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Texas’ Blake Burrow’s New Song Available for Download

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Press Release from Jeremy Westby, 2911 Media

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Native Texas singer-songwriter Blake Burrow returns with a beautifully crafted mid-tempo ballad, “Don’t Blame It On The Bar,” perfect for the honky tonk dance floor. Burrow bemoans the barfly’s life and recent lost love, but insists that the hearer shouldn’t ‘blame it on the bar.’

  • Don’t blame it on the one serving up the drinks
  • Don’t get it twisted because they mixed it
  • That Coke with some Tennessee whiskey
  • Blame it on my pride, my stubborn mind, my broken heart
  • But don’t blame it on the bar

“I’m excited to release ‘Don’t Blame It On The Bar’ as my first single off the upcoming record,” Burrow shares. “My buddy Joey Green and I created the song based on true events at a Nashville bar. We went home and turned around and wrote it the next day. The vibe and meaning of the song can hit audiences all over the world. It is one of those songs everyone can sing along with when it hits the chorus. It’s a catchy tune.”

Blake penned the song with co-writers Joey Green, Grayson Green, and Brady Irby. The song was recorded at East Iris Studios in Nashville, Tennessee, and produced by Dan Frizell (Highwaymen, Lee Brice, Craig Morgan, Chris Janson, David Ball and many others) Musicians on the recording include A-list Music Row studio stalwarts Miles McPherson (Drums), Mark Hill (Bass), John Willis (Acoustic), Rob McNelly (Electric Guitar), David Dorn (Keyboards), and Mike Johnson (Steel Guitar). Lead vocals: Blake Burrow. Backing vocals: Joey Green.

“Don’t Blame It On The Bar” was premiered on Friday, September 29, by The Hollywood Times and is available to stream/download HERE.

Blake Burrow is a talented country singer from the small Panhandle Texas town of Tulia, Born and raised in Texas, Blake’s love for music started at a young age and grew with him as he got older. While pursuing his education at Wayland Baptist University, he discovered his passion for playing the guitar.

After moving to Texas Tech, Blake started writing music and performing at various venues in the area. He played his first show at The Blue Light Live in Lubbock and quickly gained a regional following. In 2016, Blake recorded his first album, “Cotton on Concrete,” which showcased his unique sound and songwriting ability.

Since then, Blake has made a name for himself in the greater Texas country music scene. He has opened for well-known artists including Reckless Kelly, Stoney LaRue, Mike Ryan, and Dennis Quaid. Burrow has also had the honor of performing the national anthem at the Red Bull Cliff Diving event.

Blake’s music reflects his strong Texas roots, blending traditional country and rock influences. His lyrics are honest and heartfelt, often drawing from personal experiences and the world around him. Burrow released his latest single, “Don’t Blame It On The Bar,” on September 29, 2023. His upcoming album, ‘Faded,‘ is set to be released in the fall of 2023. He is sure to continue making a name for himself in the country music community.

Scott Sean White to release his debut album

Call It Even
Record Cover

Scott Sean White Builds A Foundation On His Songcraft And His Truth With Debut Album Call It Even being released on April 23

Hear “Dad’s Garage And Mama’s Kitchen” today
Note:  Scott Sean White will be playing these and many other of his songs at
El Patio Escondido, 495 W Van Alstyne Parkway, in Van Alstyne, 6-8, March 1.
For a songwriter who can produce magical, poignant, and moving songs, it’s probably no coincidence that Scott Sean White now makes his home in a place called Poetry, Texas. Like Guy Clark and Lori McKenna, White is a writer’s writer. “Some songwriters spend precious time struggling to find their truth and make it rhyme,” says fellow Texas troubadour and songwriting legend, Jack Ingram. “Others just pick up their guitar and tell it. Scott Sean White is one of the others.” Ingram is just one in a long list of songwriters and artists who praise White’s songcraft—Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame members Tom Douglas, Tony Arata, and Doug Johnson are all outspoken fans as well. “I think God gives us art to penetrate the scar tissue on our hearts to make us feel something again,” said Douglas. “[White] uses artistry and craft for that very purpose.” Needless to say, they are all thrilled to see White send his tunes off for the world to hear.
On April 23, White will release his debut full-length album Call It Even; an unadulterated 11-song collection of tunes in which White soulfully invests himself with each new song, delivering them in his life-worn, warm, and vibrant vocals that compel listeners to feel exactly what he’s feeling. Cowboys & Indians magazine premiered the album’s first single, “Dad’s Garage And Mama’s Kitchen,” a vivid and nostalgic portrait of the yin and yang of mom and dad. In the article, Cowboys & Indians writes “If you don’t mind your heartstrings being tugged at and maybe a few tears rolling down your cheeks, you’ll surely appreciate the sentimental and strong new song.” Watch the video for “Dad’s Garage And Mama’s Kitchen” at this link and pre-order or pre-save Call It Even right here.

Call It Even is chock full of every-day-life crafted into song. The jaunty “Crazy ‘Til It Works” illustrates White’s canny ability to tell a tale filled with serendipitous twists and turns to find the just-right word or phrase to describe the unexpected character of life. One day, banging around on his guitar, “not even trying to write a song,” White came up with this line about a couple who gets “married by Elvis in a drive-thru chapel in Vegas.” As he recalls, “It was interesting. I thought to myself, ‘Hmmm, I wonder what that’s about?’ Sounded like a cool, crazy couple who probably didn’t have a chance in hell of making it. So I started running down that road, telling this

Scott Sean White, photo by Mary Jane Farmer

couple’s story as it unfolded in my head.” White and Jared Hard ended up finishing this bluegrass rambler about just that and the ways that some of the stuff we do in life seems crazy at the time but ends up working.

The lush spaciousness of “Humankind”—with its gospel-inflected piano—movingly tells the stories of two people for whom human kindness provided a balm for their pain. The idea for the song came from White’s co-writer Helene Cronin who saw a hashtag—#Humankind—on the internet. On the day they wrote the song, he says, “she had an idea about how to set it up with something like ‘nothing helps human pain, like human… kind.’ We ended up adjusting that wording by the time we got done but that was the thought that sparked it all. It is one of my most favorite songs my name has ever been on. And possibly…the most impactful.”
Even though Scott Sean White tells his own stories of heartbreak and hope in his emotionally riveting songs, he’s telling everyone else’s stories, too, and in every one of his songs, there’s a glimpse at the ways that everybody’s lives have sometimes fallen apart and been stitched together again by the silver threads of love.
Call It Even Tracklisting:
Call It Even
Crazy But True
Crazy ‘Til It Works
Humankind
Dad’s Garage And Mama’s Kitchen
The Broken Part
Famous
Leaves, Branches, and Trunks
Right Reasons (For Kaiya)
God’s Not Me
When I Go
More About Scott Sean White:

Kyle Level, on the left, provides harmonies and instrumentation on Scott Sean White’s (R) premier record, Call It Even.

Scott Sean White makes his home these days in Poetry, Texas, a perfectly named little town for a songwriter’s songwriter. Releasing his first album, Call It Even, this year, White has been storing up the raw materials that became these songs for over 30 years. The stories of his family were bubbling up inside him constantly—”all the major adult figures in my childhood were either alcoholics or addicts…or both,” says White, and he’s finally had the time to write these songs and make the album. For 29 years, until 2018, White managed, booked, and played keyboards in a corporate cover band that played funk, disco, and hip hop. During that time, he wrote a pocketful of country-leaning songs, and he made his way down to Nashville, where he found his musical home. White has spent several years there as a staff writer, but in 2020, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, he suddenly had time to make the album he’d been wanting to make. On Call It Even, White lays bare his soul with raw honesty, fiercely trading in the ragged vagaries of life and love in emotionally soaring vocals that echo in our souls long after the music has stopped. Few artists possess the ability to pull us into their stories immediately with such emotional vulnerability in their voice and candor in their lyrics as Scott Sean White.

CD Review-Micky & The Motorcars “Long Time Coming”

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Photo by Mary Jane Farmer

Micky & The Motorcars, Long Time Coming. Thirty Tigers

First printed in Buddy Magazine, December 2019 issue

It’s been out about a month now, this new record from Micky & The Motorcars called Long Time Coming. And the songs on this project will be around for a long time.

Long Time Coming is the Idaho-turned-Texans’ first recording in three years, and for this they changed up two things — they used some Nashville musicians and Gary Braun, who along with his brother Micky Braun, fronts the popular group, wrote many more of the songs on this than in the past.

It was Micky who co-wrote with Courtney Patton the lead song, “Road To You,” and it says ‘I love you’ without ever saying those words. “I’m a little bit north of the heart of Texas, But I’m carryin’ yours with me.” Relatable lyrics.

This reviewer’s favorite has to be “Lions of Kandahar,” written by Gary and a first-person account of military action. It’s got a personal feel, since I have a grandson going into the U.S. Army right after Christmas. The background is a vibration that gives emphasis to the stress of the deadliest battle in Afghanistan. And yet with the stress, the songs brings out the strength of the units as they fought. “Raining hell down on those men as we advance again,” “Civilian life ain’t easy after what I’ve seen and done. I still hear the choppers coming and still hear the thumping of those guns…” and the despair “When I close my eyes at night, I’m right back in the fight, with the Lions of Kandahar.”

Micky & The Motorcars, at Hank’s Texas Grill
Photo by Mary Jane Farmer

The depth of feeling — whether the feeling is true love, despair, joy, sadness, hope — is abundant in every lyric in every song on this project. The two best dance tunes here are probably “Road To you” and “Break My Heart,” and the others, while danceable, are extra food for the ear, the brain, and the heart.

Micky & The Motorcars will be playing January 3 at Magnolia Motor Lounge in Fort Worth.

CD Review: Kinky Friedman “Resurrection”

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First appeared in The Paris News, Nov. 10, 2019, edition

“Resurrection,” Kinky Friedman, Echo Hill Records

Listening to the Kinky Friedman of today is like getting an in-depth look at his soul, and that easily transfers to in-depth looks inside oneself as well. Long gone, it seems, is the Kinky of his youth, when his music was fun and comic, yet quirky and cheeky. Now, he writes of emotion and caring, his own and of others across the globe.

In this new CD, Resurrection, recently released on Echo Hill Records, the Kinkster penned 11 new songs, and not a loser in the bunch.

“Blind Kinky Friedman” is perhaps the most poignant look at how we so often forget our blessings, the love and bounty so freely given to us. Written, it seems, while he was on his pity pot—or maybe right after he’d just gotten off it and the emotions were still running rampant in his head. “And blind Kinky Friedman is feeling sorry for himself and for every soul only God can see… sometimes he still remembers that he’s me…wakes up in a gutter filled with sorrow… with a newspaper blanket, resting on a pillow made of smoke… Oh, Blind Kinky, that old boy can really sing the blues.”

The opening track, “Mandela’s Blues,” is absorbing, and it could be because Kinky manages to put himself in Nelson Mandela’s shoes, both while the South African giant was in prison and before and after those dreadful 27 years of incarceration. “Twenty years of rags and prison shoes, He paid a whole nation’s dues. He lost everything that a man could lose, everything but Mandela’s blues… It’s a long walk to freedom… there we will always stay. He smiled at Jesus and winked at Ghandi, knowing they would understand.”

And a love song has never been written such as “Carryin’ The Torch.” True love at its finest… “If you traveled around this world, you wouldn’t find another girl, could hold a candle to the one gal you left behind… On the day you discover how many you really love her, you’ll find her love has never lost it’s glow…” Can’t say more about this song, or it could be too much and spoil the surprise of hearing the full song for the first time.

So many others with deep lyrics — such as “down that lonely road called yesterday” and “The lessons that you can’t forget are the only ones you learned.” And this writer, for one, cannot listen to “A Dog In The Sky” without wiping away a bit of moisture from the eyes.

Kinky Friedman’s words and deliveries, drawl and all, stay with you and reflect the ragged part of the heart that most other songwriters never get close to touching. This collection features the best of today’s music genres, written and delivered with rare genius and only described as the all-inclusive “Americana.”

The cigar-smoking man in black brings honor to music, to people, and to his Texas Hill Country home. Resurrection can be found on most streaming sites, isn’t yet available on the something-for-everyone Amazon.com (though most of his previous recordings are), but is available in hard copy from his own Website, KinkyFriedman.com. He is also touring nationally with the release of Resurrection and will be at Poor David’s Pub in Dallas on November 22.

 

CD Review: Ian & Sylvia’s “The Lost Taoes

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Ian & Sylvia, The Lost Tapes, Stoney Plain Records — First printed in September 2019, in The Paris News.

Imagine being returned to the folk music era of the 1960s and 70s, the time when musical instruments were played to compliment the singers’ voices, not over-power them, and songwriters wrote songs with meaning and substance behind them.

That’s what has just recently been released as Ian & Sylvia’s The Lost Tapes, a double-CD set of live recordings from those years, half of which have never been released before.

Disc 1 is filled with the Canadian duo’s classics, many of which stretched to the top of the various music charts. Disc 2, on the other hand, are the songs which have not been heard before this, but most of which are familiar to music lovers. It features Harlan Howard’s “Heartaches By The Number,” country songs by Jimmie Rodgers, Buck Owens, and Lefty Frizzell, and folk songs by Tom Paxton (“The Last Thing On My Mind”) and Utah Phillips (“The Goodnight Loving Trail”). Oh, so many more.

Of the 26 total songs featured, Ian Tyson wrote three, all on Disc 1, some are traditional songs with Ian & Sylvia’s unique arrangements and phrasing, and the remainder are cover songs.

The duo’s “Four Strong Winds,” “Summer Wages,” and “Crazy Arms” blend the influences from both folk and country.  “Four Strong Winds” has been called “the most essential” piece of Canadian music. It and “You Were On My Mind” were both inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2003 and 2007. And just recently, Ian Tyson and Sylvia Tyson were honored with induction into that same Hall of Fame, and presenters said they pushed the boundries not only of folk and country, but also of blues, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll. That’s all obvious on The Lost Tapes.

The songs in this collection came to light as Sylvia was assembling memorabilia for the National Music Centre in Calgary.

Ian & Sylvia had the distinction of recording “Darcy Farrow” before anybody else had it. Steve Gillette and Tom Campbell wrote it in 1964, and since then more than 300 artists, including Jim Croce, Townes Van Zandt, George Hamilton IV, and Gillette himself, recorded the song. Gordon Lightfoot sang it often, though he never recorded it, as have countless others.

Sylvia’s crystal clear, vibrato voice powers her leads and her harmonies, and Ian’s soars solidly through his vocals. When you hear a fiddle, you hear the fiddle because the other instruments are quiet enough to let you hear the fiddle. Ditto the keyboards, or steel guitar — no matter which instrument takes a lead, it accents the song, sometimes harmonizing behind Ian’s or Sylvia’s vocals.

The Lost Tapes is available in hard copy on Amazon.com, StonyPlainRecords.com, and can be streamed on most streaming sites.

Mary Jane Farmer