Spotlight: The Texas Gentlemen
The cover art for The Texas Gentlemen’s sophomore album, Floor It!!!, depicts two longhaired youths—and a creepy, anonymous blood-red hand—playing the eponymous board game that’s included with each record. Doubling as a drinking game for its adult participants, the object of the cardboard quest is simple— score a record deal, find fame and all of your problems will be solved. “Which is exactly how it goes,” Nik Lee—guitarist, singer and songwriter for the Lone Star State quintet—says with a laugh.
Sophomore albums have long been mythical indicators of a band’s fate—a burden that The Texas Gentlemen are well aware of. The ensemble initially stormed the scene with their strong New West Records debut, 2017’s TX Jelly, after working for a number of years as a somewhat anonymous backing combo for Leon Bridges, Kris Kristofferson and others.
At first, The Texas Gentlemen’s lineup was a revolving door, of sorts. The Gents’ de facto leader, Beau Bedford, would recruit various musicians from a pool of area players, with Lee, keyboardist/singer Daniel Creamer, guitarist Ryan Ake, bassist Scott Edgar Lee, Jr. and drummer Aaron Haynes maintaining the group’s core over an eight-year stretch. Bedford also served as TX Jelly’s producer and mixer, helping the ensemble churn out a uniquely loose-limbed and eclectic collection that corralled contributions from over a dozen musicians.
However, Bedford amicably parted ways with The Texas Gentlemen in 2019 to focus on his production career, allowing Lee and Creamer to step up and lead the outfit into their next era. As songwriters, the pair hoped to craft a followup record that played to their individual and collective strengths; The Band, the Grateful Dead and Little Feat provided aspirational standards. “We wanted to hit people the way the music of those bands hits people,” Creamer says.
Over the course of a few months, The Texas Gentlemen cut tracks in a handful of different locales, including Muscle Shoals, Ala.’s legendary FAME Studios and Fort Worth’s Niles City Sound. The group enjoyed the recording process immensely but found that the album they were hoping for just wasn’t happening. So they shifted gears, recruiting producer Matt Pence—known for his work with Jason Isbell— and scheduling some time at Pence’s Echo Lab Studios in Denton, 40 miles north of Dallas. Meanwhile, their material continued to evolve and—though they kept a few previously recorded basic tracks—they ultimately decided to recut most of the songs at the Lab with Pence.
“We would walk out of the room after [recording] something, and Matt’s already done something else to make it sound better,” Lee says. “He put his magic on everything.”
The Texas Gentlemen also enlisted David Pierce to add a number of string and horn arrangements, helping to transform and embellish their sound. As Lee says, “[Pierce] takes the music from prepubescent teen to adult.” While their debut was admittedly “throw-and-go,” Floor It!!! is deeper—more nuanced and deliberate—even if some details emerged unintentionally.
The descending opening guitar line in “Skyway Streetcar” is, according to Lee, an unconscious reference to the Grateful Dead’s “Jack Straw.” “We listen to the Dead a lot. So things like that will happen by proximity,” he says.
And there are a few more-than-apparent nods to British rock royalty; the LP’s twisting, layered, piano-driven patterns, in particular, echo the mid-1970s output of superstars Elton John and Wings. At times, their melodies ebb and flow across shifting progressions; a multitude of hooks can hold a chorus, a burst of brass or an orchestral cascade.
The 13-song set boldly opens with a pair of instrumentals— “Veal Cutlass,” a faux-stumbling Dixieland romp showcasing the band’s mastery of tempo control and syncopation, and “Bare Maximum,” a sharp, funkified groove that slices like a blade through an 8 oz. Amarillo ribeye.
In April, a few months before Floor It!!!’s mid-July release, The Texas Gentlemen dropped “Ain’t Nothin’ New,” the album’s first sun-dazed single, amid the escalating global COVID-19 pandemic. The tune was met with immediate critical praise, and Lee’s own contention that this was “undoubtedly the best I’ve ever felt about the music.”
“Making music that people will love and enjoy— that’s cathartic to listen to— is important,” adds Creamer. “People need that. It helps everybody. That’s something we will always be shooting for.”
As for the accompanying game, the group offers their own suggestive way to enjoy: “roll some dice and get good and blind.” There is even a YouTube infomercial and an order hotline brought to you by Habsbro—a cannabis-inspired wink to both Jelly’s lead track, “Habbie Doobie,” and ‘70s toy giant Hasbro.
“We will be playing this game our whole lives—the fun is in the playing,” Creamer says. “You don’t want to finish. What’s the fun of winning?”
