Tyson Leamon and the White Line Drifters are the real deal
The heart and soul of country music has always been in the songwriting. Whether it’s plaintive steel guitars and old-timey fiddles, or a 12-piece monster drum kit and screaming Stratocasters, the best of country music is in the words.
At some point, however, country devolved in to just another flavor of pop music. I don’t have the seething hate for pop music some folks do. Some of it is really quite good, and it all depends on what it is you want from your tunes, but pop largely relies on a cookie cutter approach, a predictable, quantifiably marketable approach that relies more on image, a few catchy hooks (maybe,) and a gimmick.
Soul and substance just don’t have a broad enough commercial appeal.
Fortunately, there are always those individuals who play the long odds and rebel against the “paint by numbers” approach, either intentionally or simply because it isn’t in them to be any other way.
Tyson Leamon and the White Line Drifters fall neatly in to that category. It is a gamble that I think will inevitably pay off, particularly now that more and more country music fans are yearning for something with a little more meat to it than the Nashville machine is perpetually cranking out.
Their first single, “Any Kind of Wine Girl,” is currently available on iTunes and as the vanguard of their upcoming EP, it foreshadows an outstanding collection of original music. An earlier version of the song with a different backing band (the Backwater Prophets) can be heard on YouTube now, and even this version is a stand out success in a genre plagued with mediocrity. Musically solid, it is the lyrical and vocal content that drives the song and, I suspect, defines the artist.
Leamon comes by his lyrical and vocal prowess honestly, professing, “I started singing as soon as I could talk.”
From church to a family quartet, to various high school bands and projects, there has never been a time when music was not a significant part of his life. Because of that, he has the chops, but more importantly, perhaps most importantly, he has roots and those roots are what give his creative ability and performances power.
If I had to guess, I’d say that Leamon and company do not strive for authenticity so much as authenticity is simply endemic to who they are as musicians and artists and that is, or should be, one of the key components of any musical genre.
It certainly is one of the key elements I listen for in music and believe me; I have reviewed more than one artist who, although completely competent and even genuinely talented, was phoning it in.
Leamon doesn’t phone it in, there is a living, breathing part of him in every song he sings and if he weren’t half as skilled as he genuinely is, I would still sing his praises for being real. As it happens, though, he and his band mates are highly skilled and polished, more than one would expect from a group who hasn’t finished recording their first EP.
Tyson Leamon & the White Line Drifters will be performing at The Revelry Room on January 6th and their EP will be ready for release any day now. Look for the review here when it is, in the meantime catch them at the Revelry Room and enjoy the kind of great country music that built the genre.