Wade Bowen delivered us some joy over the Labor Day weekend by dropping a new EP he’d secretly been working on during the lock downs. At first, I didn’t know what to make of the track list for The Waiting. It was kind of like peeking into a bag of Halloween candy and seeing familiar favorites (shout out Three Musketeers) mixed in with a few surprises. Even Bowen admits, “This EP is all over the place. The six songs don’t really fit together, which I like… and I did it on purpose. It’s almost like an encore on stage.” Here’s

The genre of southern rock had been moribund and dormant until the ascendance of bands such as Cross Canadian Ragweed, Whiskey Myers and Blackberry Smoke. Despite the best efforts of bands such as Copper Chief and Midnight River Choir, the sub genre has ebbed and flowed around these parts as it has throughout much of the country. Those bands got country and funky to break through. Southern rock has mostly been relegated to the novelty, county fair, discount bin of the music world as bands like Skynyrd shed original members but kept playing the same songs.  The freshness of the

Going solo after being in a massively successful band is one of the more difficult propositions in the music business. It has rarely been done with any measure of equal success. Projects from titans like Lennon, McCartney, Henley and Frey jump to mind. Petty delivered Full Moon Fever as a solo project, but it was merely a de facto Heartbreakers album. The most notable example from the Texas/Red Dirt scene is Johnny Chops of the Randy Rogers Band releasing a handful of fantastic rock-infused jams that have built a solid solo brand. Cody Canada’s post-Ragweed deserves consideration in this conversation

John Baumann is one of the finest young songwriters plying his trade in Texas and beyond at the moment.  He’s developed a knack for hard-scrabble emotional lyrics paired with sneakily infectious lyrics.  He’s as adept at drawing from the well of personal experience as he is observation and imagination. That’s not an easy trick for any songwriter to learn, yet Baumann mastered it all before age 30.  He’s experienced a lot of love and loss in his young life, including the uber impactful experience of unexpectedly losing his father as a young man.  This loss informs even the brightest moments

The Hold My Beer Volume 1 release from Wade Bowen and Randy Rogers dropped five years ago. It was a rallying testament to the type of classic country music that they grew up on. Lloyd Maines punched all the right buttons and the songs selected made a statement from the opening single “Standards” to the infectious radio single worthiness of “Ladybug”. Five years later we now have Volume 2. Bowen and Rogers reconvened the same cast of characters and upped the fun quotient. This is the country music of the late 70s and 80s that evokes the best of Moe