They took their name from a Dwight Yoakam song. With their first album, the band gave a nod to the rhinestone-spangled “Nudie Suits” worn by country music superstars like Porter Wagoner and Hank Snow a half-century ago.
Their voices are their own and their music is all original. That’s Midland — Jess Carson, Cameron Duddy and Mark Wystrach.
With a five-song EP and two albums to its credit, Midland has brought a fresh, old-fashioned sound to the pop and country music charts.
The trio released its second full-length album almost exactly one month ago. They’re bringing the best of both albums to The Republik on Wednesday.
“There’s a story behind every song because the songs are all telling a story,” Wystrach, lead vocalist and designated spokesman, said during an early morning call from his home near Austin, Texas.“The ability to turn a phrase — like ‘cheatin’ by the rules’ or, ‘People say I have a drinkin’ problem, but when it comes to drinkin’ I got no problem at all’— will take a song, a melody, and make it iconic and make it timeless.”
To get into the concept, take a moment to examine “Cheatin’ by the Rules.” The title sounds like a contradiction in terms — cheaters are by definition people who don’t play by the rules. Wystrach says there’s much more to the song than that seeming contradiction.
“It’s a song about people trying to protect the people they’re no longer in love with,” he said. “It’s one of these songs that might seem to be about one thing, but on further review and further exploration these songs end up being much more dense.
“Rhett Akins, who we wrote that song with, had that title working around, and then we sat down (with him) and we wrote the song. What we learned on the first album was that, being a band, if you’re all going to sing songs together they need to kind of emanate from all of you. That’s where the collaborative songwriting process came from.”
MIDLAND’S HISTORY began in 2013 when Duddy was getting married in Jackson Hole, Wyo. He had worked with Carson and Wystrach at different times in Los Angeles and invited them to be his groomsmen. Carson and Wystrach arrived few days early and that gave the three men some time play music together.
By the time Duddy and his bride exchanged vows the three men had a shared interest in working together. The pieces started coming together when Duddy got back from his honeymoon.
Carson was living in Texas at the time, and Dripping Springs, a small town a few miles west of Austin, became their base of operations. Wystrach was the lead voice, with Carson (guitar) and Duddy (bass) harmonizing behind him.
The three introduced themselves as recording artists in 2015 with “14 Gears,” an original song that updated the classic country music genre of songs about truck-driving. In March of the 2016 they were signed by Big Machine Records.
Midland’s first single for the label was “Drinkin’ Problem,” the song about the man who says, “When it comes to drinkin’ I got no problem at all.” It became one of the five songs that the label included on the self-titled “Midland EP.”
For a first full-length album, “On the Rocks,” which was released in September 2017, the band added eight originals to the EP’s five songs.
“Nothing New Under the Neon” and “At Least You Cried” caught listener’s attention. Meanwhile, Midland made a visual splash with the neo-traditional sequined Nudie Suits they modeled on the cover.
The suits evoked memories of the country stars and the brightly colored rhinestone-covered suits created by tailor-to-the-country-stars Nudie Cohn in the 1950s. Cohn’s creations — suits with jackets covered in musical notes or giant cacti or wagon wheels, and trousers decorated to match — had been iconic country music garments for more than a half-century.
“When we started the band, the Nudie Suits were kind of an obsession,” Wystrach said. “That dates back to our being influenced by watching guys like Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers.
“We’re all students of country music history — guys like Marty Robbins, Hank Williams, Sr. — and back then, stage lighting was really basic. The artists really had to be the production — the decoration, if you will.”
MOVING FROM neo-traditional to contemporary, Midland gave audiences a preview of their evolving music on a second album several months ago, with the release of a song titled “Mr. Lonely.” On that song the trio was joined by two additional co-writers, Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne, in putting a non-traditional spin on the story of a man who roams from town to town, breaking women’s hearts.
Dennis Quaid stars in the music video. What happens to him when the women catch up with him isn’t pretty.
“It was counter-intuitive or a bit of an off-set perhaps from what people would think the song is about,” Wystrach acknowledged. “We wanted it to be very aware, but also very pro the female perspective, and that’s where the idea (for the video) came from, because just having some guy going around being this mythological Lothario — even in the past, I’m not even sure it was a real thing.”
“We wanted to crumble all that and leave everybody surprised. The great thing about that song is that it’s a classic, almost primal, honky-tonk song, and you think it’s going to be from the typical male perspective, but there’s a message — treat your women right.”
Wystrach added that Quaid “totally embraced the concept.”
“It’s amazing for a superstar to take something like that on, but we’d met him the year before, and it turned out that he was a fan — he’s also a musician himself — and he was willing to be kind of the butt of the joke.”
WITH “LET It Roll” out for just a month, and many, many concert dates ahead, Wystrach says they’re looking seriously at songs for a third album.
“My phone is filled with probably 300 song ideas — some of them half-cocked, some of them finished — and there’s a bunch of songs that we weren’t able to fit on this album that we still really love and believe in, so the process of putting together the third album has already begun. I can think of five songs right now that I would like to be on there that are in our back catalog.”
Midland is also preparing to launch a podcast that will provide a platform to interact with their fans, promote the group, and support some of their friends in the music business.
“We just interviewed Dwight (Yoakam),” Wystrach said. “We talk with him all the time, we’ve been on the road with him, we’ve hung out at parties together. He’s a big supporter.”
MIDLAND
>> Where: The Republik
>> When: 8 p.m. Wednesday
>> Cost: $45-$50
>> Info: 941-7469, jointherepublik.com
