MUSIC

Goode's Armadillo Palace is proud to welcome Shy Blakeman. (acoustic)

Shy Blakeman is damn sure country, in fact just about as country as a singing, guitar playing and songwriting guy can be. All that, and also a whole lot more. And his third and truly definitive album, LONG DISTANCE MAN, is damn sure country and a whole lot more as well. It’s rich with the true to the music yet renegade spirit that launched Blakeman out of Kilgore, Texas. It’s also rooted in the outlaw country and classic country-rock he was all but literally weaned and teethed on as a child in Wyoming.

You can hear how he learned what to do (and not just) from his time in Nashville. And also be thrilled and enchanted by the musical savvy of the long vital Los Angeles roots-rock scene and some of its hottest musicians that played on the album. It takes but a spin of the disc to know that Shy Blakeman is a country music man for all seasons, and primed for the long run through many more to come. From the first notes of the opening title track, it’s obvious there’s something very cool in LONG DISTANCE MAN that takes country into a wider musical realm.

Over a groove that nods to Waylon Jennings in his prime, there’s bubbling Wurlitzer electric piano and swirling Hammond B-3 organ, gospel-flavored backing vocals, a Stax/Volt-style horn section, and searing electric rock guitar, all bolstering Blakeman’s assertive vocal statement of intent.

For anyone who loves country that’s as bracing as a shot of moonshine and all other rural musical styles from below the Mason-Dixon, the sound of this disc declares: I love my roots! “All the musical decisions led to such a sonically rich and interesting listening experience,” Blakeman notes, “but it all still feels within the realm of what country music is and used to be.” The sound also offers a bracing freshness sure to bring a new liveliness to the contemporary scene.

The songs Blakeman collected for the album form an autobiographical tale of his life in recent years. The Band-tinged “Late Night Early Morning” and Celtic-folk flavored closer “Save A Little Room” channel feelings from his years playing night after night on the road. “Quarter To Three” captures the sweet buzz that follows a killer show with echoes of the feisty, boozy spirit of Southern rock icons Lynyrd Skynyrd. The swampy “Dragonfly” laments leaving romance behind while the swinging bounce of “Easy Goin’ Woman” celebrates carefree love with a breezy panache. “So Many Honky Tonks” channels Blakeman’s late night revelry in Music City, and “Swamp Water Whiskey” hits the ground running the next morning to labor towards one’s goals. “Living Proof” struts with a survivor’s pride, “Old Folks Blues” takes a cheeky look at how good times can clash with maturity to a Dixieland jazz lilt, and “Cannon Ball” provides a chilling cautionary tale, and Blakeman brings it all back to the he calls home — and salutes some of his favorite red dirt singer-songwriters — from the late Rusty Wier’s infectious dancehall classic “Don’t It Make You Wanna Dance” to his simmering full-throttle take on Willis Alan Ramsey’s “Satin Sheets.”

Long Distance Man was executively produced by Warren Izard and produced by Ted Russell Kamp, bassist for Shooter Jennings as well as artist in his own right. The Los Angeles sessions featured guitarists Marc Ford (Black Crowes) Doug Pettibone (Lucinda Williams, Jewel) and Kenny Vaughan (Steve Earle, Marty Stuart, Rodney Crowell) as well as harmony vocalist Gia Ciambotti (Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt) among the stellar cast of players. The end results are both “unfamiliar yet familiar, and reminiscent but still up to date,” says Blakeman. “The album is so eclectic it’s really hard to try and define it by one genre. And that’s the way it should be.”

Yet at the center of Long Distance Man is a genuine country music core. The disc hits the musical bullseye of Blakeman’s near lifelong artistic ambitions. “I’ve always known music is what I was meant to do,” he explains. No surprise there, since the first music he heard was the group his country singing father started with two of Shy’s maternal uncles, The Whiskey Fever Band, which toured throughout the great high American plains in the 1980s.

“Nothing else has ever been an option. I attempted other career paths before I had the confidence to just go for it. But it was always in the back of my mind nagging at me.”

And when he did finally decide to go for it full on at age 22, the results underscored the fact that Blakeman had indeed met his destiny. He saved up $600 to cut his debut album, Downtown Women, which included duets with Texas legends Gary P. Nunn and Rusty Wier and his nearly a legend by now friend Miranda Lambert. The title song, which featured Nunn, spent over 40 weeks in the Top 40 of the Texas Music Chart. Then Blakeman hit the road in and around the Lone Star State like a warrior and hasn’t looked back. His next release, The Southern Roots Revival, scored a Top 10 Texas single (“Knockin’ On Heavens Door“) and three Top 20s on the chart (“Going Back To Texas,“ “Still Talkin‘ ‘Bout You” and “A Million Miles Away“), and was nominated for Record of the Year at the Texas Music Awards.

 He later landed on the fourth season of “Nashville Star” in 2006. And during his first extended stay in Music City, Blakeman was befriended by the The Muzik Mafia of Big & Rich, Cowboy Troy, Kid Rock, Gretchen Wilson, John Anderson and Hank Williams Jr. Palling around and working with some of them “really helped me develop my sound and get me to the next level,” he notes. And now with Long Distance Man, he finds his sweet spot and hits his music out of the park. As one can hear on the album, Blakeman’s journey to the artistic place he now finds himself is one with many musical and personal dimensions. When Shy was six his family moved to Northern California, where he keyed into his mother’s musical favorites like Motown, classic rock and R&B, and dug on his own into punk, reggae, ska, hip hop and grunge.

By the time he was 14, the Blakemans landed in Kilgore in East Texas, and he was further exposed to blues, Cajun and zydeco and later funk. At 15 he picked up the guitar and soon after the songs started coming from his muse. Along the way there he started a ska/punk band, a funk-rock group, and then during a stint living in Queens, New York at age 20, an acoustic punk duo that played the Big Apple clubs, including the famed ground zero for punk rock, CBGB’s.

On returning to his Texas home, however, Blakeman finally embraced the music truest to his soul. “I was 21 years old, and saying to myself: How long can I sing about teen angst?” he recalls. “I was getting out of that rebellious stage of wanting to be completely different from my Dad in every way. I was growing up a little, and I realized that country and blues and classic and Southern rock are what I love to do.” Fired by the young country boom in the Lone Star State, Blakeman started a print magazine called Country Music Texas. He got a tip on a hot young singer with the house band at the venerated Reo Palm Isle club in nearby Longview, and made fast friends with Lambert and her family, who furthered his initiation into the Texas music scene and encouraged his own artistic ambitions.

“Texas is a big part of who I am,” Blakeman stresses. “It’s where I’ve lived longer than anywhere in my life, and I’m glad I lived in Texas in my most impressionable years when I was coming of age. What makes Texas music great is that it’s organic, it’s real, it’s just what it is. Texas was the launching pad for me, and what has allowed me to do this.” By 2006, the hundreds of shows Blakeman played every year were catching up with him, along with his days on the Nashville music business treadmill and nights out on the town.

“During that year I played over 300 dates, 150 in-stores, and was going up to Nashville once a month. I got burned out and was ready to quit,” he confesses. “I just wanted to find a bar down on the beach somewhere and play there a couple nights a week.” So he headed for a well-earned break in Florida, where he found just the club he was seeking as well as “a great bunch of guys that I really enjoyed playing with. It lit the fire under my butt again.” Getting back to making music for its own sake also fueled his determination to record the album he heard in his head and felt in his heart. And the collaborator to help him do so turned out to be his friend Ted Russell Kamp, who Blakeman had bonded with when they shared a bill at Bllly Bob’s Texas.

“We became fast friends and started writing songs together. We love the same kind of music and are on the same wavelength. And as people we have the same outlook on life. The night I met Ted something told me I was going to be working with this guy in the future. I didn’t know how and why, but I just had a feeling” he says. Together they made an album that captures the full breadth of what Blakeman brings to the country genre. “I wanted that organic Texas spirit to come through but still have that Nashville polish, scuffed up by the L.A. roots and country-rock sound,” he explains. “It was living in California, Texas and Tennessee that helped define me as a person. So it’s only fitting that all three music scenes define me as an artist.”

Amidst all his music making activities, Blakeman also worked as a classical and country radio DJ in East Texas in his teens, was a print ad model signed to a high-profile agency in Dallas, traveled the nation on the first professional skate team for Heelys skate shoes and taught an after school program in New York City. And if all of the above wasn’t enough in his almost 30 years now on the planet, he stared death in the face and survived when he was shot in the face during in a botched robbery attempt outside a Dallas music club in 2003.

Ultimately the incident fed into his determination to make music, and do it his way. “After that, I said, you know what? I almost died,” he recounts. “I’m going to do what I want to do. You only have one life. I’m following my dream.” “For me this is the album where I come into my own,” concludes Blakeman. And what else can a poor boy do except for sing and rock in a country band? “I really don’t believe music is a choice. It’s a calling. And when you hear it, there’s nothing you can do about it. You’re compelled to pursue it like you’re compelled to breathe.”