CANCELLED – Brian Paddock & Josh Smith {St. Patrick’s Day Show}
Brian Paddock joined by his friend and fellow East Tennessee musician Josh Smith, the lead singer and songwriter for Knoxville’s top Americana band Handsome & The Humbles, adds Missouri to their shared solo acoustic mini-tour from Tennessee to South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas, and back to Georgia. Between Paddock and Smith, the two and their bands have shared the stage and played alongside notable acts such as Tyler Childers, John Moreland, Aaron Lee Tasjan, American Aquarium, the Black Lillies, the Steel Woods, Whiskey Myers, Nikki Lane, Rayland Baxter, and Will Hoge, among others.
BRIAN PADDOCK
“Oh, this life, it’s the hardest thing anyone can do / But even when it breaks me down, it’s still beautiful”
Love Is Weird, the newest release from songwriter Brian Paddock, is amplified Americana at its most heart-wrenchingly honest. Written alone and recorded with his Knoxville-based band, Brian Paddock & the American Gentlemen, these 10 songs fire twin barrels of melody and guitar-driven muscle, with Paddock taking inspiration from Neil Young, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, and other heartland heroes. Along the way, he also shines a light on his own struggles, turning the most difficult season of his life — a period that included a death in the family, a cancer diagnosis, and the breakup of his former band — into an album about maintaining hope in the face of ongoing obstacles.
It wasn’t always so easy to look on the bright side. Back in May 2018, Paddock was busy caring for his sick mother when he received more jarring news: he had cancer. As he underwent surgery and began receiving radiation treatments, his mother’s condition worsened, requiring her to spend her final months in hospice. Meanwhile, another family member died of a heart attack, while his band of the previous four years — hometown heroes Shimmy and the Burns, whose three releases had afforded Paddock the chance to sharpen his songwriting and hone his warm, rusty-throated vocals — called it quits. Paddock was despondent, struggling to maintain a positive outlook.
Then, he turned to music for help. Mixing several newly-written originals with a handful of songs he’d written before 2018, Paddock pieced together his solo debut, Under New Management. When the time came to support the record with an album release show, he opened for local heroes the Black Lillies, assembling a top-notch band for the gig. Playing with this new group of musicians felt natural, and as the months progressed, Paddock began bringing new songs to band practice. Those songs — not to mention those new musicians — form the bedrock of Love Is Weird, an album that finds Paddock merging his singer/songwriter sensibilities with the sympathetic stomp of a full band.
Produced by bandmate John Baker, Love Is Weird sets Paddock’s autobiographic lyrics to a soundtrack of 12-string guitar, Hammond organ, slide solos, big melodies, hot-to-the-touch amplifiers, and even the occasional fiddle. Some tracks are reworked versions of songs he originally performed with Shimmy and the Burns; others are fresh compositions that deal with death, drinking, and the hope that binds us together in harder times. On “Glory Days,” Paddock gives himself a musical pep talk, finding a balance between his career goals, personal insecurities, and the musical drive he’ll never be able to shake. A similar theme underscores the album’s kickoff track, “Still Beautiful,” which finds the frontman refusing to be overtaken by his struggles.
With 2019’s Love Is Weird, Paddock finds the equilibrium that seemed so elusive during the previous year. It’s a record borne of hardship, yet filled with accessible songs that root themselves in singalong hooks. And while these songs all feature contributions from the American Gentlemen band, they’re grounded in the same craft that fills Paddock’s solo work, allowing them to still pack a poignant punch whenever they’re performed during his one-man acoustic tours. Inspired by challenge, Love Is Weird is the most anthemic release of Brian Paddock’s career — proof that even in the darkest of times, a skilled songwriter will make his own light. -Andrew Leahey
https://youtu.be/cRhz7Etahe0
Press
“A guitar driven country stomper.” –Americana Highways
“Wonderfully idiosyncratic songs… like the countrified love child of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Neil Young and Crazy Horse.” –Blank Newspaper
“Delivering driving tunes of clear conviction or musing on contemplative, heartfelt narrative ballads imbued with sensitivity and substance… Simply superb.” –Goldmine Magazine
“…wrapped in the earthy guitar tones on a song like “Street Lamps,” it finds its niche alongside similar-throated Americana dudes like Ben Nichols of Lucero, B.J. Barham of American Aquarium and Chip Robinson of The Backsliders.” The Daily Times
“Brian Paddock emotes with a sandpapery vocal that seems to reflect the toll taken by troubles and travails, that unbowed attitude is never in doubt… songs of almost anthemic proportions.” –No Depression
“Brian Paddock’s raspy voice and matter-of-fact delivery on top of the band’s solid country-rock foundation. It takes about the length of one song to fall in love with the combination…Take time to listen to the lyrics and there’s even more of a pay-off.” –Knoxville News Sentinel
JOSH SMITH
In his day job, the gig that pays the bills until his band — Handsome and the Humbles — gets the recognition (and the payday) it so richly deserves, Josh Smith spends his days listening.
He’s a physical therapist assistant, and that merry twinkle in his eyes and ever-present smile puts his patients at ease. As he encourages them and puts them through the routines that bring their frail and wounded bodies back to health, they open up to the East Tennessee boy, and in turn, he gives them his mind and his imagination as well as his hands.
“It gets you thinking about things,” he says. “Hearing about people who have been through a lot more than I have makes me think, ‘How would I handle that? Am I as good as this person?’ I’m a lucky guy — I’ve got a great family and great friends, and I wonder sometimes what my life would be if I had to go through what they have.”
It would be easy to think that “We’re All the Same,” the new album by Handsome and the Humbles, is a collection of those stories, filtered through Smith’s keen eye of observation and the band’s deft musical chops that fit the prototypical Americana mold. But that’s too simplistic: These are songs written by a soul that’s older than the years of the body that carries it, played by a group of guys who have grown as instrumentalists into a capable ensemble that renders each track with the sort of nuance necessary to embolden the message. This isn’t your prototypical three-chord country-rock, nor is it a rehash of 2016’s “Have Mercy.” In these troubled times, when division and discord pass for normalcy and disagreement has become a yawning chasm of separation, “We’re All the Same” embraces the idea that hope can bridge that gap.
“It’s about feeling uncomfortable, and realizing we all feel that,” Smith says. “It’s about recognizing that we all feel these things we may never talk about.”
Like most of the characters in his songs, Smith began to ask himself those uncomfortable questions as a younger man. Raised in Clinton, Tenn., just outside of Knoxville, his childhood and formative years were centered around his faith. He even started out working for a small town church, but he came to realize that the fundamentalist dogma to which it subscribed didn’t sit well with his core beliefs of tolerance and acceptance.
“It just occurred to me that everything I’d been taught, everything I was repeating without thinking about it, wasn’t really what I believed,” he says. “Deep down, I knew that these certain things weren’t right. I knew this wasn’t the way to treat people. I started to wake up, I guess you could say.”
And so he turned to an outlet that allowed him to further explore that awakening: music. Influenced by artists like Springsteen, Dylan and Ryan Adams, he positioned himself as a seeker of greater truths and a teller of stories descended from the rich tradition of oral narrators who bring to life the hardscrabble men and women who carve lives out of those rugged East Tennessee hills. Upon hearing his songs, two old friends — Tyler Huff and Jason Chambers — abandoned their plans to start a cover band, opting instead to bring Smith’s songs to life.
“To be able to make things out of nothing with my friends — people I’ve known for so long — is pretty special to me,” Smith says. “I don’t know how I lucked into knowing such talented people. I feel like I write a good song, and then they make it so much more than I ever thought about it being.”
Handsome and the Humbles is rounded out by Josh Hutson and Chris Bratta, two veterans of the East Tennessee music scene. Both are recent additions to the band, and Hutson was one of a multitude of Humbles, past and present, who helped sculpt the songs on “We’re All the Same” into poignant observations of humanity. It’s a particular point of pride for Smith that the album features contributions from his former bandmates— multi-instrumentalist Zack Miles, a singer-songwriter who’s pursuing his own career, and drummer Lauryl Brisson, who are joined by frequent band contributor Jay Birkbeck and a couple of Knoxville scene heavy hitters: Mic Harrison, formerly of The V-Roys, Superdrag and frontman of Mic Harrison and The High Score, as well as Andrew Leahey, who leads the Homestead as one of Tennessee’s brightest young roots-rock bands. Smith’s wife, Erin, even contributes some harmonies.
Together, they’ve made a record that’s deftly composed, sweetly nuanced and epically sprawling. It’s the equivalent of a time-traveling drone, hovering a hundred feet over the East Tennessee ground, recording places that feel familiar even to those who have never lived here, because the human condition knows no geographical boundaries. “We’re All the Same” is more than a title; it’s a mission statement, and in these songs, listeners from the Bay Area to the Florida Keys will hear themselves — their fragile hearts, their optimistic dreams, their wistful sorrows — in every line.
The tone is set with “Back Home,” the lead-off track that begins as a simple acoustic lamentation, written from the perspective of an old man remembering the place he left behind: “When I breathe my last, would you send me back home, to that Tennessee clay, where they’ll lay down my bones?” As the rest of the band slowly joins in, it transitions into one of those wise-beyond-his-years observations that make Smith such a gifted songwriter: that the miles traveled and the things seen seldom bring the same comfort as the places to which we all hope to return.
“It’s about an old man who thought he needed to leave to find something, and so he just left everything,” Smith says. “A lot of these songs are me writing about other people, but there’s something personal about it for me when I do.”
References to home abound on the new record, from chiming R.E.M.-style guitars on “Down to the Wire” to the melodic dance between six-string and keys on “Tried So Hard,” in which Smith returns to the faith of his youth, an anchor that became an albatross, but like most things, one that provides both solace and regret when viewed through the lens of time. Those ghosts show up again on “Rebel,” the band shuffling through a Southern blues groove while Smith moans about the real terror of “kids packing pistols … loaded up on pills,” and by the time the record ambles toward its twilight, the players have locked in on a sound that calls to mind early Son Volt, and the characters in those songs claw desperately for a little light to beat back the darkness. The harmonies of “What Could Have Been” give way to the glorious ache of “Now and Then.’ “Think about me,” Smith pleads as the album crosses the finish line, every note perfect, every guitar channeling the things these guys feel so keenly: Sorrow abides, hope never dies and love is eternal.
Those themes are universal ones, and “We’re All the Same” serves as an ideal declaration of union between the hearts of men and women. It’s a gem of an album, even by the rigorous standards of the East Tennessee music scene, and in these turbulent times, it feels like a necessary one.
“I don’t want to pretend that we’re making some grand statement, because that was never the point,” Smith says. “We don’t write about politics or social issues or things like that, even though we might have those opinions. But the things we do write about, I’d like to think, show that we can find some common ground despite those differences. We all know love. We all know hope. And if we can spend more time listening to each other instead of shouting at one another, I think we’ll see that those things are more important.”
-Steve Wildsmith
“Equal parts drive and determination, weariness and resolve, Handsome and the Humbles never falter when it comes to expressing life’s setbacks and disappointment, even though they don’t wither under the duress either. ”
— Lee Zimmerman, No Depression