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Event
JASON BOLAND and The STRAGGLERS
*Tickets are available at the door!* Welcome Red Dirt Country favorite ~ Jason Boland & his band the Stragglers for the first time to Loco Billy's on tour from Texas! This will be an early show so you kids can get home in time for bed for your Monday morning work day! $20 Advance & $25 Door (if there are any tickets left) Show includes opening act ~ The Lowdown Drifters! Doors open 5pm. Show starts 6:30pm. See these boys up close & personal in the best sounding venue & pro stage in the North Country! YeeHaw! Some standing & some seating (about 150 seats). Food will be available for purchase from 3 local restaurants that deliver for free & fresh to our club! www.locobillys.com or (425) 737-5144 for more info.
Jason Bolland & The Stragglers Bio:
Its admirable when a musician gets back to his roots, theres no questioning that. But in
a lot of ways, its even more admirable when an artist has no need to do that having
never lost touch with those roots in the first place. Jason Boland falls squarely into the
latter category, having spent the better part of the last 15 years entrenching himself in
the so-called red dirt of his native state of Oklahoma and adopted home in Texas and
while spreading his musical branches to cover a remarkable amount of territory.
Ive always thought it was important to keep one foot in tradition and the other pointed in
the direction you want to go, says Boland. I didnt invent the G chord, so Im standing
on the shoulders of the giants that did, and on the shoulders of some great songwriters
that have come before me. Im using an old stencil, but adding my own colors.
On their new studio album, Dark And Dirty Mile, Boland and his compatriots use a wide
array of hues to illustrate 11 songs of rejection and redemption, dark clouds and silver
linings, all assembled in the rough-hewn manner thats earned him an ever-growing fan
base a following thats snapped up more than a half-million records over the past
decade and change.
Dark And Dirty Mile is a song cycle of sorts, one that finds Boland seeking and finding
-- beauty in lifes often-overlooked places, learning tough lessons through experience
and overcoming obstacles with the help of others. Thats evident in the title track, which
opens the album with a vividly drawn emotional landscape strewn with moments of
regret and missed opportunities but a clear bead on a clear horizon.
A similar dichotomy rolls through Electric Bill, a slow burn of a honky-tonk tune that
conjures a picture of a man with an overdrawn checkbook in one hand and the hand of a
loved one in the other a sentiment he credits to his wife, who he says, reminded him
that, if everything is taken away tomorrow, theres still love and hope in the world.
Boland presents that sentiment without a drop of Hallmark saccharine, however. He
doesnt sweeten these tunes with easy studio tricks or the sort of pop trickery so often
heard on Music City productions these days. The surface is anything but slick, and the
sinew that runs through songs like the organ-tinged strut Green Screen and the high
lonesome desert tone of his take on Randy Crouchs They Took It Away lends a tone
thats ragged-but-right, ideal for Bolands always-incisive lyrics.
People dont always expect to have a lot there in terms of lyrics, he says. Society says
if it sounds like this, you have to do songs about that. But if you just try to fit things
together in the most simple way possible, youre just trying to manipulate people, and Im
not interested in doing that.
I think of myself as being in the Oklahoma tradition in the same way as Woody Guthrie
those of us who came up in Tornado Alley can all trace our lineage back to Woody..
Boland has been mining that territory for pretty much his entire career. Bowing in 1999
with the regionally popular Pearl Snaps a first teaming with Lloyd Maines, who Boland
cites as one of several seminal influences on his sonic vision the Stragglers built a
rabid following from the Panhandle to the Gulf Coast. Over the intervening half-decade,
the band would team with similar kindred spirits from Billy Joe Shaver to Dwight
Yoakam compadre Pete Anderson to the late Bob Childers to create an
uncompromising body of work, as whip-smart as it is body-moving.
Weve always been lucky enough to work with people who feel the same way we do
about things, says Boland. The world doesnt always make sense, but you meet people
around the campfires who will be there for you. Thats the big secret, 99 percent of
people will share and break bread with you when times are hard.
Boland himself says that he started to figure things out in earnest around the time he
and the Stragglers went into the studio to record 2008s Comal County Blue, a set that,
as Country Weekly put it, vividly chronicle the thoughts of a regular guy trying to make
sense of the world and only occasionally succeeding, while keeping one eye on the
reasons he keeps trying.
That disc brought Bolands songs to a wider audience than anything he had done in the
past, but the momentum was slowed a bit by his need to take several months off to
recover from surgery to remove a polyp from his vocal cord. He took the setback in
stride, and now says, in retrospect, it was a good thing in some ways, since it helped
teach me to really sing and broke me of the habit of yelling which is an easy habit to
develop if you come up singing in Texas honky-tonks.
By the time 2011s palpably redemptive Rancho Alto (to quote the Austin Chronicle)
came around, Boland had a firm rein on his instrument, which had grown into a
burnished, evocative baritone, and further honed his pensive-but-not-pedantic writing
style all of which comes to heady fruition on Dark and Dirty Mile, co-produced by
Boland and Shooter Jennings.
From the steeliness of Only One, with its unflagging belief in love in the face of
adversity to the wistful regret of the album closing See You When I See You, that
strength shines through. It emerges in the two-step friendly rhythms of Nine Times Out
of Ten and it burrows deep into the soil on the soulful swing of Lucky I Guess songs
that evoke the sight, smell and taste of the red dirt of his home territory.
The t-shirt sellers love that phrase red dirt, because its so simple, says Boland. But it
fits. It was coined by the people making the music rust in the ground, blood in the dirt.
Its real and its where I come from and what I refuse to give up, no matter what.
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LocationLoco Billy's Wild Moon Saloon (View)
27021 102nd Ave NW
Stanwood, WA 98292
United States
Categories
| Minimum Age: 21 |
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
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