An artist has a lifetime to write and prepare for their first record. There are very few expectations. There is no “mold” to break. The canvas is blank.

But the follow-up record? The sophomore album? That’s a completely different story —

There’s an old exercise in logic that goes a little something like this: Imagine you flip a coin 100 times in a row and on each one of those flips the coin turns up heads. What are the odds that the coin will land on heads on the one hundred and first flip?

The logical answer is 50%, but our instinct takes over and we look for the reason why it came up heads 100 times in a row and wager that it will be heads again. Is the coin heavier on one side? Is it a two-headed coin? Is it rigged in some other way?

So, when we go out to watch live music in Texas and see that the audience is evenly split between male and female, when we look at who is buying Texas music and see that it’s evenly split between male and female, and when we look at the people working in the Texas music industry and see that even there, if not quite equally split, women are well represented, we can’t help but look up at the stages of Texas’s dancehalls and honky-tonks and wonder where the female artists are.

Early in the morning on Christmas Eve of 2008, Kevin Russell received a gift he’d been waiting on for well over a decade.

“’Ain’t No Sunshine’ by Bill Withers is one of my favorite songs of all time and there has always been this one chord I just couldn’t find. I asked everybody and I looked online and no matter where I looked, I couldn’t find that chord. Then finally this morning I found it and I ran and told my wife.”

I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know: you’re wondering who the devil this Kevin Russell is and why you’re reading about soul legend Bill Withers in a magazine purported to be about Texas music. If that’s accurate then you must be unfamiliar with Austin’s favorite sons, the Gourds.

Allow us to make the introductions.

The following is an interview I did with Cody Canada and Jeremy Plato for the cover story of LoneStarMusic Magazine during the fall of 2009.

Happiness and All the Other Things. Sounds good, doesn’t it? It’s an apt title for the tenth album from Cross Canadian Ragweed in this, their fifteenth year as a band.

While two members of the band – Grady Cross (rhythm guitar) and Randy Ragsdale (drums) – are back in their home base of Oklahoma, happiness is certainly the theme at an early lunch of sushi as …

I spent a couple of days in the studio with Ryan Bingham and the Dead Horses for LoneStarMusic Magazine as they recorded Roadhouse Sun. It was one of my favorite stories to write. I had to fly blind with it some as the record would come out almost a year after we went to press. Here’s my story:
Captain Guitar, the Confused Protestor, and a Hobo
the new world of Ryan Bingham
Monday night at Saengerhalle was open mic night. This was back in late 2002 and I booked the venue so I …