Out of the swamp, the creature raises its greasy, filthy head—Stop, Cut—this is not a B grade horror flick, but it does provide an accurate description for the music of one of our country’s hottest Americana bands, The Band Of Heathens. Guitarist, dobro player and singer/songwriter Colin Brooks sat down recently, with Riveting Riffs Magazine and talked about the band’s origins, their music and in particular The Band Of Heathens’ current, self-titled CD.
Brooks describes The Band Of Heathens’ music as, “It sounds swampy. Our music has lots of swampy, filthy grooves. It is kind of like white people trying to play black music. The stiffness of those grooves renders a certain charm to them. Most of the time, lyrically, we have a commitment to some kind of story.”
The rock Americana element to The Band Of Heathen’s music is evidenced in their popular tune “Jackson Station,” a song which also features mandolin player Stephen Bruton. As for the grease, you don’t need to look any further than the ninth track, “Cornbread,” a song written by Brooks, and featuring their producer, Ray Wylie Hubbard on slide guitar. “Second Line,” co-written by Gordy Quist, Ed Jurdi and Colin Brooks, also contains enough grease, to cook a stack of flapjacks.
“I didn’t want to push myself on any of The Band Of Heathens’ songs, because I was producing the record. Colin came up to me and said, ‘We have this song that is just greasy and has a lot of grit to it. We would like you to play on it.’ That is my forté right now (the slide guitar). I have fallen into this bucket of grease. I just fell into “Cornbread,” because it is such a lazy, groovy, blues song. It was a lot of fun doing that song,” says Hubbard.
“You just don’t know where songs will come from. “Cornbread,” has such and old feel to it. It alludes to a loose kind of vibe. It was just one of those songs that wanted to be written. It didn’t take a lot of laboring over it. It was easy and it just sort of landed on the page,” says Brooks, about a song that was inspired by a conversation that he had with the owner of an Austin, Texas Bed and Breakfast.
At the other end of the spectrum is the mellow ballad, “Maple Tears,” co-written by Brooks’ band mate Gordy Quist and another renowned Texas musician, San Marcos’ Adam Carroll. When contacted Quist shed some light on how it came to pass that two Americans wrote a ballad that takes place in Canada. “Adam tours up in Canada fairly often, and on one of his tours last year, he actually got stopped crossing the border, because he didn't have a visa to work in Canada. He had a carload of CD's and a guitar case in hand... Adam told the border guys that he was just going to visit his friend Roger Marin and he would not be playing shows. The very quick-witted border man then went into the booth and looked up Roger Marin's schedule online. He saw a bunch of shows listed on Roger's website billed as "appearing with Adam Carroll," so the guy figured out pretty quick that Adam was going into Canada to work. He was stuck in upstate New York for 5 days, while one of the Canadian festivals he was playing got him the work visa.”
Seemingly relishing telling this story, Quist continues, “While stuck in the hotel room by the border and waiting for his visa, Adam decided to do some writing. He worked on, ‘The Girl From Manitoba.” When he returned home to Texas, he came by my place and show me his idea. We decided to go for this old time country idea of a guy missing his girl from Manitoba, while he is traveling across the continent. It seems as though a lot of modern day, post 9/11 “country music,” is making a big deal about the red, white and blue and (sticking it to) people who aren’t American enough. In “Maple Tears,” we were going for the idea that more people are similar than they are different. There are probably just as many hillbilly, good country folk up in Canada as there are in Oklahoma or anywhere else. Over the next week or so we kept working on the song, and it became, “Maple Tears.”
