Kevin Fowler

This article first appeared in the March issue of Buddy Magazine, free for the picking up. Pix and video at the end.

Back to making music the Texas way

From the first song on Kevin Fowler’s new CD, “How Country Are Ya?” it’s apparent that this is going to be a keeper. The 14 songs are new, with a few already getting airplay, and some have been heard at Kevin’s live performances. But, new they are. And maybe, just maybe, he recorded one for each of the 14 years he hasn’t had to take a “real job,” that he’s been able to be a musician exclusively and still support his family. Fowler has been in the music business longer than that, but the “no real job” time is what he measures time in. When you love what you’re doing, you never work a single day. And Kevin Fowler loves what he’s doing.

Kevin said he invited a bunch of different friends who just happen to be songwriters to his ranch in Wimberley, and they just spent time relaxing and writing together, until the songs just seemed to pop into existence.  Sounds simple, but it actually took about two years from being a gleam in Fowler’s eyes to a finished product, this time on his own label.

It’s the 7^th CD for Fowler, who got into the music scene full-time about 15 years ago. A couple of those were on national labels, but he, after much reflection, said, “I wanted to go back to the old ways of making music. Where I wrote them all. I did, with lots of help, and recorded them in Austin with my own band. There’s no outside material, no outside influences, it’s all my Texas spirit, too strong to be covered up by external ideas put into other people’s actions.”

He’s had songs charted nationally, starting with the tongue-twisting “Pound Sign (W?*!)”, and some of his penned tunes, covered by other singers, made the top spots on Billboard national chart including “Beer, Bait & Ammo” with Sammy Kershaw at the mic; Mark Chesnutt’s version of his “The Lord Loves A Drinking Man;” and, in 2009, “Long Line of Losers,” covered by Montgomery Gentry. Those are all staple crowd-pleasers in his shows, as he holds out his mic stand for the audience to be better heard singing along with him. The entertainer in him can’t make him slow down.

Fowler said his best-selling music has always come from his own label, and “If I’m not chasing national radio, there’s no reason for me to be on a national label. And why? This is like Texans do it, and we can do anything here.”

Kevin Fowler, with red solo cup

The title cut was released first, “How Country Are Ya?” and it’s got a great introduction by Earl Dibbles Jr. (Haven’t seen Earl yet? You can catch him at most, if not all, Granger Smith shows.) Then, there’s humor, along with great guitar work, from Davin James on “Chicken Wing”, and a little bit of female vocals thrown in by Amy Rankin on “Before Somebody Gets Hurt,” which could be a torridly sexy song about resisting temptation, but perhaps are words of wisdom offered to his three daughters. The Texmaniacs brought flavor to “Borracho Grande,” and Cody Johnson co-wrote and provides some vocals and true Texas grit to a couple of songs, including “Guns and Guitars.” Others in the songwriting camp were, Kevin said, Pat Green, Josh Abbott, Deryl Dodd, and Trent Willmon, names known to Texas music lovers.

Kevin Fowler’s incorporation of humor into his songs have begun to earn him the dubious dub “the Toby Keith of Texas music.” Fowler said he hadn’t heard that yet, but he certainly wasn’t offended by it. “My songs reflect my ability to not take life too seriously. They are a reflection of my personality. There’s a lot of guys who write deep lyrics, and that’s good. I can and have done the lovey-dovey love songs. But, I’m not trying to save the world, or cure cancer. Music is entertainment. There’s enough people out there doing the serious stuff. I want to see a relief from all the worries of life, to give my crowds a chance to forget about the problems for a while. I want to keep it light-hearted and fun.

“I’ve been really lucky. Every day has been a day of doing what I love to do — write songs and play them to people who seem to like hearing them, and make a living doing it.”

Fowler has a family that includes his three daughters, 6, 12, and 19, and one of the new songs on this CD is obviously for them and his wife, “The Girls I Go With.” Kevin talked about them with his signature humor, calling them his city girls. The ranch life is not for them, he said. He, for the most part, keeps his touring schedule down to the weekends, and has the weekdays for his family at their city house. “And by Thursdays, they are wanting me to leave,” he said with

Even the sound man gets into the spirit at Kevin Fowler shows.

his smile. “That’s all they have ever know, (a dad) who tours and makes music.” The ranch life is his, “a place for me to escape, to raise big deer and feed chickens, to get muddy on a 4-wheeler or get on the tractor. In 2015, we’ll start renting parts of it out for weddings and special events, but for now it’s a place for me to retreat.”

The Kevin Fowler band, on stage and in this recording, have as much fun as Kevin does with his music. He said he’s been really blessed, too, with very little turn-over in band members. Like grits and gravy, they are as country as Kevin himself, and work together like a well-oiled gears in a Mercedes… or more like gears in that big bus they travel in.

And it travels. In the past two weeks, the Kevin Fowler band played a festival in Dallas, went up to New York City for a Texas Independence Day celebration put on by displaced Texans, and back to Houston for a rodeo. On Friday, March 7, they will be at Southern Junction in Rockwall as part of the Texas Music Revolution’s pre-party fun. And nowadays, that SoJo concert will be a rather rare appearance, as the band is moving on down the road, across highways, and on the interstate with their tours.

So, which is his favorite cut on the new “How Country Are Ya?” CD? It’s definitely “Panhandle Poorboy,” Kevin said without hesitation. It talks about his growing-up years in Amarillo. “Where you are really from shapes who you are. I grew up on the edge of downtown Amarillo, but nowhere in Amarillo is anyone less than a block or two from open cattlefields. It was a safe place to be, where kids could ride their bicycles all day — we didn’t know fear and neither did our moms and dads, the crime was so low then and there.”

There’s a little side project, just for the fun of it, that keeps the Fowler man busy nowadays, too. “What I’m doing is I’m taking a video camera out during the week and videoing stuff, like fixing fence, or calf roping, or blowing up stuff, or riding the train.” This goes on a separate Website, KevinFowler.tv. “It’s my own reality show,” he laughed.

Reflection, analyzing, puzzlie-zing keeps Fowler busy keeping his energy and his priorities in place. There’s no slowing down for this amped-up musician. Whether on stage or off, he’s on the eager side of a project, and that now includes his next CD, already in the planning and writing stages before “How Country Are Ya?” is even released.

“If I have learned one thing from all my experiences, I think I learned that I work better on my own things and in my own work style.”

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Video, “Love Song” click here:

 From playing music on a tailgate, to practicing in a garage, to setting up this current band, Cody Johnson is as close to an overnight success as one can get in this business. Especially considering he’s still a young man who is taking Texas like a tornado, except that, unlike a tornado, he’s leaving only good times in his wake.

Cody recently released “Cowboy Like Me,” a CD with 13-track project filled with real country songs. It had to be that way, because Cody himself is a real, working cowboy, and it’s the only life he has known. In fact, he said, the title song was written toward the end of the project, and had to be a song to epitomize his life. He and co-writer David Lee sat down to write, he said, when he told David “I want the album to be about me, my life, who I am.” “And who would that be?” David asked him. “You know, a cowboy like me. And the song is so personal and descriptive, it is who I am.”

Yet, it isn’t the first release off the CD. “Dance Her Home,” is currently high on the Texas music charts.

It ain’t Cody’s first rodeo, though. His “Pray For Rain” hit the Texas charts, and there were several others after that, including an usual recording — unusual in that it was a song he didn’t write himself, but covered a Zane Williams’ song, “Ride With Me.”

Johnson cut his musical roots on true country, listening to Gene Watson, Farron Young, Alan Jackson, and others of the ilk. Now, he believes his music is somewhere around that of George Strait and Garth Brooks. A highlight of this career, he said, was when Moe Bandy “actually walked up to me in Vegas and said, ‘Thank you for playing real country music.’”

“It’s nice not singing about trucks and tailgates and cut-off T-shirts. It’s in the real emotions that country brings out,” Cody said. “When George (Jones) sang ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today,’ you believe it.”

He was rocking along, the band playing all over Texas, when Nashville’s Tim DuBois approached him about a publishing deal, Johnson related. He was, by then, already working with Howie Edelman, and when the deal was done, they also had Trent Willmon at the gate to produce this new project.

Talking with Cody make one realize that there’s no overblown ego going on inside that spirit of his, and when asked how he maintained his down-to-earth personality, he simply replied, “There’s a fine line between confidence and cockiness.” He learned that, originally, he said in the rodeo arena. “Rodeo instilled something in me. You check your ego every day and, when you do, you’ll be OK downin the arena. I use that same mentality toward my shows.”

This thunder bolt wore a performer’s jacket he had just earned at the Colorado hugh Music Fest, having Music fest. He’s on the line-ups at Larry Joe Taylor Fest in April, and Texas Thunder in May. He’s got a return gig at Billy Bob’s Texas, still the largest dance hall in Texas, and playing Gruene Hall and one of the oldest dance hall in the Lone Start State, the Cheatham Street Warehouse in San Marcos, which was Tuesday night home to George Strait for two years in Strait’s earliest years. Cody Johnson is being featured on the syndicated music series “Troubadour TX.”

Until the past few years, Cody said he worked for six years with the Texas Department of Corrections, all while rodeoing and playing music. “I spent a little time riding horses while working those guys (inmate) in the field. Then, I met Brandi, who was to become my wife, and Howie, who gave me the avenue into full-time music.  “He opened the doors and leveled with me on what he expected out of me, and we shook hands and been thick as thieves ever since.” After Cody and Brandi married, “she quit school and took two jobs, and I kept pouring money into the business, and she stuck with me in spite of all the time apart. I told her Christmas 2012, ‘Quit your job.’ She did, and she is completing her schooling online. I got my friend back. Then  last year, I bought her a truck.”

All this growth and changes has, in Cody’s words, “been surreal. It’s not the fame, not the ego, it’s because I didn’t expect it. In the last six months, the gravity of it hit me. We (the band and Brandi) were working so hard we couldn’t see it coming. We were too close to the scene sometimes. That’s how it can be, and then you pull your head up and see that’s it’s working. And knowing I have a wife who loves me, whether I succeed or not, and a manager who believes in me, well, it couldn’t get any better.”

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