2021 should be flooded with music. A deluge, surge, torrent, downpour or whatever word you want to use for the inundation that will hopefully come soon after a coronavirus vaccine has made its way through the world.
For all the musicians who have dropped music that was recorded in their forced downtime – and there’s been a lot – there’s likely just as many with releases in the can, records musicians are sitting on, waiting to unleash to the world when the time is right.
Montezuma County’s Dale “X” Allen of Genuine Cowhide has been sitting on his latest record since February; the forthcoming release is another dose of “Montezuma County Nitro-Twang,” a genre that could be Allen’s own. It’s a world where garage rock and sweaty punk kicks up dust with classic country and honky-tonk, all sewn together in the spaghetti Western West. Allen, who had been a denizen of Austin, Texas, for decades, split for Colorado three years back. He’s banged out all sorts of sounds, but nitro-twang is his thing, and with his 2019 release, “Red Dirt Colorado Girl,” and his forthcoming record, “All Roads Lead To Colorado,” he’s laying out a Centennial State theme in a hard, country rock package.
“I’m once again working that Colorado angle; I couldn’t do it in Texas because everybody wrote songs about Texas, but Colorado, I’m starting to milk the Colorado title and the Colorado subject. I hear all these bands getting airplay and all the songs ‘gotta get back to Colorado, gotta get back to that girl in Colorado,’” said Allen in his best animated and overblown radio announcer voice. “So I said, ‘Heck, I can write songs like that.’”
Allen is a DIY, make-it-all-happen musician. Moving to Colorado has taken him off the stage and into the writing room, allowing him much more time to write and record. He outfitted his Montezuma County home with a recording studio, a place where he dictates the tempo of the entire music-making process. There is no engineer or producer on the clock, no dilly-dallying or wasted time. It’s the sort of organic process that aids his music; it’s a rock ’n’ roll product void of filler or fluff.
“I tend to write in the studio. I’ll come up with the framework and lay it down and then I kind of get creative and it could go in various directions, and you don’t really get to do that in a studio under a clock,” he said. “I get to cut 10 guitar tracks on 10 different amps and go, ‘I don’t like any of those, give me the 11th one,’ that kind of stuff. After laying a guitar track down, I then go outside and work in the garden or something, come back in and eat, and go back in the studio again. I get to do all that – I’ve been ruined by having my own studio to record in.”
When “All Roads Lead To Colorado” finally drops sometime in 2021, expect to see Allen on a stage, pushing out a glorious racket of rock ’n’ roll suitable for the two-stepping crowd and the now middle-aged reared on Black Flag and The Beat Farmers.
“I’m dying to play. I’ve been at this over 40 years, this is the longest I’ve ever gone without having at least a gig on the books,” he said. “It’s frustrating and depressing. I recorded an album in the meantime, which was the best part, but I was weened in the bars, beer joints and honky-tonks and clubs and grange halls playing to packed houses filled with people sometimes slamming into each other. And having a great time, sweating and spitting and that’s over for now. Everybody’s distanced and masked, and it doesn’t look like that much fun, but I’m dying to get back.”
Bryant Liggett is a freelance writer and KDUR station manager. Reach him at liggett_b@fortlewis.edu.
