Fresh off of her win as the 2023 Ameripolitan Music Awards Honky Tonk Female, the blue jean Texas honky tonk queen Summer Dean has announced a new album, and released a new single that is classic country music gold. “The Biggest Life” will arrive via Bruce Robinson’s revivalist label The Next Waltz.
Texas music couple Bruce Robison and Kelly Willis announced the end of their marriage late last week, and with everything else going on, it may have been easy to miss the news, or to maybe gloss over just how significant this news is, and regard it simply as gossip.
The Next Waltz project helmed by Bruce Robison will be issuing their 3rd compilation volume on November 27th. Featuring songs from Flatland Cavalry, The Panhandlers, Charley Crockett, Jack Ingram, and more, the volume comes on the heels of Vol. 2 reaching #1 on Americana radio.
If you want to know just how much pent up appeal there is for the music of Evan Felker and his band the Turnpike Troubadours, here’s a pretty good sign. This week on the Americana Music Association’s Radio Albums Chart, the recently-released The Next Waltz – Volume 2 compilation produced by Bruce Robison has landed at #1.
The only thing better than a badass Texas music songwriter from the Panhandle is four of them combining their powers in a country music supergroup. That’s what you have with The Pandlandlers, which sees William Clark Green, Josh Abbott, John Baumann, and Cleto Cordero of Flatland Cavalry coming together.
The Saving Country Music Top 25 Playlist is built to keep you informed on all the best songs and albums coming out right here, right now. It’s available on most all streaming formats (see below), or you can just use the song, artist, and album recommendations to find something new to listen to. New songs have just been added.
There is a reason the indefinite hiatus of the vaunted Turnpike Troubadours hit fans so hard, almost like losing a relative. The way you leaned on the band’s music to make it through hard times, and celebrate the good ones, it’s tough to fathom a world without the voice and songs of Evan Felker backed by the boys from Oklahoma.
“It really is a representation of what we’re trying to do here, which is connecting the greatest music in Austin with country music in a greater sense,” Bruce Robison says about the upcoming compilation. Though all the names and songs are worth getting excited over, it’s Turnpike Troubadours frontman Evan Felker that has many talking.
Man, there’s nothing better to get your country music pants going crazy like a good ol’ supergroup, and it appears we got a new one that’s formed right under our noses. Called The Panhandlers, it’s not in reference to vagrants, it pertains to that flat-ass piece of land in West Texas that sticks up like a chimney pipe on the map.
The original Willis Alan Ramsey album released in 1972 is the stuff of legend. Considered one of the very foundations of the Austin music scene that was just starting to emerge as a point of national interest at the time, the enigmatic songwriter recorded 11 original songs for Leon Russell’s Shelter label, and they would go on to be covered…
How hard could songwriting really be? You learned a few chords on the guitar in college, and if you had some more free time you could probably gnaw on rhyming a few lines of verse … or so you tell yourself. Then you hear an album like ‘Beautiful Lie’ from the First Couple of Texas Country, and it’s so enriching, you’re immediately demoralized.
“I knew I wanted to record in this old fashioned way, that that was going to be the way to capture this music,” says Robison. “It’s real simple how we do it in here, which is pre-Beatles, where people used to be on the road, and they’d just take their new song into a real simple recording studio or a radio station, and they would just put the song down.”