Kevin Gordon and Band

Doors 3:00pm • Music 4:00pm

The call came between the first two recording sessions. “I knew something was up when the first scan results came back; I drove straight to New Orleans and stayed pretty much out of my mind for three days. I was terrified, and thought I would lose it completely if I sat in my house staring at the wall any longer,” recalls Kevin Gordon. “They were using words like malignant, which scared the hell out of me. Those second tracking sessions were more emotional for me, personally,” he continues.

The artist – who has dueted with Lucinda Williams, been profiled in the New York Times, performed on NPR World Cafe, and seen his songs covered by Keith Richards, Irma Thomas, Levon Helm, and Todd Snider (in Hard Working Americans)  – is talking about his throat cancer diagnosis during the making of unapologetic rock & roll record ‘The In Between,’ his seventh album and his first full-length since 2018’s acclaimed ‘Tilt & Shine.’

With guitars, drums, and bass completed for most tracks but vocals for only one or two, the sessions had to go on indefinite pause while Gordon underwent radiation and chemotherapy. “The doctor was allowing for all sorts of scary results, including my voice changing,” says Gordon, continuing, “I thought, am I going to be wearing a voice box? But there was an odd calm about it: this was the hand I'd been dealt.”

“During treatment, I was able to maintain a sense of hope, which is uncharacteristically optimistic for me. I got off easy. When you do chemo, you’re sitting in one of those rooms with a bunch of other people and most of them were much worse off,” he says.

Lead single and album opener “Simple Things,” written during the pandemic about, as he puts it, “contact, that exchange of energy between me and an audience,” took on new meaning while Kevin was receiving treatment. 

It took the better part of a year for doctors to certify Kevin as cancer-free. When his singing voice started to return to him, making music felt urgent and vital in a new way. “Unfortunately, nothing changed with my voice!,” he jokes.

“But it was all that much sweeter on the other end. The first gig back, a short solo set broadcast live on radio, it was pretty scary, the starkness of it. I wasn’t sure how it was going to go,” he says.

His singing on ‘The In Between’ crackles and sparks with life.

Much of the support he received came from the East Nashville musical community, in which he is held in high regard. Aaron Lee Tasjan wrote on Instagram, “All I know is KG writes the songs that inspire a lot of us. One of our finest, no doubt.”

Jim Lauderdale said simply, “He’s amazing.”

Lucinda Williams, with whom he dueted on his recording of “Down To the Well,” opined, “He’s writing songs that are like short stories, and I really like the kind of swampy, bluesy sound.”

The press has also widely praised his prior half dozen albums. Rolling Stone called him a “juke joint professor” while its sister webpage Rolling Stone Country termed his music “gripping.” Associated Press has called his music “brilliance… mesmerizing.” The Nashville Scene and Premier Guitar both opined that his last album ‘Tilt & Shine’ may have been the best album out of Nashville, TN in 2018.

The New York Times, in a full profile under the headline “A Musician Or a Poet? Yes to Both,” characterized his music as “an often harrowing tour of the back-roads South.” Of the themes on ‘The In Between,’ Kevin says, “The older I get, the more I’m thinking about what my friend Kenny Stinson called ‘all that old southern shit.’”

Take the character study “Marion,” loosely based on a real-life coworker at Kevin’s first job, as a dishwasher in a restaurant owned by a gay man in Monroe, Louisiana. “Man, it was just a freaky scene,” Kevin recalls. He continues, “It’s probably the most diverse group of characters I’ve ever encountered. Some of the employees were gay men, and some of the crowd as well. So fucking tragic, he shot himself.”

Kevin had started writing “Keeping My Brother Down” years before after reading about Emmett Till’s murder. He finished it, drawing a through line to Eric Garner and the events of Ferguson, MO. It’s written from the point of view of a sympathetic white southern male. “It felt important to give voice to justified outrage. There’s a lot of anger. There’s a lot of guilt, in a way,” he says.

Sometimes, it’s the subtexts that lean into the southern aspects. The autobiographical title track on the album reckons with aging, contemplating the tension between wanderlust and the security of home. The song references money buried in the yard, a tale Kevin heard growing up about his great-grandfather’s practice. “I asked my mother and she doesn’t remember anything like that. I know that that’s true, that if he didn’t bury it in the ground, he kept cash in the house in hidden places.” The in-between consciousness. Hidden places. Southern shit.

Though largely true-to-life, “The In Between” also calls on one unforgettable, hypothetical image: “Feeling like Gary Busey playing old Howard Hughes.” Gordon says, “I was immediately thinking, can I do that? Gary Busey has never played Howard Hughes!”

Other songs also draw on his lived experiences, past and present. The scuzzy, garage boogie of “Catch a Ride” shouts Kevin’s determination to follow this rock & roll road as far as it goes. He says, “I wrote that right before the 2nd set of tracking sessions--which took place about a week before I finally got the final diagnosis of throat cancer, and less than a month before beginning radiation treatment. So—I think there's a certain amount of faith and urgency coming out there in the lyric—metaphorically addressing an unnamed higher power, just wanting everything to be okay.”

In the swaying “Tammy Cecile,” accompanied by a playful fiddle, about the tense dalliance, began after Kevin found a photograph of himself and the titular character . “My friends tried to steer me away. I didn’t take that as a sign,” he deadpans, adding, “I just look back and see how much she was craving a deep attachment that was missing from her family life, and would do all sorts of things to try to force that, in her relationships. ’Cutting’ wasn't a common term then. But she could also be very strong and confident.”

The Black Flag reference in the song checks out as well, Kevin attests, saying, “I was listening to a lot of Black Flag. I’d been a skateboarder in junior high and high school. All those bands out of the LA punk scene were a big part of the skating culture at that time. X, they were probably my favorite out of all of that stuff. I saw them twice in the early- to mid-‘80s.”

“You Can’t Hurt Me No More,” written with Kim Richey, comes on like a fever trance. It’s a title the song’s narrator of the song hopes is true. “You see your ex and all that façade crumbles,” Kevin says of the song.

Part of the richness of his writing comes from Gordon’s degree in poetry earned from University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

He and producer/guitarist Joe V. McMahan laid down music for several tracks, with lyrics to be written later, as it turns out, quite a bit later. “I did it to push myself. I felt confident enough about the songs’ basic forms to chart out an arrangement and record it. It’s a more abstract way of working,” he says, exclaiming, “You hope that you left the right number of bars of whatever chord in the right place for the lyrics. When we cut it with the band, it just felt really good.”

Joe V. McMahan (Justin Townes Earle) also spent formative years in northern Louisiana. Kevin explains, “In some ways, the fact that Louisiana still has more of a dance culture than other places, that music is tied to movement in that way, that means something.” For instance, “Hey Destiny” could be a long-lost British invasion cut.

Recording vocals after he was declared cancer-free brought a new clarity “Coming out of that, it definitely did create a certain sense of not only urgency but a sense of permission, that I felt more comfortable saying a few things more plainly than I had before,” he says.

Kevin sings on “Coming Up” about his parents splitting up in 1980, followed by his initial, 1984 encounter with an electric guitar. He worked for two weeks farming for his stepfather on a cotton and soybean farm before quitting and joining a punk band. “We played our first gig for half a case of beer. Our second gig, we demanded more compensation, so we got a full case of beer,” he says, laughing. He recounts, “We were packing this place. We had people from a holy roller church protesting out front with signs.  It was insane.”

For the punk rock-adjacent “Love Right,” the two dialed the tempo up high, as Kevin puts it, “greasy but still pretty straight.” The rock & roll music disguises some deep digging, Kevin singing about his mother kicking his father out, first to remarry into a family where Kevin didn’t fit, and then to go to California to try and strike it big with his software company. He sees echoes in his own life, like being that he was on the road for chunks of his own kids’ childhoods, and sees some of the darker temptations in his father deep within himself.

Part of his newfound perspective comes from understanding the physically abusive household in which his father grew up. “My dad’s biological father was apparently quite a piece of work. I never knew the man but he came to see me once when I was a baby. This is something that my father only talked to me about once in my lifetime. My grandfather ended up dying in a bar fight outside of Dallas, over Easter weekend, in 1965 or ’66, hit in the head with a pipe.”

The task of the song, Kevin says, is “actually talking about forgiving my dad, showing empathy for him, as a human being.” He adds, “I was trying to get at this whole thing about personal intimacy, the awkwardness of it. I’m a lot more empathetic the older I get. You realize, oh, it’s really not easy being an adult.”
All of this—the feeling of life his found in his early punk rock band, his family trauma, the heartbreak, raising his kids in Nashville, TN, his cancer, doing the best he could and observing how others try for the same, and yes, “all that old Southern shit,” is captured in ‘The In Between,’ recalling Faulkner’s aphorism “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Or, more succinctly, as he told a concert audience last summer, with his electric guitar strapped on instead of his radiation headgear, “It feels good to be doing this instead of that other thing that I was doing.”

https://kg.kevingordon.net/

Tickets: $25 and on sale online at https://abilene.showare.com and today at the door