pin down what kind of sound I wanted and stumbled across a video of Sera and just loved how she performed. I then listened to her last studio record and thought, that’s the sound.” Cilker says. “I found out Sera had produced that record herself with John Askew. My friend put me in touch with her and she liked my demos enough to produce the album. It felt very auspicious—It was truly just a gut feeling.”

Cahoone quickly got to work assembling a first-rate band: Jenny Conlee (The Decemberists) on keys, Jason Kardong (Sera Cahoone, Son Volt) on pedal steel, Rebecca Young (Lindsey Fuller, Jesse Sykes) on bass, Mirabai Peart (Joanna Newsom) on strings, Kelly Pratt (Beirut) on horns, and the album’s engineer John Morgan Askew (Neko Case, Laura Gibson) on an array of other instruments. The record also prominently features effortless harmonies from Sarah Cilker, Margo Cilker’s sister and frequent touring partner.

Over the last six years, Margo Cilker has toured extensively across the US and internationally, and is a staple in the independent festival circuit.

(written by Maria Maita-Keppeler)

About the Old 97’s

“Somehow what we’ve got never breaks down,” Rhett Miller sings on Old 97’s exhilarating new album, ‘Twelfth.’ At first, the line comes off as a boast, as a declaration of invincibility from a band that’s managed to survive three decades of rock and roll debauchery, but as the phrase repeats over and over again, it slowly transforms into something more incredulous, something more vulnerable, something deeply human.

“We experienced some close calls over the last few years,” says Miller, “and I think that led us to this dawning realization of the fragility of it all. At the same time, it also led us to this increased gratitude for the music and the brotherhood we’ve been so lucky to share. I think all of that combined to make recording this album one of the most intensely joyful experiences we’ve ever had as a band.”

That joy is utterly palpable on ‘Twelfth.’ Loose and raw, the record is an ecstatic celebration of survival, a resounding ode to endurance and resilience from a veteran group that refuses to rest on their considerable laurels. Working out of Sputnik Sound in Nashville, Miller and his longtime bandmates—bassist Murry Hammond, guitarist Ken Bethea, and drummer Philip Peeples—teamed up once again with GRAMMY-winning producer Vance Powell (Chris Stapleton, Jack White), and while the resulting album boasts all the hallmarks of a classic Old 97’s record (sex and booze, laughter and tears, poetry and blasphemy), it also showcases a newfound perspective in its writing and craftsmanship, a maturity and appreciation that can only come with age and experience. Perhaps the band is growing up; maybe they’re just getting started. Either way, Old 97’s have never been happier to be alive.

“You have to take pride in the unlikeliness of it all,” says Miller. “It’s mind boggling to think that we’ve been able to last this long, that we’ve been able to support ourselves and our families on our own terms for almost thirty years. Twelve is a lot of records.”

Formed in Dallas, Texas, Old 97’s first emerged in the early ’90s with an adrenaline pumping blend of rock and roll swagger, punk snarl, and old-school twang that quickly brought them into the national spotlight. Conventional wisdom places the band at the forefront of a musical movement that would come to be known as “alternative country,” but, as the New York Times so succinctly put it, their sound always “leaned more toward the Clash than the Carter Family.” Fueled by breakneck tempos, distorted guitars, and wry storytelling, the foursome built a reputation for high-energy albums and even higher energy shows, earning themselves performances everywhere from Conan and Letterman to Bonnaroo and Lollaplooza alongside countless rave reviews. NPR lauded the group as a “pioneering force,” while Rolling Stone hailed their music’s “whiskey-wrecked nihilism and slow-burn heartbreak,” and The New Yorker praised their songwriting as “blistered, blasted, and brilliant.” On top of his prodigious output with Old 97’s, Miller simultaneously established himself as a prolific solo artist, as well, releasing eight studio albums under his own name that garnered similarly wide-ranging acclaim and landed in a slew of prominent film and television soundtracks. A gifted writer beyond his music, Miller also contributed essays and short stories to The Atlantic, Salon, McSweeney’s, and Sports Illustrated among others, and in 2019, he released his debut book, a collection of poetry for children, via Little, Brown and Company.

While part of Old 97’s charm has always been the air of playful invulnerability they exude onstage every night, reality began catching up with the band in 2017. The night before a television appearance in support of the group’s most recent album, ‘Graveyard Whistling,’ Peeples collapsed in a hotel parking lot, falling backwards and cracking his skull on a concrete abutment. He spent weeks in the ICU and was forced to miss the first leg of tour. Bethea, meanwhile, began to notice a loss of feeling in the fingers of his right hand. As his condition continued to deteriorate on the road, the numbness spread to his leg, and he was eventually forced to undergo spinal surgery in order to regain full motor control. Miller, for his part, found himself at more of an existential crossroads, questioning attitudes and behaviors he’d long taken for granted. Yes, he was a rock and roll star (whatever that means nowadays), but he was also a father and a husband, and he decided it was long since time to get sober.

“Back when we were in our 20’s, we put ourselves through these terrible trials because we thought we could survive anything,” says Miller. “But over the last few years, it started becoming clear that we’re human.”

Rather than slow things down, the band decided to embrace their mortality as all the more reason to seize the day. Life is short—a lesson that was hammered home on the group’s first day of recording in Nashville, when a series of deadly tornadoes ripped through town—and ‘Twelfth’ is the sound of Old 97’s recommitting themselves to making the most of every moment they’ve got left. Addictive opener “The Dropouts” sets the stage, taking stock of the band’s journey from its very first days, when they cut their teeth playing the bars of Deep Ellum in exchange for pitchers of beer and pizza. Like much of the record to come, it’s a nostalgic look back on simpler times, but it smartly avoids looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, instead recognizing that change is neither inherently good nor bad, only inevitable.

“There’s a line about sleeping on hardwood floors in that song,” says Miller, “and that’s what we did in the early days. But that image of hardwood floors keeps coming back and building on itself in different songs throughout the album, and over time it begins to mean different things as we grow up and start families and own homes.”

Miller has a knack for capturing those sorts of little details that tell a larger story, for crafting richly cinematic scenes that transform seemingly mundane moments into metaphors for life itself. The driving lead single “Turn Off The TV,” for instance, spins a free cable hookup into a celebration of the visceral pleasures of living in the present, while the larger-than-life “Diamonds On Neptune” turns an astronomical phenomenon into a meditation on what really matters, and the waltzing “Belmont Hotel” finds emotional symbolism in the restoration of a Dallas landmark.

“‘Belmont Hotel’ is a microcosm of the album, and of our band,” says Miller. “When we first started out, the Belmont was in absolute ruins, and we even did a photoshoot in the empty parking lot. Now, though, it’s more beautiful than it was in its glory days, and that got me thinking about the way we approach our relationships. Whether it’s a friendship or a marriage or a band, it’s inevitable that you’re going to go through ups and downs, but if you’re willing to put in the work and stick out the hard times, you can wind up with something that’s better than it ever was before.”

While Miller collaborated with writers like Butch Walker and Nicole Atkins on ‘Graveyard Whistling,’ he penned everything on ‘Twelfth’ himself (outside of the Spaghetti Western-esque “Happy Hour” and hypnotic album closer “Why Don’t We Ever Say We’re Sorry,” which were both written and sung by Hammond). It’s a return to form he credits in part to his increasing comfort with sobriety, a comfort that finds him effortlessly running the gamut from playful romance (the dreamy “I Like You Better”) and brash bravado (the blistering “Confessional Boxing”) to supernatural fantasy (the Kinks-ian “This House Got Ghosts”) and old-school twang (the rollicking “Bottle Rocket Baby”). It’s perhaps the jaunty “Absence (What We’ve Got)” that captures this particular moment in Old 97’s history best, though, as Miller marvels at the way things change while staying the same. “The wine turns into whiskey / And the whiskey turns to tears / It’s been this way for years,” he sings, later summing the whole magic act up with a deceptively simple confession: “This is what I do.”

Old 97’s may be human, but somehow what they’ve got never breaks down.

About Nikki Lane

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.”

About Blue Water Highway

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.

About Whitney Rose

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

About Lucette

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.

About JP Harris

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.”

About Daniel Markham

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

About The 40 Acre Mule

“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.

About Houndmouth

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.

About Shannon Shaw

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.

About Hunk Hunt

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.

About Sleep Talk

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.

About The Cactus Blossoms

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.

About The Paranoyds

Four-piece from Los Angeles. Punk wing dong gaze porn pop cop chop proto shoes progs clogs hogs fuzzy wuzzy soaked hugs and slugs.

About Black Belt Eagle Scout

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.

About Motel Radio

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.

The Bobby Lees

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.

White Rose Motor Oil

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.

About Broncho

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.

The Yawpers

Bloodshot Records’ band The Yawpers craft tunes that are engrossed in creative context. Some might recall edges of the mid-1900s Delta blues, but only if those lived-in riffs were played by the MC5, broadcast through booming stadium speakers and drenched with pounds of fuzzy distortion and full-throttled punk rock energy. They conduct parallel frequencies with the ferocious and raw proletarian roots of Uncle Tupelo, the burning-hot thrashings and cavernous sonic space of Hot Snakes, and mix in derisive scrutiny that brings to mind Ween or the Minutemen (and might we add that Cook is the spitting image of D. Boon).

About Ratboys

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.

About Ruby Boots

At 14 years old, Ruby Boots—real name Bex Chilcott—left a conflicted home in Perth, Western Australia to do grueling work on pearling boats, and she hasn’t stopped migrating since. Her nomadic streak has taken her around the world, and eventually to Nashville, TN.

Don’t Talk About It charts this drifter’s odyssey, tattered passport in hand. Behind her commanding and versatile voice, sharp guitar playing, and adept songwriting, Ruby Boots confidently maneuvers past the whirlwinds life has tossed on her occasionally lost highway. It’s an album of hope, breakthrough, and handling the unknown challenges around the next bend.

The roads taken, the miles traveled and the voices heard during Ruby’s life’s trek resonate throughout Don’t Talk About It. Informed as much by the wide-open landscapes of her homeland as the intimate writing circles of Nashville, the album may range far and wide but always maintains a firm sense of place. Echoes of first wave UK power pop and jangly punk intersect with the every(wo)man indie and pop- inflected muscle of Best Coast. Classic rock touchstones from T. Rex to the girl group Wall of Sound to personal hero Tom Petty meld with a weary poet’s eye recalling Hope Sandoval.

On her Bloodshot Records debut, Ruby continues to map out a polished-yet-fearless, bare-knuckled self, previously hinted at on her last album, Solitude. In 2016, Ruby met with Lone Star State-bred studio wizards The Texas Gentlemen and the album’s eventual producer Beau Bedford. The group had stopped off in Nashville on their way to back Kris Kristofferson at Newport Folk Festival and a mutual admiration society quickly coalesced. The collective pulled a handful of songs from the 40 she had waiting and began recording at their Dallas-based studio Modern Electric Sound Recorders.

The album rips right open with “It’s So Cruel,” strutting through the door with dual harmonic, bawdy, fuzzed-out guitars, reminiscent of a glammy, ‘70s southern-rock-soaked Queens of the Stone Age. It all captures the meteoric emotional flares of an adulterous relationship destined to fail. The Gentlemen spell a Stetson-hat wearing Wrecking Crew as they lay down dusty gothic vibes in the Nikki Lane co-written “I’ll Make It Through,” building towards a crescendoing, persevering, bright chorus. (Lane also sings background vocals on the album’s title track.) On “Believe in Heaven,” doo-wop beats, dark choral echoes, and a plucked string section lead into ZZ Top full-bodied rawk riffage.

But the most defining of tones come through in spirit, when on the a capella “I Am A Woman” Ruby reaches towering vocal peaks, shredding raw, putting it all out there. The song could be a traditional spiritual, as she belts: “I am a believer / Standing strong by your side / I’m the hand to hold onto / When it’s too hard to try… I am a woman / Do you know what that means / You lay it all on the line / When you lay down with me.”

Of the song Chilcott says, “‘I Am a Woman’ was conjured up amid recent events where men have spoken about, and treated women’s bodies, the way no man, or woman, should. This kind of treatment toward another human being makes every nerve in my body scream. These kinds of incidents are so ingrained in our culture and are swept under the carpet at every turn—it needs to change. As tempting as it was to just write an angry tirade I wanted to respond with integrity, so I sat with my feelings and this song emerged as a celebration of women and womanhood, of our strength and our vulnerability, all we encompass and our inner beauty, countering ignorance and vulgarity with honesty and pride and without being exclusionary to any man or woman. My hope is that we come together on this long drawn out journey. The song is the backbone to the album for me.”

Don’t Talk About It smoulders with a fighting spirit and pulls influence and experience—both musically, emotionally, and beyond—from many pins in the map, but is 10 songs harbored in the singularity that is Ruby Boots.

About Moving Panoramas

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

About Panda Riot

Panda Riot is a four-piece dreampop band from Chicago. Their latest album, Extra Cosmic, will
be out in Summer 2022.

Brian Cook and Rebecca Scott first met at a bar in Philadelphia where Brian was debuting a
short film. A first date soon led to more, and they formed Panda Riot while working on another
short film together. Their first album, She Dares All Things, was recorded in their bedroom and it
showcased a DIY attitude that continues to characterize Panda Riot’s approach to this day. Brian
has recorded, mixed, and mastered all of the band’s albums and even builds custom guitar pedals
that give Panda Riot it’s signature sound.

Although frequently classified as shoegaze, a genre typified by Irish trailblazers, My Bloody
Valentine, Panda Riot has a sound that pushes far beyond the noisy guitars and buried vocals
characteristic of most shoegaze bands. With hip-hop, electronic, pop, and rock influences, the
band stretches the “shoegaze” sound to new sonic landscapes.

After releasing She Dares All Things from their tiny Philadelphia apartment, Brian and Rebecca
moved to Chicago where the band has grown both in members and experience. Their sophomore
release, Northern Automatic Music, was described by Popstache as an album that “further
refine[d] the band’s cinematic sound by crafting a wash of shimmery guitars and underpinning it
all with a newfound organic, rhythmic intricacy.”

With their third album, Infinity Maps current bassist, Cory Osborne (Airiel, Tom Spacey,
Lightfoils), joined the band, adding a new sophistication to the rhythm section. The Chicago
Reader described Infinity Maps as an “ambitious 18-song album [that] has more than enough
shimmering guitars, swelling electronics, and sci-fi movie samples to soundtrack any
recreational moper’s dark (but totally pleasant) night of the soul.”

Now, emerging from the pandemic, Panda Riot is back with a new full-length album, Extra
Cosmic. While maintaining their signature wall-of-sound dreampop with avalanched guitars and
dancey drums, they explore an even wider aesthetic range in their most acoustically and
emotionally dynamic release yet. With new drummer, Brian Hilderbrand, their live sound has
also reached a new level. They are excited to debut the new songs and lineup in their summer
tour which will feature a performance at the Schellraiser Music Fest in McGill, NV.

About Velvet Starlings

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.