Randy Rogers & Wade Bowen Discuss “Hold My Beer, Vol. 1”

In this exclusive conversation, the respected artists for their other bands (Randy Rogers Band, Wade Bowen) discuss why they decided to jointly release their new album of 10 traditional country tunes.

With a new duo project on the charts, Randy Rogers and Wade Bowen have set about releasing something that fans of the tours have been long hoping for. a project which would satisfy even the harshest of modern country music critics who long for the days when country had shuffles like “Standards” and a familiar groove that can only be described as “country music.” In this exclusive story we talk to Randy Rogers and Wade Bowen to learn just what was behind them turning a long time friendship into a recording partnership with Hold My Beer, Vol. 1, their new album of outlaw style traditional country music, an album born out of an enduring friendship and love for playing music.

RoughStock: What made now the right time to release Hold My Beer, Vol. 1?

Wade Bowen: It’s a change of pace for Randy and I both, especially for me to go really old school country. It’s exciting for fans to hear the music we grew up on. It’s a change of pace for people and hopefully they’ll like it.

RoughStock: What was it like to work with Lloyd Maines as producer for the project?

Randy Rogers: I’ve never worked with Lloyd before and I’ve always wanted to. He’s a genius, one of the easiest to work with in the studio. He communicates really well and gets the best performances out of the bands. It was a real treat.

RoughStock: How did you go about choosing the tracks on the record?

Wade: It was originally supposed to be a live acoustic thing and we’ ve been doing that for years and years and originally were just gonna record a couple tracks to go with that but had so much fun we decided to do a whole record. We scraped everything together and it kinda just feel lout of the sky.

Randy: We’d written many songs but we also wanted to nod to our heroes like the Hag and Willie. The records we grew up living, we just wanted to cut songs we loved, including “Great Afternoon” and “Reasons To Quit,” songs we wanted to take a shot at. It was a lot of fun to cut those songs, songs we’ve loved our whole lives.

RoughStock: We think traditional fans are really gonna gravitate to “Standards” how fun was it to create that song?

Randy: Something I haven’t done on any of my records, a shuffle like that with the fiddles. The sentiment isn’t a “shit talking” song but more of a joke at ourselves, more than anything. It was written to say it was OK that I didn’t have a #1 or “Sell Out” to get at any point in my life to be happy or have stability. The way of life for me is touring and playing shows and I get to do that. Also, if the dance floor is packed at a show, that's like a standing ovation in Texas.

Wade: We're both songwriters so we felt that a whole cover's record might've been too much of an easy way out. So, there were a lot of songs we've written over the years that just never felt that they didn’t fit on any previous records and as we dug through these songs, it felt like we probably could’ve done a lot more. That’s why we call it “Volume 1,” we hope to do more records.

RoughStock: It’s an interesting thing that more artists aren’t doing more of things like this…

Wade: Yeah, going back to the 70s and early 80s where Jones and Paycheck and Haggard and Nelson and Waylon and even Moe and Joe, They did records like this. Randy and I, after shows, go back and drink beer and listen to records like this and hear all the fun they had. They just went out and did these records. It’s kind of a lost thing so I’m glad we may, in our own small way, be bringing back the spirit of those records...

RoughStock: Well, Willie and Merle just announced a new record this week...

Randy: I just made a new Randy Rogers Band record with Buddy Cannon, who produced that record and the parts I heard were fabulous.

RoughStock: I can’t imagine it being anything but that…

RoughStock: Are you gonna take a full band with you when you tour behind this project?

Randy: we plan on it, taking it on the road and try to do a bit bigger venues than we’ve done in the past.

RoughStock: One cool thing for the fans is some of them may not have seen each of you live…

Randy: Well, a lot of fans of Wade’s are probably already fans of mine, but we’ve got a mix of our bands together and the marketing is different than we’ve done before so we hope to bring even more fans…

RoughStock: And fans who like traditional country music instead of what’s on the radio…

Randy: and that seems to be trending with people…

Wade: We’ve both made careers out of word of mouth and to do something fresh for both of our fans will hopefully have them sharing the project out with as many people as possible, their friends and family and we can see where this grows from there.

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You can now purchase Hold My Beer, Vol. 1 at local stores or online at iTunes.

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