CMT Blog: Wade Bowen

The first few things I heard were a wispy steel, a guitar hook, an image forming lyric and a Hammond B-3 organ. For me, that’s an excellent start to Wade Bowen’s newest album, If We Ever Make It Home. In the liner notes, he quotes Willie Nelson as saying, “You can’t make a record if you ain’t got nothing to say.” Here’s a few of the things he had to say, and for a limited time you can listen along to If We Ever Make It Home on CMT.com.

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Some readers have suggested that I need to open my mind a little more. You know who you are. The ones who tell me I’m too focused on mainstream pop country. So today, a day that the close-minded me would have reserved for talk of only Kellie Pickler’s new album, I will also tell you what I think of a not-so-mainstream new album, Wade Bowen’s If We Ever Make It Home.

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So, I’m sitting at my friend KC’s house in Lyons, Colorado. She’s one of the members of the band, Uncle Earl, and they are leaving tomorrow to go on tour, but we are playing at her local bar tonight, and I’m gonna try to get her to sing with us. She has the most pure, mountain-sounding voice I’ve heard in a long time. The bar is called Oskar Blues, and I would recommend anyone coming thru this way to stop and play a night. The people are music fans that live in this town, and as someone that relies on fans, that is a HUGE help.

As I’m sitting here, I’m looking at my poor attempt to start a fire in the fire place. I’ve tried everything. I’ve been working on this for an hour at least and it always fades out. Let me just say… just because I’m from Texas doesn’t mean I was born with innate qualities to be mountain savvy. I’m a poor excuse for a fire starter. But, lo and behold, in walks her roommate, and he looks at my futile attempt, and just goes over and gets more wood, stacks it in a completely different fashion than I had done, and within seconds, the fire is blazing. We get to talking and he’s the sound engineer for Yonder Mountain String Band. I’m a HUGE FAN and can I say, what a small world we live in.

So, the reason I haven’t written any blog entries here lately is because I’ve been kinda busy … but I have been having soooo much fun. We left early January to go up to Colorado to play the big Music Fest that is put on by Dickson productions out of Texas. There were like 50 bands and it was a four-day event! It got kinda crazy. It snowed so much the first night we were there, we had to leave our van and take a shuttle back up to the condo they put us up in. I met so many new people (fans and other musicians) that were so cool, and I can’t wait to get back to Texas so we can hang out again.

One night, I met Muzzy Braun back stage with his daughter-in-law, Kathleen O’Keefe Braun and her husband, Cody Braun, from Reckless Kelly. Kathleen is a singer-songwriter in her own right, but she just adds some female-ness to that hugely talented Braun clan. Anyway, Muzzy is a writer from up in Idaho and is Willie, Cody, Micky and Gary’s dad (all musicians in Austin). He is a great writer and ran around with all the cowboy writers up in that neck of the woods, and he was there singing with his boys at the Music Fest. It was really cool to see all them onstage together. We played the first two nights at Steamboat Music Fest and stayed a couple extra days after we were finished playing for some R&R. We got to see a bunch of our friends play. I saw my friend, Brooks’, band. He plays drums with Wade Bowen. Brooks is a solid drummer and fun as hell to watch. He looks like Tommy Lee when he plays. One of the bands was Corb Lund and the Hurtin Albertans. They are from Alberta, Canada, but he sings and writes like he’s from the south. He yodels, he’s a good 6 foot 2 and ain’t too shabby to look at. Ladies??

Anyway, here we are hanging in my most favorite town on earth, Lyons, Colorado (about a 30 minute drive from Boulder) and I’m about to go to the local coffee shop and hang for a bit. Talk to ya down the road.