With Goodnight, Texas, everything is about distance and time… the distance that separated the two main songwriters, Avi Vinocur is from San Francisco and Patrick Dyer Wolf from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and the time to which their music seems to belong, a sort of Appalachian-Americana garage rock, rooted in small-town USA. This idea totally comes together with their clever moniker, the real name of a tiny Texan town, located just at midway between San Francisco and Chapel Hill.
As the band was playing at the Silverlake lounge on Friday night, the small place was packed to the roof, and some people got soon restless legs and began to dance at the sound of their infectious banjo-guitar anthems, a sort of old-school classic folk with a modern indie garage rock twist. Another band going back to Americana roots you’re gonna say?… May be, but, looking at this awesome banjo-picking and the lyrics I could get during their set, they visibly were doing it with a real authenticity and admiration of the overused genre, a great sense of humor and a perceptible emotion, bringing characters and scenery alive through storytelling songs. ‘This is a song about slavery’, said one of them before ‘I’m Going to Work on Maggie’s Farm Forever’,… Who still writes song about slavery in 2015? I immediately thought. Of course this took another twist when I realized that the slave in question was working on Maggie’s Farm, and when they brought up a somewhat more-Springsteen-than-Dylan-esque harmonica.
It was so easy to feel transported in middle-town America and to live through their series of characters, like ‘Jesse’ who ‘Got Trapped in a Coal Mine’ or ‘Uncle John Farquhar’… Wolf’s great-great-great grandfather, featured on the cover of their last album along with a sermon he delivered on the occasion of Abraham Lincoln’s death. Then we were traveling through the deep South with Deliverance-style banjo and happy foot-stomping rhythm, the smell of the good old country terroir present all along. They sure were bringing back an authentic sound with full vocal harmonies and a mix of devilish banjos backyard parties, alternating with soulful nostalgic tunes like ‘California You’re a Hole in my Heart’, and porch ballads declaring true love for Tennessee, or about Nebraska (‘Hello, Nebraska’) where girls marry very young to someone in the KKK… I could almost hear the chicken in the backyards, see the dust on the road behind Smokey and the Bandit’s trail. Not only these guys were good, but they were damn entertaining, injecting so much life and fun during their banjo-mandolin-kicking numbers and finding raw beauty during their slow-down and haunting tales of doomed romance.
Americana-folk putting banjo and mandolin center stage with uplifting choruses? How could anyone resist? Plus I detected some subtle waltz-y pulses on some songs, going in indie wistful territory, as well as a few whipped Cash rhythms for everyone’s joy. They closed their set with a stamping blue-collar-worker anthem, ‘the Railroad’, which sounded like a chain-gang or slave chant.
Goodnight, Texas released their debut LP, ‘A Long Life of Living’, in 2012 and their sophomore record, ‘Uncle John Farquhar’, in the summer of 2014 and they both sound like a fun lesson about history and geography in a Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie or Hank Williams tradition. Don’t miss these old-time-y Appalachian garage rockers if they visit a city near you.
A few more pictures of the show here.
