Moving Down The Road

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Moving Down The Road

– By Ty Weatherford.

Ty Weatherford?…who is he?”  Those are the words I said when Kinky Friedman woke me up with a call late one night from his west coast tour. The Kinkster calls me to tell me jokes, talk politics, to talk about his aging dogs and retired carriage horses, but he never calls me to talk about new and up and coming song writers. “Jess, you have to hear this guy…he’s been opening shows for me and my audiences love him!” I thought hmm, I at least better hear him, right? Skip to 6 weeks later and I’m in Nashville with Kinky promoting a record that we did at the Americana Festival.

Kinky says, “here he is, I call him Ty Weatherford!” I found out later that his real name is Brian Molnar but every night the audiences kept yelling out “Milner?”… Mullins?. So, as a joke, Kinky just started calling him Ty Weatherford cuz it sounded like a bull rider form West Texas and it stuck. Hey, you could have worse people give you your stage name than Kinky Friedman, right? So I’m blown away in Nashville by the songs. A few weeks later we bring him to SXSW and have him do a set with us at The Continental Club. Let me remind you Austin audiences can be spoiled and jaded and he still kills the place. After that we hide out in a cheap motel and run thru about 20 stellar original songs. We fianly pick 12, then immediately go into Red Hourse Studios in Austin with my Band backing (all hot dog session pickers by Austin standards) and make a record of 10 songs.

Lots of influences of folk, country, rock and blues. Guess you’d call it Americana? Sure, “Moving Down The Road” reminds me of a male Lucinda Williams and the acoustic stuff like “Miss You” and “The One” brings to mind a young Arlo Gutherie, but it was refreshing to be in the studio with a guy who already had his own voice and not another wanna-be outlaw country singer. I just call it a damn fine batch of songs. In a world where a lot of people are emulating other people’s styles, voices and especially their business models, I’d call it luck that I even found Ty Weatherford, and I hope you will too.

-Jesse Dayton, Austin TX 9/2013

But can he rock too? You betchyer ass he can, a lot like JP Jones when that folk-oriented guy lights it up. Refer to Invictus for the proof, with Drayton wailing away on electric guitar, but don’t expect more than that one-shot ’cause, as I say, this man’s a troub, it’s where his heart is, and when anyone can make Kinky Friedman get misty-eyed along with his usual whiskey-eyed, then you know something’s goin’ on. Throw on Moving Down the Road when you’re tired of the raucous rock or the saccharine sweet Smooth Jazz or the perplexities of the avant-garde and just want a good, human, thoughtful set of tunes to re-calibrate things back to the normal and the everyday.

Source – Review by Mark S. Tucker AcousticMusic.com