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I Rode The Wild Horses

Ross Cooper is the rare country musician who has actually lived the life of a cowboy. The former professional bareback rider was still bustin’ broncs when his music career began. Though a knee injury sidelined his rodeo career, Cooper drives a band like he’s still wearing spurs and holding on for eight. His new album, I Rode The Wild Horses, pushes country music way past traditional territory just for the rush. It’s the new Nashville sound: glimmering pedal steel, rollicking & rocking telecaster riffs, soulful keys, and gorgeous harmonies.

Cooper grew up surrounded by music taking piano and guitar lessons. By the age of ten he’d written a gospel song with his mom, and set his mind to playing guitar and a life of music. He’s been in Nashville for five years, but Cooper hails from Lubbock, Texas, the hometown of Buddy Holly, and Holly’s influence upon Cooper’s music is clear. Every country song rocks, and every rock song has an unmistakable twang.

Ross Cooper’s career has parallels with Chris Ledoux, the bareback riding world champion and country music star that inspired Garth Brooks’ rodeo songs and rambunctious live shows. Like Ledoux, Cooper began making music while still working the rodeo circuit. Cooper’s rodeo lifestyle provides great material for his songs, but this isn’t just a rodeo record. A fan of both indie-rock and country-folk greats like Guy Clark and John Prine, Cooper draws largely upon small town life and the simplicity it affords. It’s this eclectic taste in music and his time in the trenches with other talented songwriters that makes I Rode The Wild Horses special. The sound of the record ranges from country torch bearers to dirty garage rockers, and from the first note you know this is something different.

The album opens on the title track, and Cooper’s “Coming out” song establishes him as an anomaly among Nashville musicians, an actual cowboy. His belt buckle is no longer shiny, his body still aches, and he’s got stories to tell about it. “I ain’t got much to show,” he sings, “But I rode the wild horses.” The opening track ends in a fuzzed out electric solo and Cooper ad-libs a rodeo announcer’s cadence. It’s a hypnotic induction to a country-rock record.

“Heart Attack” struts in on a cinematic whistle and a muted electric riff. Cooper describes an object of affection, singing, “Is this who you are, or how you act?” as drums and electric guitar build into a tense orchestra. Cooper sings about self-medication, a pounding pulse, and living on pins and needles. It’s just the second song but there’s a perfect bridge with a tempo change, a haunting chorus and piano stabs. Cooper sings “What doesn’t kill me keeps me comin’ back.” And you’re hooked.

Embedded in the Nashville song writing community, Cooper has made some talented friends, many of whom appear on I Rode The Wild Horses. The album was made at The Casino, Eric Masse’s recording studio. Cooper sought Masse out for his recent work with acts like Andrew Combs, Robert Ellis, Rayland Baxter, and Miranda Lambert. Combs even helped Cooper write “Lady Of The Highway,” a traveling song with a country-politan polish. Other co-writers include gospel country rocker Paul Cauthen, who helped Cooper finish “Old Crow Whiskey And A Cornbread Moon,” a folk song that illuminates his complex inspiration for the album: the emotional intelligence of country folk that allows them to appreciate the simple things, and having the common sense to avoid expensive habits by drinking cheap whiskey. Masse enlisted frequent collaborator Jordan Lehning for production (who also helped pen “Lady of the Highway”), and the album features an all-star cast of musicians as a backing band with Jeremy Fetzer (Steelism) on guitar, Eli Beard on bass, Tommy Perkinson (Lera Lynn) on drums, Skylar Wilson on keys, and the incomparable Eddy Dunlap on pedal steel.

With so much talent at hand, Cooper took care to put together songs he’s written that develop into an album meant to be listened to cover to cover. “I wanted to give the album a consistent voice.” says Cooper. “It has the theme of a road weary cowboy. Where my life away from home taught me to celebrate the simple things.”

Songs like “Damn Love” and the autobiographical “Living’s Hard Loving’s Easy” are classic country heartbreakers, in the hands of a writer talented enough to twist them into love songs. “Another Mile” and “Strangers In A Bar” elucidate the leathery toughness of Cooper’s soft voice. Cooper is also acutely aware of the dichotomy between actual cowboys, and the urban cowboys of Nashville as addressed in “Cowboys And Indians”.

Cooper maintains a songwriting integrity and honor that he learned in West Texas and in the rodeo circuit. If you want to hear a story, there’s nothing like getting it straight from the source, and I Rode The Wild Horses is a refreshing take on cowboy music. It’s a showcase of this former bareback rider’s talents as a songwriter and musician.

“Gentle, story-driven alt-country accented by pedal steel, standing on the quality of the tales he conjures” – Rolling Stone

“Hypnotic and embodies Cooper’s cowboy demeanour with a newfangled slant” – Exclaim

“Ross Cooper astonishes…one of the top dogs in Nashville to look out for these days.” – PopMatters

“A refreshing (and real) take on the cowboy life.” – Wide Open Country

“The kind of background that would make country’s authenticity police drool” – Rolling Stone Country

Publicist: Rachel Hurley

“For me, putting together a hardworking team to work a record is paramount.  At the end of the day, you want to work with someone who will absolutely fight for you.  You want to work with someone who you can call at dang near any time of the day.  Someone who sees your art and believes in it.  That’s what’s important to me, and that’s what I have in Rachel Hurley and Baby Robot Media.  I’ve honestly never worked with someone who is so devoted to work and quality of work.  I’m very lucky to have gotten to work with this team.  I never once felt like I was just a name on a roster in a mass press email.  My album might’ve fallen flat if it wasn’t for Rachel.  She knew my music, saw my vision, and executed the right markets.  I can’t wait to work with them again on down the road.  In short, she’s the best. ”  – Ross Cooper

Karen & the Sorrows. Photo by Leah James

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Guaranteed Broken Heart

Queer country trailblazers Karen & the Sorrows have been featured in Billboard, WNYC’s The Takeaway, and Rolling Stone, who described them as “Dolly Parton fronting Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers.” Noisey called the band “exactly what country music needs right now.” For the last eight years, they have also been at the heart of a growing queer country community, running the Gay Ole Opry Festival and the Queer Country Quarterly, and creating space for people who love country music even if country music doesn’t always love them back.

With the Sorrows’ third album, Guaranteed Broken Heart, singer-songwriter Karen Pittelman has struck off in new directions. While many of the songs still center around the dark, country-rock twang that Pittelman loves, she also dove more deeply into both ‘90s country and string-band inspired sounds.

After parting ways with longtime bandmates Elana Redfield and Tami Johnson, Pittelman explains, “It was scary to be on my own, but I was also excited to experiment with new arrangements. I knew I was going down a different road when I realized that about half of the songs I was writing would require a string band.” So Pittelman began reaching out to members of Brooklyn’s strong bluegrass and old time scene to put together an all-star line-up, including Rima Fand on fiddle, Ross Martin on guitar, and Cole Quest Rotante on dobro. She also called on friends and frequent collaborators to form her core electric band, including engineer Charles Burst, who stepped into the additional role of drummer for this album, guitarist Barbara Endes from fellow country-rock band Girls on Grass, Larry Cook on bass, and Gerard Kouwenhoven on harmonies.

“My inspiration was imagining: what if Neil Young had made a ‘90s country album? So on the one hand, I was obsessing about producers like Garth Fundis and Keith Stegall, listening to the genius way they layer and build a song. Sometimes people dismiss that era of country music for being too smooth and slick, but when it’s at its best, that polish and shimmer is there for a powerful purpose—to make you feel exactly what the song feels. At the same time, I was thinking about not just Young’s Harvest, which I guess I’m always thinking about, but also On the Beach, and the way that rawness and honesty draws you in and makes you trust the music. The two songs I probably listened to most over the last year were George Jones’ ‘Choices’ (produced by Stegall) and Young’s ‘Ambulance Blues.’ Though they are on opposite ends of the production spectrum, I wanted to make something that drew from what I loved about both, and how each can make me cry. I was also looking to some of the powerful women artists that I grew up with, like PJ Harvey and Tori Amos, who produce their own work and have never been afraid to make the sound that is in their head, no matter how strange it is.”

With a band named The Sorrows, it’s no surprise that Pittelman tends toward sad songs. For this album, she found herself writing in particular about grief and desire, and the powerful intersection of the two. “I wanted to write about the tidal pull that these feelings can have, about what it’s like to be pulled under—and what it’s like to want to be pulled under. There is a religious version of this experience and a romantic one, and most of the time we keep them separate. But I was thinking about how similarly terrifying and ecstatic both can be, whether the source is sacred or profane. And that sometimes it’s not so easy to tell which is which.”

While Pittelman was recording Guaranteed Broken Heart, she was also working on a long essay about the relationship between country music and white supremacy that she published earlier this year on Medium. “I’m happy that we’re in a moment where some new conversations about racism, sexism, and homophobia are happening in country music and Americana. But there is still such a long way to go. Sometimes people will ask me why I keep bringing up all these issues about identity and politics. Don’t I want people to just listen to my music for the music’s sake? Of course I do! I would love to live in a world where everyone gets to be an artist on their own terms. But we don’t live in that world. Whether you take an explicitly political stance as an artist or not, what you say—and what you don’t say—is always political. The history of music in America, especially the history of country music, has always also been a history of white supremacy. If we’re not reckoning with that past and fighting to create a different future, we’re not doing right by the music itself. And I love this music so much—that’s why I want to do right by it. One of the things I love most about country is that it demands we tell the truth about our lives. For me, this is part of what it means to tell that truth.”

Pittelman formed the Brooklyn-based Sorrows in 2011 together with guitarist Elana Redfield and drummer Tami Johnson. In 2012, they released the EP Ocean Born Mary about a ghost story from Redfield’s New Hampshire hometown. In 2014, they put out their first full-length record, The Names of Things, which was voted one of the Freeform American Roots Chart’s best debut albums of 2014. On their 2017 sophomore record, The Narrow Place, The Sorrows continued building their heartbreak catalog with songs that were both unexpected and entirely country, from a queer reimagining of the bro-country pickup truck ode to a Jewish family story about immigration and race. The band will be celebrating the release of Guaranteed Broken Heart on October 18th at Brooklyn’s Littlefield, and then heading out onto the road for a southeastern tour in November.

“Brooklyn-based country band Karen & the Sorrows are exactly what country music needs right now.” – Noisey

“The band are at the centre of a growing queer country scene ‘creating a community for people who love country music even if country music doesn’t always love them back.'” – Americana UK

“…Seventies-era folk rock, accented by generous amounts of pedal steel and a steady social conscience.” – Rolling Stone

“Lonesome, twangy, and infectious” —Yahoo Music

“…it’s a trim record, with the right amount of sputter and splat…” – Billboard

Publicist: Rachel Hurley

“Rachel Hurley is a fierce warrior goddess of PR. She fought tirelessly for me and did everything she could to make sure my music got out there. She is passionate and dedicated and I felt very lucky to have her in my corner.” – Karen Pittleman

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RADNOR & LEE is a musical collaboration between Ben Lee and Josh Radnor. Friends for over a decade with a shared interest in spirituality and philosophy, they had always said they should write a song together. One song turned into ten and Radnor & Lee was born.

After their first live show at Hotel Cafe, a friend described their music as “the intersection of pop and prayer.” Upon hearing this, their producer Ryan Dilmore dubbed them “singer-psalmwriters.” The songs are by turns witty, hopeful, yearning, joyful, searching, and meditative.

Ben Lee began his career as a young teenager in the early 90’s, in the Australian lo-fi punk band Noise Addict, who were discovered by taste-making artists Sonic Youth and the Beastie Boys. This began a now almost 25 year career of producing intelligent and spiritual indie-pop songs that have soundtracked Ben’s inner life in music.

Josh Radnor is best known as an actor, having played the central character for nine seasons on CBS’s Emmy-nominated comedy HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER. He has written, directed and starred in two feature films, LIBERAL ARTS and HAPPTHANKYOUMOREPLEASE, both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where the latter won the 2010 Audience Award for Favorite U.S. Drama. He has also worked extensively on Broadway and off-Broadway.

Radnor & Lee’s debut single “Be Like The Being” is a call back to the present moment, the only place where the human heart can breathe easy. It is a catchy piece of melody folk pop that gives us a taste of what their forthcoming full length album Love Songs for God & Women is all about.

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Bring The Flood

Dark times call for dark songs. At least that’s how East Nashville based singer/songwriter Derek Hoke sees it. On his new album, the portentously titled Bring the Flood (Little Hollywood), Hoke dives into a sound far more ominous, threatening, and anxiously introspective than the music on his previous three full length releases would suggest.

“So much pain and sorrow/more than I’ve ever seen,” sings Hoke on the opening “Love Don’t Live Around Here,” an exploration of life passing by for people stuck in their small town existence. And for most of the next 40 minutes, he explores various shades of unease, if not quite gloom, of the characters that populate this world with the confidence and musical prowess gleaned through years of working in Nashville, one of the toughest, most competitive songwriting scenes in the nation, if not the world.

Assisted by contributions from friends and neighbors such as Elizabeth Cook, Langhorne Slim, Aaron Lee Tasjan, and Luther Dickinson, then molded into a cohesive whole by longtime producer and friend from childhood Dex Green, Bring the Flood finds Hoke more visceral, honest and intuitive than at any other point in his career.

Never one to release the same record twice, this album nevertheless marks a substantial shift in Hoke’s approach away from the rootsy, singer/songwriter vein and towards a more edgy, low boil, subtle country infused rock oriented style. It was inspired by Hoke watching the news, often with the audio turned off, in the heated political atmosphere of late 2016.

“It seemed like a dark cloud coming over America, watching a lot of people hurting, going through hard times, harder than ever.” He lodged those visual images into musical protagonists, flowing melodies and, with Green’s assistance, an overall conceptual world where each track feels connected to the last. That creates an austere, rugged but not stripped down landscape, both hypnotic and earthy in its atmosphere.

Hoke looks to artists like Tom T. Hall and Roger Miller, known for their directness and simplicity, for inspiration. “I’m a big fan of getting to the point and saying what you mean” he explains, and that informs tracks like the blues based ballad “I’m Just a Man” with its swampy, humid texture and “She Never Loved Me” featuring wiry, sinewy funk pushing nervy, dreamy/nightmarish strings.

You wouldn’t suspect it from his smooth vocals and unruffled demeanor, but Hoke’s current persona emerged from a self-professed “skateboard-punk rock kid” upbringing in Florence, South Carolina. His grandfather was a Grand Old Opry/Hee-Haw enthusiast and his father a Stones loving classic rock devotee. Hoke’s own “weird” CD collection extrapolated from those influences and added his own. So Radiohead and the Pixies sat alongside Clint Black and Garth Brooks. “It wasn’t to be cool. All of this is good music, it all has a place and it all speaks to me.”

That diverse sense of musical inclusion began when he was a child, mimicking songs and riffs from TV and radio. It was kick-started after Hoke moved to Nashville in the late nineties, taking a job selling merchandise for Ricky Skaggs. For the next three years, Hoke visited every state, learning the finer points of performing from an established veteran. His role as founder/curator/weekly host of $2 Tuesdays at Nashville’s The 5 Spot club keeps him plugged into fresh talent, absorbing different methods of songwriting and execution.

The themes of isolation on Bring the Flood were in part stirred by Hoke driving alone late at night, singing thoughts into his phone recorder and analyzing the results in the daylight with producer Green. “It’s a lonely feeling, especially on the back roads and two lanes around middle Tennessee. I wanted to evoke that mood running through these tunes.”

He also sees these tracks connecting with a more visual, almost cinematic coherence. “We tried to make these tunes wider-sounding. This is something I’ve never done before. I’ve always kept it short and sweet…this is fuller,” he says. Hoke also stretched his comfort zone, urged by Green who encouraged him to push the creative envelope and, should he revert to his more traditional impulses, drove him to “get back in the fire.”

The result on insightful, dreamy, psychedelically tinged tracks like “When the Darkness Comes” reflects that heat and the simmering frustration developed by the uncertainly of current times.

As a whole, Bring the Flood focuses on Hoke’s knack for melody and easy flowing, distinctive vocals, incorporating them into a cohesive, sometimes unsettling yet always imaginative and creative set that positions him firmly in the top tier of contemporary songwriters. It’s a bold, perhaps unexpected stride in a dynamic new direction, further separating him from his Nashville peers, and audacious proof that Derek Hoke has stepped forward with confidence and is not looking back.

Look for Hoke to further expand as he takes Bring the Flood on the road in 2017 and beyond, exposing audiences to its nocturnally inspired nature and spellbinding musical charms.

“…this new album finds Hoke retreating into himself and his experiences.” – Noisey

“While he’s still blending styles as far-ranging as rock, country, gospel, and many iterations of blues on his latest, Hoke is also taking a considerably darker turn in regards to his LP’s conceptualization this go-around. –PopMatters

“…and overall conceptual world where each track feels connected to the last.” – Glide

“Dark visions of a country descending into madness with some great tunes too!” – Americana UK

“A weighty and ominous, gospel-tinged rocker that builds like an incoming storm.” – No Depression