WADE BOWEN
We look forward to welcoming Wade Bowen to Billy Bob’s Texas on Saturday, September 21st. We offer a one of a kind experience in the heart of the Fort Worth Stockyards! While you’re here check out the Honky Tonk Kitchen, Billy Bob’s gift store, and live bull riding!
Show Details: Saturday, September 21st
Wade Bowen at 10:30 PM on the Main Stage
House band at 8 PM on the Honky Tonk Stage
Doors Open at 6 PM
Every story has a next chapter and for Wade Bowen, this new self-titled album, is it.
Wade Bowen marks a new beginning, the turning of the page to a place where the music becomes a little bit freer, a little bit
looser, and a lot more intimate. This is the sound of catharsis, of Bowen released from major label
bonds to find himself on his own again – ragged from the storm, but finally, back
on shore. In short, this is the real Wade Bowen.
Bowen has sold over 300,000 album in his short career, sung duets with the likes
of Will Hoge (“Another Song Nobody Will Hear”) and Brandy Clark, (the duet of
“Love in the First Degree” on the successful comp “High Cotton: A Tribute to
Alabama”), and been featured on compilations alongside the likes of Charlie
Daniels, Old Crow Medicine Show, Eli Young Band and The Blind Boys from
Alabama. His Wade Bowen Classic golf tournament has raised over 1 million
dollars to benefit children’s charities across central Texas.
And now, after 15 years of near constant touring, (sometimes up to 250 nights a
year), through hit albums like, The Given, and hit tracks like, “Songs About
Trucks,” Bowen has continuously grown and evolved, becoming the man on this
incredible new record. Welcome Bowen the balladeer, the storyteller, the guy who sings from the heart.
“This was a whole new approach,” explains Bowen of the making of this newest
album, his 7th to date, “Probably what I love most about this album is the search
I went on to go out of my norm and write some songs that were out of my comfort
zone. I guess you could say I was more selfish on this record. I wanted
everyone playing on this to feel willing to explore, to go as far out as they wanted
I wanted to go back to the way we all played when we were kids in garage
somewhere, playing just for the pure fun of it. “
Sometimes, starting new, means going back to where you began in the first
place, where music was played straight from the gut, for the sheer and beautiful
joy of it. Wade Bowen was made without the burdens that come with big
business or the pressures to fit in any kind of particular box. This is simple,
American-made Americana, dreamt up on the road and played in the company of
good friends.
“The focus was to talk about what I’ve been through. To get personal,” Bowen
says of writing these new tracks, “everything I’ve been through lead me to this. I
needed to get stuff off my chest in a way, to be free and to be playing music for
the right reasons. This album was about getting friends involved, about getting on
the road and trying to inspire people.”
Recorded his own way, Wade Bowen sounds more like a casual gathering than a
stiff studio session. The players have space to breath and room to explore. You
can hear it in the big guitar thrusts of “When It’s Reckless”, co-written with Will
Hoge. “When I heard Will for the first time, I always wondered what a co-write
between us would sound like,” says Bowen. “Finally, here it is.”
Your can here is in gritty sway of “Honky Tonk Road” a track Bowen first heard
performed by Walt Wilkins and the Mystiqueros and “fell in love with it. Walt has
always been one of my favorites anyway. They took this Ray Stephenson song
and made it their own and from the first time I heard it I imagined how fun it would
be to get some buddies together to sing it with me. Remember back in the days
when multiple artists recorded a good song, over and over? Well…”
On covers like this one, as well as on the album’s vibrant originals, Bowen and
his band manage capture all the raw energy of a live performance, while taking
us on a wild ride down the highways and byways of a lost America. “It was about
the energy,” says Bowen, “I wanted this record to be unique from everything else
I’d done. It is rawer record than I’ve ever done and it has more of a free spirit. I
want you to feel like you’re in the room with us when you’re listening to it.”
With Wade Bowen, he rolls with us onto wide-open roads and into territory both
fresh and familiar. You can hear a host of influences here, old school rockn’roll,
classic country, and singer-songwriter confessionals. But the thematic glue that
holds the album together is the idea of moving forward, of moving on, of following
that arrow of black pavement that links one experience to the next.
Tracks like “Drive and “Wander” are songs born of hot asphalt, of the sky spread
out big and blue. “California” and “Leola” carry traces of sweet nostalgia and the
kind of yearning that aches deep in the chest. “Gonna Go” is darker, grittier,
following the beat of the road, that dotted yellow line pulsing into a lost horizon.
On “West Texas Rain”, with Vince Gill guesting on vocals, Bowen gives a nod to
his early days in his home state, a place, “where I started playing music and
figuring life out. I’ve always felt that as a writer, sometimes the best thing to do is
just be as honest as you can and everything seems to work itself out. This song
is a story of life and love and learning and anyone who knows West Texas as all
knows, if you don’t like the weather, stick around cause it’ll change before you
know it. Live your life. We are only here for a little while.”
“I wrote the album over a few years time,” explains Bowen, “but when you gather
these songs together, there always seems to be a theme you didn’t see before.
A lot of them are about being on the road, about the life I’ve been leading. I listen
to this record and my life comes through, and ultimately, without trying, the songs
all ended up feeling right together.”
Take a listen. The tracks on Wade Bowen feel as familiar as old denim, as
comforting as an old friend – back again after a long time gone. This is an album
that has Bowen both returning to his roots…and pushing ahead into strange new
lands. These are songs made of memories, regrets, redemption and the promise
of a next chapter too – those adventures that still await, just up around the next
curve.
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