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Truckers Deliver Rock Solid Third Album

Written by Aaron Reed

Photo: Aaron Reed

With the June release of their third album, Let’s All Go to Bed, Austin country-rock quartet The Mother Truckers have cemented their reputation as a thinking person’s good-time band that delivers every single time.

As the band kicked-off a summer-long tour in June that will take them from coast to coast, more than 100 rock, college, AAA, and public radio stations were already spinning the disc. Steven van Zandt of E Street Band fame picked one of the cuts, “Streets of Atlanta,” as the “coolest song in the world,” a recurring feature on his weekly Sirius-syndicated radio program, “Little Stevie’s Underground Garage.”

Though the goin’ is great for The Mother Truckers now, but it’s been a long haul to get here.

The Truckers packed up and left San Francisco for Austin in 2005. Songwriters Teal Collins and Josh Zee, with the help of admirer Ray Benson, landed a spot at Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnic in pretty quick fashion. The self-released Broke, Not Broken followed, and then a record deal with Funzalo Records, who re-issued the disc to a wider audience. Along the way they picked up an Austin Music Award for “Best Roots Rock Band” and landed a coveted weekly residency gig at the Continental Club on South Congress.

The energy of those Thursday night happy hour shows has become something of a local legend. The thing about our crowd at the Continental is that they’ve become more and more involved with the show. There’s a dozen times during our show now where people shout something,” Collins says. “It’s like ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show,’ almost. There have been girls who get up on the stage and dance when they’re feeling it.”

Where some bands may fret over losing control, Collins sees it the other way around. "Let’s have them up. I mean, I love it. It makes the crowd go crazy, it makes us go crazy.”

Collins and Zee, the married couple that shares songwriting duties, brought serious rock ‘n’ roll recording and touring experience to the table when they first started strumming acoustic guitars and singing old Hank Williams songs at the beginning of the decade. Collins had backed Third Eye Blind, among others, and Zee led a hard rock trio, Protein, that put out two albums on Sony’s Work label.

Now, on their third record as The Mother Truckers—with an equal number of rhythm sections (former Protein bandmate Danny Thompson on drums and Austin’s “Danny G” Grochow on bass)—the band appears to have solidified and hit its creative stride.

“We’ve always been too rock for country stations, and too country for rock stations,” says Zee. “Somehow, hopefully, we’ll find a crossover or find a niche or something.”

“We’re pretty stubborn about keeping both of those sounds,” Collins interjects.

Zee rips a face-melting solo with Danny G

Photo: Aaron Reed

Zee calls Texas a “guitar state” that is particularly hospitable to the sorts of face-melting solos he so enjoys playing. “People just collectively seem to appreciate the guitar out here. A lot of good guitar players obviously come from Texas, that doesn’t hurt,” he says. “Maybe that’s why you can cross over within a show from country to rock, because if it’s guitar-based and it’s in your face, you can appeal to both.”

Whatever the reason—and it’s probably simply that Let’s All Go to Bed is a collection of damned fine songs—the Truckers have been getting a healthy helping of love from fans and critics alike. There’s nothing too exotic about the formula: take the aforementioned searing six-string solos, embed them in traditional chord progressions and honeyed harmonies, mix with sneaky-smart songwriting and Collins’ world-class vocals. The Truckers pull that recipe off with the sort of effortless grace that hints at serious behind-the-scenes hard work.

The CD opener, “Dynamite,” is a rocking celebration of sex, or if you prefer, pyromania. “Streets of Atlanta,” a catchy, gritty offer of redemption, is another obvious single on the new album. Collins covers Billy Joe Shaver’s “When I Get My Wings” as if she’d written it herself, and Zee’s “I Give You My Word” is both a celebration of and plea for honesty in the world: “The words you speak define you/So if those words are just sounds/I don’t have time/Get out of my way/I’ll knock you down.”

Perhaps the most poignant song in the collection, given the grim news of the murder of Collins’ older sister in California May 31, is “Soul’s Journey Home:” “What’s it come to/all this life/as we reach each cold shoreline/will we take the fallen/will we take each soul/so nothing’s wasted after all,” she sings.

“Most people have lost somebody at one time or another and, you know, everybody has a different idea about what happens after this,” Collins said in an interview in April. “I always like to think you’re going to meet people over there and the love you have with people in your life, it can never be destroyed—it’s just there. Once you have that you’re just set.”

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