If you think mezcal and some brick weed make for a pretty fine summer evening, then Russel Taine Jr. might have a new anthem for you to add into your rotation. The band is back with another song for quarantine summer, this time with the rocking, radio-ready cut “Blue Jean Baby”.

Russel Taine Jr. features Aaron Winston (lyrics/guitar/vocals), Justin Winslow (bass), Brittany Long (keys) and Cory Fica (drums). As the band members continued to record through stay-at-home orders, the longing for summers past crept up in mind. “July 4th fireworks – and a dance and a drink down at the White Horse…a love song for a Texas summer without COVID.” It can be migraine-inducing to reach far enough backward for memories of a carefree August, but the sparkling guitar of “Blue Jean Baby” instantly conjures images of sun-soaked sands and glistening waters.

Right from the jump, Winston’s vocals are situated apart from the instrumental, mixed to give them just enough separation to stand out, especially in the verses. His voice sits somewhere to the left of Jack Johnson – just a little more verve, but still free and easy enough to coast this song through. It’s a smile-inducing melody that’s easy enough to pick up and hold onto, with a smashing singalong chorus.

With many country music acts forced to reckon with the pandemic and protests and alter their release plans, or scrap them altogether (except you, Kenny Chesney), Summer 2020 radio has been drier than usual. We have plenty of indie and alternative-tinged tunes to take away the pain, but when the setting just calls for good times, not too many have been willing to answer this year. Thankfully, Russel Taine Jr. decided to keep recording and releasing at their own pace. This might not be the summer they wanted, but who says they can’t pretend?

– Mike Floeck 

“Hello, I’m Johnny Cash” is as startling to read here as it is to hear on the opening of Bill Callahan’s ​Gold Record​. Sparse guitar riffs and faint trumpet notes guide the listener through the Tejano lullaby “Pigeons.” Calahan’s description of the romantic saga is as elusive as his voice:

“Deep in the heart of Texas, life and love go sleepily on,” Callahan writes on his Bandcamp page. “From the wheel of his long white limousine, a man witnesses scenes from many lives. Musically commencing with Cash and rambling to Cohen suggests that whether the wedding rice explodes in your belly or you end up married to the whole wide world, there’s a place for you on this Earth.”

For the past seven weeks, Drag City has released a different single from the album, offering a preview and pre-order for the September release. Callahan offers ​Gold Record ​in multiple formats including cassette, compact disc, vinyl and digital. The current releases are as dense as a novel, allowing the listener to pick up on different insights of the characters with each listen.

It’s hard to know how many personal anecdotes Callahan includes with his work, as fictional characters take the place of himself. “Let’s Move to the Country” describes a blossoming relationship, the character leaving traveling behind to settle down and start a family. This may provide a link from Callahan’s characters into his personal life, as he married Hanly Banks in 2014 and became a father, and took a significant break in recording.

The seven released tracks are held together with a cohesive sound, forcing the listener to observe the lyrics. In an interview with Texas Monthly earlier this year, Callahan cited Willie Nelson as an influence for visual storytelling. Though Callahan was describing a line from his previous release ​Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest​, the material on ​Gold Record f​ eels connected to the writing style of Nelson’s ​Red Headed Stranger.

Follow the release of Callahan’s ​Gold Record​ here: https://billcallahan.bandcamp.com/album/gold-record

-Andrew Blanton

West Texas Blues​ is a live studio album born out of organist, Mike Flanigin, and guitarist Sue Foley’s Texas Blues Party. Streamed live on Facebook, the hour-long program focused on regional history and included interviews with blues legends C.C. Adcock, ​Angela Strehli and Derek O’Brien.

“That’s almost what jump started the album in a sense.” Flanigin said. “We were just hesitant to do any sort of live stream thing, but we got so bored that we decided to do it, and our angle on it was we wanted to have a theme for the show.”

West Texas Blues​ was recorded in a four-hour session at Fire Station Studios in San Marcos with Chris Layton on drums and engineer Chris Bell, who worked with Foley on ​The Ice Queen and Flanigin’s debut ​The Drifter.

Mike Flanigin and Sue Foley’s West Texas Blues

“As much as I labored over ​The Drifter​ album, which took me three years to make, and I had a lot of different types of genres, and people, and guests, this was the exact opposite.” Flanigin said. “This was ‘Let’s go in and let’s do what we do,’ and we play the blues. That’s what we’ve been doing our whole lives.”

The gritty-slow title track on the album by Lightnin’ Hopkins delivers a solid example of the phrasing that gives Austin blues guitar its sound.

“I just love the imagery of it,” Flanigin said, “because when you go to West Texas it’s so vast and the sound of that song is just like that.”

For the past four months, pulling open the red-and-white striped doors at C-Boy’s Heart and Soul on a Saturday night has felt like a distant memory. Flanigin’s crowded weekly residency with Jimmie Vaughan in the shadows of the tallest Capitol in the nation has been on indefinite hiatus as Coronavirus mandates leave night clubs in limbo.

“To me the C-Boy’s gig was kind of our equivalent in Austin to Preservation Hall Jazz Band in New Orleans,” Flanigin said. “Tourists would go, and if you wanted to kind of know what the early styles were of New Orleans music you would go see Preservation.”

Flanigan traces the Austin style back to Bill Campbell, and to the opening of Antone’s as a home for blues artists. Jimmie Vaughan performed nightly with the Fabulous Thunderbirds alongside Muddy Waters, Eddie Taylor, Hubert Sumlin and Lazy Lester at the club. As Vaughan built upon his experiences, local guitarists followed suit and created a unique style for the region that’s played around the world today.

“Jimmie is ground zero for the Austin sound,” Flanigin said. “His phrasing and what he did was copied by everybody who saw it. That was the template.”

When Foley arrived in 1990 from Vancouver, Canada, she immediately performed on stage with Albert Collins, and recorded her debut album ​Young Girl Blues​ for the Antone’s label. Foley later worked with Derek O’Brien on Lazy Lester’s ​All Over You,​ which features the song “If You Think I’ve Lost You.” An updated version shines on ​West Texas Blues,​ twenty-two years after the release of Lester’s album. Foley’s melodic solo captures the essence of the county, blues and Cajun melting pot that inspired Lester’s sound.

“He was hugely influenced by country music,” Flanigin said. “I sat with Lazy Lester in the Antone’s office on Guadalupe and he sat with an acoustic guitar and played every hardcore country blues song you could ever imagine… George Jones, Merle Haggard, he loved all that. When you listen to his blues songs, they’re like country songs. The words tell a story.”

Flanigan was touring with Jimmie Vaughan and Buddy Guy as the Coronavirus outbreak shut down the nation. The outlook is especially uncertain in the blues community, as the few living legends that created the genre will have to take additional precautions when venues re-open.

“I wonder in my mind, ‘Are some of these people going to retire and never come back?’” Flanigin said. “We might get a vaccine tomorrow. We all may be back in two months and all this may sound ridiculous, but these thoughts do cross my mind.”

West Texas Blues ​focuses on material from Juke Boy Bonner, The Nightcaps, Guitar Gable and others to preserve the history of the Texas sound.

“I want people to know there is a real history to Ausin blues, and it’s complicated, and it’s a rich history, and it’s a wonderful history,” Flanigin said. “Everything we do, everything we’ve ever done, has been a celebration in honoring these people.”

-Andrew Blanton

The CDC called…and boy, do they have an update for you.

Like many Austin-area musicians, The Blowies were sidelined by the coronavirus pandemic. Simultaneously cut out of a just-canceled South by Southwest festival ​and​ reeling from an indefinite delay for the release of an album that’s already finished, the political punk duo parted ways and headed for isolation – but not before hitting up Rock n Roll Rentals to secure enough gear to convert their respective shelters into studio spaces. From there, Sam Thompson and Tucker Jameson set out to see what would become of collaborating from afar.

When another local act began gathering the necessary ingredients for a compilation record that would spotlight Austin artists affected by the SXSW cancelation, to be titled ​LOST X LOST WEST,​ ThompsonandJamesonrespondedtothecall.TheBlowiesself-producedsomenew music in isolation with the help of their rented equipment and a ProTools free trial, and “CDC” was born – an irreverent and sassy track with just the right dash of practicality for a mask-or-be-masked world.

The Blowies have a sound one part Ramones, one part Sex Pistols, one part Joan Jett (they recently released a pitch-perfect cover of The Runaways’ “Cherry Bomb”). The energy in their music is partly manic but never unsettling – the two aim to be political when they write and to attack topics with a tepid sense of neutrality, and maybe a tinge of anarchy. The Center for Disease Control was a perfect catalyst for their energy: wildly politicized by leaders and the media alike.

To hear Jameson put it, “We…set out at the beginning of this project to have a voice that spoke to current events…We have an angle on it. And usually, it’s not your typical angle; it’s not taking…any particular side in the argument but it’s pointing out the absurdity of it all in a palatable way, in a fun way.” “CDC” takes these tropes and props them up with added humor that sears the song into memory by playing on our collective pandemic hysteria (“The CDC’s got an update for me / Cozy on up to Mr. Clean”).

Satirical analysis of current events is critical to this writing duo, so much so that they are fighting to release their delayed album “sometime before the election” so as to capitalize on cresting momentum. For a band christened by an American flag-clad blow-up doll, the high stakes could matter less, though. It’s more about the absurdity of it all.

-Mike Floeck

They profess inspiration from both modern Americana and Van Morrison, and Briscoe hit the bullseye on their new single, “Sailing Away”. The inspirational muses are wisely chosen, too; much of Van Morrison’s early works morphed from singer/songwriter odes drenched in the warm notes of Irish folk music to psychedelic works more in line with what the Wilson brothers were cooking up – and modern Americana, as broad a genre as it may be, has a whole branch that swings down into Texas Country Rock; the two musical stylings mesh swimmingly because the writing pushes the listener to really feel what the singer is feeling, and in turn focus less on what is being said.

“Sailing Away” beams in like an easy Galveston breeze over some finely-plucked guitar strings. The first chorus lays down the groundwork for a nicely built-up second chorus that beefs up the instrumental, while the narrator’s tone is bright and saccharine. “She told me she was leavin’,” he sings with an aching drone, a wail that tugs at your shirt from behind you as you walk away.

Whether or not he just goes back to sit on that sandy and sunny European beach, our narrator surely is going to lose the girl he wants. She’s leaving, and he’s out on the ocean of his own mind, sailing away. But is ​she​ sailing away, too? Is ​he​ really leaving ​her?​ The back-and-forth of perspective, especially when it shifts so quickly, is engaging; it lends an endearing quality to the narrator’s story, even if he is too sun-dazed to notice he’s told the same story three times.

Briscoe is the project of Austin-based musicians Philip Lupton and Truett Heintzelman. Lupton wrote “Sailing Away” and first released performance videos on his personal YouTube channel in 2017, before partnering with Heintzelman. “Sailing Away” ups the production quality from their recent releases and points them in a clearer direction going forward for more Americana surprises.

-Mike Floeck

Quarantine failed to shoot a dose of productivity into our collective societal vein, but there are some among us who are managing to come out on the other side of the shutdown with something to show for the time spent. This month, The Band of Heathens uncage “Black Cat”, the stirring lead single previewing their seventh studio album, titled ​Stranger​, due to be released this September.

The Heathens know a thing or two about serendipity; the three founding members shared billing at Momo’s as individual singer/songwriters and, according to bandmember Ed Jurdi, “organically” began playing together as The Good Time Supper Club. The band formed in earnest after a misprint in a local paper (and some clever guerilla marketing on behalf of ardent local fans) dubbed the group The Heathens, and the name stuck.

On “Black Cat”, The Heathens tackle serendipity of a more genealogical kind. As bandmember Gordy Quist tells it, “‘Black Cat’ is based on the true-ish legend of Augustinal Fonseca, the great-grandfather of an anonymous concertgoer.” The legend goes that Fonseca came through Ellis Island and discovered an “underground fighting ring in New York City around the turn of the last century” – and that he killed a panther in the ring after rising in the ranks. The Heathens are particularly adept at telling stories, true or otherwise, about strangers; considering the title of their forthcoming record, a special attribute of “Black Cat” is its nature as historical fiction in the very words of a stranger.

“Our friends at Song Confessional sent us the story from a ‘confession’ at the Newport Folk Festival,” Quist tells American Songwriter. The confessor claims to be Fonseca’s grandchild and that Fonseca lived to be 99 years old – and all the details unspool in the song, lovingly embellished by Quist’s pen. To helm production for the epic tale, The Heathens enlisted Portland native Tucker Martine, a former collaborator of The Decemberists and Modest Mouse.

“Black Cat” is fittingly slinky, with Quist’s mangled tenor navigating the sweeping drums in commanding sequences, framed by Jurdi’s falsetto issuing a stark reminder to the listener: “Know where you come from.” When focusing on where ​someone else​ came from, there is room to step back and breathe. Quist explains that the band is a “microcosm” next to their fans and that ​Stranger​ is a vehicle to demonstrate strangerhood within the music industry. If “Black Cat” is a harbinger for more lucid narrative-building from The Heathens, then we all might as well make ourselves comfortable.

-Mike Floeck