The Gourds

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Austin, Texas’ The Gourds have never been much on sentiment. Since the band started defining Gourds Music, as it has come to be known, with Dem’s Good Beeble in 1997 and the quirky Stadium Blitzer in 1998, they have chugged through America fueled by music and a near-pathological need for a good time. And while songwriters Kevin Russell and Jimmy Smith have written the most dense, reference-laden country songs of the last 10 years and almost single-handedly made a place for deep thought in a genre of “Honky Tonk Badonkadonks” they have, for the most part, shied away from the tear-in-my-beer ballads that made country music a commercial powerhouse over the last 50 years.

But on this go-round with Noble Creatures, Russell and company have put the irony and redneck post-modernism on the backburner for a bit, instead building their ninth studio release around a single song, a song based on an accident. Upon fiddling around with a ukulele chord book while spending time with his young daughter, Kevin strummed a few chords that were like a glass of ice water to the face. “I was messing around with this ukulele chord book and I stumbled upon this C to E minor chord progression that’s really simple, but it woke my ears up.” “I just started messing around with it and that’s how the melody for “Promenade” was written,” says Russell in his everyman Texas drawl. “I knew when I wrote that song I wanted it to be on the album but I wasn’t sure it had a place in the Gourds. It’s not the type of thing we usually do.” Faced with what is surely the most stirring and beautiful song he has ever written, Kevin set out to make it fit into the Gourds canon. “I knew there had to be more ballads on the album so that “Promenade” would have some context. I couldn’t just throw it on the usual Gourds record.” As a result Noble Creatures sports a somber soul not found on any album to date. Despite some initial trepidation, Russell soon warmed to the idea of a different sort of Gourds album, “I wasn’t really sure how all the ballads would sound with the band just because they aren’t really our style traditionally, but for some reason I thought it would be cool just because we had never done anything like it before, and now seemed like as good a time as any. Luckily the guys liked the songs!”

band photo: Andy Goodwin