Austin, Texas’ The Gourds have never been much on sentiment. Since the band started defining Gourds Music, as it has come to be known, with Dem’s Good Beeble in 1997 and the quirky Stadium Blitzer in 1998, they have chugged through America fueled by music and a near-pathological need for a good time. And while songwriters Kevin Russell and Jimmy Smith have written the most dense, reference-laden country songs of the last ten years and almost single-handedly made a place for deep thought in a genre of “honky tonk badonkadonks” they have, for the most part, shied away from the tear-in-my-beer ballads that made country music a commercial powerhouse over the last 50 years. The Gourds have ensured that their musical legend will move past adjectives like witty or ironic and on toward more profound descriptors like classic and timeless, helping them to take their rightful place as some of today’s greatest American songwriters.
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