Sam Outlaw announce the release of Angeleno 
January 15th 2016 and opening for Aaron Watson’s  UK dates

The future’s bright for the young Angeleno And an old song plays in his head Far as he knows. . .

  To get familiar with the material, Cooder sat in with Outlaw’s    band. “Before we got in the studio, Ry had already played four  shows with us. It helped him curate which members of my    band would work best for the live tracking. I was thinking that    we’d have five rehearsals before the studio, get everything    super tight, then go in and knock it out of the park. But Ry    said, ‘The band knows the songs. Let’s leave some room for    life to happen when we get in there.’ I liked that he had faith in  the players and the songs that we didn’t need to over-    rehearse. And throughout the sessions, he was on top of every  nook and cranny of the arrangements. ”Recording in Megawatt Studios in Los Angeles, with a band that included Bo Koster (My Morning Jacket), Taylor Goldsmith (Dawes), Gabe Witcher (Punch Brothers) and Chuy Guzmán (Linda Ronstadt), Outlaw heard the album he always dreamed of coming to life. “Ninety percent of what you’re hearing is still the five of us in a room performing a song,” he says. “Ry plays on every song, electric and acoustic on the basics. And then all the overdubs he did were just insanely beautiful. He was able to make magic happen on every track.

The resulting record has the timeless feel of those that inspired Outlaw. It is also almost defiantly nontrendy. Does he worry about fitting in with a country scene teeming with bros and Bon Jovi wannabes? “This whole debate about what country music is or isn’t, bro country versus traditional, americana versus ameripolitan, it’s all pretty boring to me,” he says. “I think I made the distinction of SoCal country because I know that people crave classification. Ultimately I think that the music will speak for itself.”

As Outlaw gears up to support Angeleno with tour dates opening for Dwight Yoakam and Clint Black (“Two of my heroes,” he says), he’s hopeful not only for his own record but a comeback of the music he loves. “I’ve made it a personal mission to remind people how great country music is,” he says. “And specifically, I want to remind them that Southern California has a really rich history with country music. Even though there hasn’t been a scene here for a long time, there has been a noticeable resurgence. If I can be involved in some kind of revival in the spirit of this music, that would make me very proud.”

Tracklisting

1. Who Do You Think You Are?
2. Keep It Interesting
3. I’m Not Jealous
4. Love Her For A While
5. Angeleno
6. Country Love Song
7. Ghost Town
8. Jesus Take The Wheel (And Drive Me To A Bar)
9. It Might Kill Me
10. Keep A Close Eye On Me
11. Old Fashioned
12. Hole Down In My Heart

Tour Dates
w/ Aaron Watson

Renowned raconteur KINKY FRIEDMAN is set to release
The Loneliest Man I Ever Met

his first album of new material in 39 years, on Avenue A / Thirty Tigers.

“Mark Twain meets Groucho Marx,at the corner of Johnny Cash and
Lenny Bruce,”

Legendary outlaw country singer-songwriter, activist, politician, entrepreneur, novelist and Texas Jewboy is joined by Willie Nelson on disc mixing originals with interpretations of Cash, Waits, Zevon, Dylan and others 

 Kerrville, Texas:  Nobody could invent a character quite like Kinky Friedman – the stogie-smoking, black-hat-wearing Texas  Jewboy – singer, storyteller, purveyor of his own brands of tequila and cigars, animal rescuer and full-time iconoclast. As anyone who saw Rich Hall’s recent homage to the Lone Star State, broadcast on BBC4, will know, above all, Kinky counts himself as Texan first and foremost.

Though renowned for penning some of outlaw country’s most outrageous songs, authoring bestsellers and running for governor of Texas, his 45-year career includes touring with Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue; recording with Clapton, The Band and Ringo Starr, appearing on Saturday Night Live and at the Grand Ole Opry, and writing one of Nelson Mandela’s favourite songs. He also became the protagonist of his own crime novels, because even he couldn’t invent a character that could out-kink Kinky Friedman.

But what he hasn’t done in 39 years is record a new studio album. Friedman’s The Loneliest Man I Ever Met, releasing this autumn, might be one of the longest-awaited follow-ups in recent memory. Not that fans have complained. The continued popularity of tunes such as Sold American, Nashville Casualty And Life and Ride ’Em Jewboy (the Holocaust-referencing song that soothed Mandela in prison) prove Kinky is that rare talent whose work withstands the test of time. Friedman still delivers those songs – interspersed with his inimitable blend of politically incorrect quips, jokes and tales both tall and true – to appreciative audiences around the world.

 Still, there were more sentiments he needed to express – his own and those of colleagues such as Tom Waits, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard and his pal Willie Nelson, who produced and performs on his own Bloody Mary Morning. The album’s opening song, which also features Willie’s sister, Bobbie, on piano and Kevin Smith on stand-up bass, is rendered as a spare duet, their traded lines punctuated with Nelson’s Spanish guitar-picking. The intimacy sets the tone for the other 11 tracks, all produced by Brian Molnar and featuring guitarist Joe Cirotti, with harmonica by Willie’s Family Band mate Mickey Raphael and piano contributions by Little Jewford, Kinky’s sidekick since his first post-Peace Corps job – bandleader of the Texas Jewboys.

Though songs such as Waits’ A Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis, Haggard’sMama’s Hungry Eyes, Dylan’s Girl From The North Country and Friedman’s own Lady Yesterday, not to mention his 20-year-old, never-recorded co-write with Tim Hoover, I’m the Loneliest Man I Ever Met, seem filled with melancholy, despair and regret – and certainly, loneliness – Friedman suggests they’re something else: Romantic.

He explains, “What I’ve tried to do is interpret some of these songs. But it’s not like Tony Bennett sings Willie Nelson; it’s more spiritually halfway between those people and me. So if you’re not a little bit melancholy, maybe you should be.

“A happy American creates nothing great,” he adds. “My definition of an artist is someone who’s ahead of his time and behind on his rent. If you can figure out how to stay that way, you can write the great shit that Kris [Kristofferson] and Willie were able to do. Look at what shape Willie was in when he was writing in Nashville – he had three little kids and was just broke, living in a trailer park. Willie wrote Night Life, Funny How Time Slips Away and Crazy all in one week – a terrible week in his life.”

 Railing against such perceived evils – whether cultural, political, social or in any other realm of human experience – is one of Friedman’s favourite pastimes, which is why he calls Warren Zevon’s My Shit’s Fucked Up possibly the album’s most important song. The late Zevon wrote it as a commentary on his own failing health, but Friedman finds it a perfect allegory for the current state of world affairs. As a man who has travelled much of the planet, quotes Winston Churchill, calls two presidents pals and now labels himself “governor of the heart of Texas” (as chosen by voters everywhere but in his home state), he’s in the best position to know.

But in most cases, the selections, which also include a lesser-known Cash song that was Friedman’s father’s favourite (Pickin’ Time) and two Great American Songbook tunes (Wand’rin’ Star and A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square), reflect more personal feelings. Feelings that he’s taking out across America with 30 shows without a break on one of his famous ‘bi-polar’ tours.

There are more outrageous schemes in the works, including planning the ultimate country-music death, but Kinky fans should not concern themselves unduly, because as soon as he finishes this tour, he’ll likely start another, while also signing copies of his soon-to-be-released who-done-it, The Hard-Boiled Computer – a title that carries no small dose of irony, coming as it does from a guy who claims not to own an email or text account and who will remove the cigar stub from his mouth long enough to insist, “Real cowboys don’t tweet.”

Jason Boland & The Stragglers announce the autumn release of Squelch on
Proud Souls / Thirty Tigers

“…one of the country scene’s most multidimensional songwriters, unfurling honky-tonk rave-ups, slices of slow-burn swing and tear-in-your-beer ballads.”  New York Times

 Another son of the Oklahoma Red Dirt, Jason  Boland is a man with a gift for perfect timing. Just as listeners are crying out for something true, some meaty songs that offer comfort, even as they cut right down to the bone, everyone is finally ready for the gritty, thundering country sound that Jason Boland & The Stragglers have sharpened over almost 20 years. And new album Squelch is the proof.

Picked by Billboard as one of the key country music releases of 2015 and billed as a, “Beg, borrow, sell a kidney,” event by www.savingcountrymusic.com, Squelchfeatures the brand of true, no-frills country music Jason Boland has built a burgeoning reputation on as one of the genre’s genuine and most exciting ambassadors.

As a dominant force in Red Dirt music and as an honest, intelligent, thought-provoking lyricist, Jason Boland has always pushed the boundaries of what country music could, and should be, while maintaining a high level of artistic integrity. “We’re just trying to make something that we’re proud of,” Boland says.

Since coming together in Stillwater, Oklahoma, Boland and his tight-knit crew have sold more than 600,000 albums independently and earned a devoted following that’s swelled far beyond the band’s Red Dirt roots. At a Stragglers show, oil patch roughnecks, hippies, college kids, and intelligentsia all sway side-by-side like a traveling reincarnation of Austin’s Armadillo World Headquarters in its cosmic cowboy, Willie Nelson heyday.

Listen to the album now on soundcloud below…..

 While The Stragglers draw from rock and folk, make no mistake, they traffic in unfiltered, unfettered honky-tonk, raw and lean. Equal parts subtle, meditative, and snarling, and often wickedly funny, Squelch is a deeply rooted exercise in exhuming beauty by trading artifice for something that feels real. “We pay homage, but we don’t want to copy or be a throwback act,” Boland says. “All you can do is try to take the music that inspires you and make it personal.” He is who he is, and he’s all in, what you see is what you get.

Recorded at Orb Recording Studios in Austin and mixed at Sonic Ranch in El Paso, Squelch was produced by Jim Ward (At the Drive-In, Sparta, Sleepercar). Like two previous Stragglers’ albums, Squelch was recorded and mixed directly to tape. Boland says, “I think it’s a fuller, richer sound. And it’s just more honest.”

The signatures of their sound are immediately apparent from the opener Break 19, which revels in bassist Grant Tracy’s heart-pounding walks, punctuated by Nick Worley’s whirling fiddle, Brad Rice’s locomotive drumming, and newest Straggler Cody Angel’s achy pedal steel. There’s not a throwaway line to be found, as Boland’s deep baritone rumbles through a sly takedown of modern media.

I Guess It’s Alright is classic Boland wordplay layered over a breakneck shot of adrenaline, a rollicking send-up of society’s uneven tolerance of bad behaviour over growling guitar. Fat And Merry bristles with snark, taking aim at quintessential American hustle and nonstop consumption. “Nobody wants to come off as judgmental, but you have to make judgments,” Boland says. “With your tongue in your cheek is a nice way to do it. None of us are above reproach.”

 First To Know is a love song for adults and a plea for understanding. It’s also a reminder that sometimes, what you see really is what you get, and while that may disappoint, ultimately it’s also cause for trust and hope. Lose Early is a sauntering rendition of dust to dust and a skewering of the lie that you have to sell your soul to eat, while Do You Love Me Any Less questions whether or not absence hinders affection.

The haunting and heart-breaking Christmas In Huntsville was written by original Stragglers fiddler Dana Hazzard and is the only track Boland didn’t pen. Images of Christmas at home flood the imprisoned narrator’s mind as he heads to his execution for a murder he didn’t commit. Closer Fuck, Fight, And Rodeo kicks out the footlights in a two-minute, hell-in-a-hand-basket hoedown.

Holy Relic Sale is a stunning example, and one of the songs that makes Boland most proud. “My wife’s got a pair of lucky blue socks,” he says. “One day, we just had an awesome day – everything went right. We got home, and she pulled the socks out of the dresser and said, ‘I thought I had these on all day.’ It’s the classic story of ‘it’s not the things.’ The things are there to remind you to concentrate on the positive facts of life. The little relics that we have are going to wear out or get lost, but the light and the energy are within you.”

Now that the void for smart, substantive country music is finally beginning to be populated, those who have been yearning for it have been heard. However, with Squelch, Jason Boland & The Stragglers remind us that it was out there all along, we just needed to look a little harder.

The Turnpike Troubadours are set to release their hot-rockin’ eponymous fourth album in the UK and Europe.

Hailing from Tahlequah Oklahoma The Turnpike Troubadours are set to release their fourth album this autumn. The eponymous release, on their own Bossier City Records finds the quintet in fine form, playing their high octane blend of Red Dirt, country roots and raw, hard rocking overdrive with a conviction and passion that finds them widely championed by those seeking an alternative to the Nashville mainstream’s saccharine gloss.

The band made their debut back in 2007 and have since gone on to cement a reputation as a hard working band, putting in the road miles and steadily growing an audience across America. It’s no longer news when they draw 5,000-plus at Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth, sell out three nights in a row at Gruene Hall or turn several hundred away at the Legendary Stubb’s Bar-B-Q in Austin. Word has spread, throughout the States. Their shows in Chicago, St. Louis and elsewhere have pulled in more than 1,000 fans. And they’ve drawn full houses at Joe’s Pub in New York and The Troubadour in L.A., among many other nightspots North, South and from coast to coast.

Subsequently they’ve even been picked by   Playboy as one of three acts to watch in 2015 –  a distinction lead singer, guitarist and principal  songwriter Evan Felker admits is, “Pretty  bizarre,” but actually, still rather impressive  nonetheless.

Their high energy musical approach centres on   Fekler’s acute observations of American life, with fiddler Kyle Nix and steel and electric guitarist Ryan Engleman bringing their instrumental flair. The rhythm section of bassist RC Edwards and the more recent recruit, drummer Gabe Pearson, are lock-tight and with four of the band singing, they boast some impressive harmonies too. Ryan also produces, along with engineer Matt Wright and there is a notable guest appearance from former Troubadours’ alumnus John Fullbright on keys, vocals, guitar, banjo and accordion.

For all of their raw rock drive, however, it’s the songs that really stand out with lyrically engaging and compelling stories. There’s 7 Oaks, recounting a life of desperation through poverty, made more vivid by an incongruous hoedown accompaniment. Bossier City focuses on a sad mill worker who blows his pay regularly on gambling and booze. The Bird Hunters is a short story set to a Cajun waltz about friendship, love and coming home. Down Here documents a conversation between one guy who has lost all he had and another who assures him life “down here” really isn’t so bad. How Do You Fall Out Of Love offers a melancholy meditation on lost love.

There’s an adroit technique at work here, adding a unique spin to an age old craft. “Human beings like stories,” Felker insists. “It doesn’t matter what form, whether it be a song or a movie or a poem. And they’ve always been drawn to characters. Our songs are real life applied to stories applied back to real life. I might get a plot line from several short stories I’ve read. Then I’ll build fallible characters into the midst of all that. They’re never archetypes. They’re real. It’s all about the character.”

In fact, characters are so central to the Turnpike Troubadours that they often turn up in more than one song. On The Turnpike Troubadours, for instance, the narrator in Down Here, Danny, turns up again in The Bird Hunters.

“Stephen King has this canon of characters and any of them can walk into one of his stories at any time,” Felker says. “You have all these characters living in the same universe. I haven’t ever seen that applied to songwriting, but that’s what I’m doing.”

This universe feels real on The Turnpike  Troubadours because the band resolved to let the album happen on its own time. Moving out to the Prairie Sun recording complex in the desert country of Cotati, California, setting up in former chicken coops converted into studios, they metaphorically unplugged the clock and worked studiously through 12-hour sessions, wrapping up only when each story and every note rang true. “This album sounds like us at our best,” Edwards says. “We weren’t going for being overproduced. What we got was exactly what we wanted because we didn’t have that time factor problem.”

In many ways it channels what the band have become renowned for, bringing their highly charged live show into the studio. “Our sound comes from playing country music, punk rock and anything else we liked in honky-tonks and beer joints,” Edwards adds. “You’ve got to give the crowd something to dance to and have a good time. But songwriters are the most important thing. So I think everything we’ve done says that you can have it both ways.”

The Turnpike Troubadours have crafted an artful album, enriched by a narrative tradition that traces back to their fellow Oklahoman Woody Guthrie, in which every nuance tells a story unto itself and it all adds up to one hell of a record from a band on the up and up. As bizarre as it may be, it seems Playboy has a point.

Will Hoge returns with his brand new album
‘Small Town Dreams’
along with September 2015 UK Tour

If Will Hoge wasn’t a country singer, he might have been a character in a country song. The Nashville native has done some hard travelling, clocking up thousands of miles down lonesome highways, chasing the American Dream and the spirits of his heroes, the storytellers who tell all our stories. Stories that are vividly realised on his tenth album, Small Town Dreams, a landmark in his evolution as a writer to be reckoned with, someone whose minimalistic language and granular delivery embodies Hank Williams’ narrative acuity, Bruce Springsteen’s everyman sensibility and Steve Earle’s unflinching truthfulness.

“It’s a reflection of where I am currently in my life, but also where I grew up and, ultimately, where I’m going,” says Hoge.

The personal becomes the universal on ‘Middle of America’, about the moments, good and bad, that bring us together. ‘Guitar or a Gun’ finds a young boy in a pawn shop confronted by a dilemma – should he buy a guitar or a gun? “One can feed your family, and one will end you up in jail”, sings Hoge in a voice that suggests the deal could go either way. And ‘Small Town Dreams’ itself – inspired by a childhood photo that Hoge came across while visiting his mother – is a renewal of the callow faith in possibility we all possess before being disabused of such a notion.

“I started thinking about all the people I had lost contact with, and how, at that age, everybody in that photo truly believed they could do anything they wanted to, and that those sort of small town dreams are possible,” Hoge explains.

His own small town dream was to become a high school history teacher and basketball coach, before he decided to drop out of Western Kentucky University and pursue the more fanciful dream of a life in music. Not even the lean years of driving from one venue to the next across America, or honing his craft in Nashville writing rooms, writing for himself and for others, dissuaded Hoge. The dream became a vocation, though that vocation was almost derailed when, in 2008, after leaving a studio session, his motor scooter collided with a van. Hoge was rushed to Vanderbilt University Medical Centre in a critical condition, sustaining numerous broken bones and lacerations to his face, arms and torso that required 200 stitches.

“At the time I had only been married for five or six months, and we had a nine-month-old little boy,” he recalls.

“I had a career that was finally starting to go somewhere and that was almost bashed away. It changes and adds some perspective on how fortunate I am not only to have those things, but to just be healthy and happy. It was certainly a life-changing event.”

In 2012, some 15 years after the release of his debut, Spoonful – Tales Begin to Spin, that vocation was validated when Hoge’s ‘Even If It Breaks Your Heart’, taken to the top of the US Country Chart by The Eli Young Band, was nominated for a Grammy Award, and also a contender for both Country Music Association and the Academy of Country Music accolades in the Country Song of the Year category.

“That was monumental. As a writer and an artist, it opened so many doors and just changed the perspective of even people who knew me as a writer or liked me as a writer or artist. It just gave them sort of confirmation that they weren’t crazy for that, and that there could be bigger things than what I had before.”

A year later, Hoge joined forces with crack producer Marshall Altman, whose credits include Matt Nathanson’s Some Mad Hope, Frankie Ballard’s Sunshine & Whiskey, Eric Paslay’s eponymously-titled debut. The idea to work with Altman was hatched on another late night drive, when Ballard’s ‘Helluva Life’ came on the radio, followed by Paslay’s ‘Friday Night’.

“Neither of those sound like records I would make, but they both sound so uniquely them. So I called up Marshall at 2am – he was in the studio that late. We started the process of recording Small Town Dreams after that. He’s part cheerleader, part conductor, part coach, part fan, all at the same time.”

The resultant collection, which features a guest appearance by country stalwart Vince Gill on guitar, is arguably the most significant signpost on Hoge’s odyssey so far – an odyssey that promises still greater things to come.

Tracklisting

1. Growing Up Around Here
2. They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To
3. Better Than You
4. Little Bitty Dreams
5. Guitar Or A Gun
6. Middle Of America
7. All I Want Is Us Tonight
8. Just Up The Road
9. Desperate Times
10. The Last Thing I Needed
11. Til I Do It Again
Watch the official video of ‘ Middle Of America ‘

UK TOUR 2015 

 

SEPTEMBER

Fri 4th – The Stables, Milton Keynes
Tickets

Sat 5th – The Picture House, Sheffield
Tickets

Mon 7th – 02 ABC 2, Glasgow
Tickets

Tues 8th – Night & Day, Manchester
Tickets

Thurs 10th – Bush Hall, London
Tickets

Fri 11th – The Portland Arms, Cambridge
Tickets

Sat 12th – Green Door Store, Brighton
Tickets