Gurf Morlix seeks his inner 'Caveman' on his third new record in 2 years

It took awhile for Gurf Morlix to bring his own music to the world. The Buffalo native, who first came to Austin in 1975 and returned in the 1990s for good, was nearly 50 when he released his first album in 2000.

By that point he was already well-known as a producer and guitarist, with credits including Lucinda Williams, Robert Earl Keen, Slaid Cleaves, Butch Hancock and Ian McLagan. But he made up for lost time over the next two decades, issuing a dozen more albums under his own name. (A name, by the way, that was given to him by the late Blaze Foley, another artist he worked with over the years.)

Now 71, Morlix says the pandemic brought about a surprise avalanche of songwriting. His roughly once-every-two-years album-release pace has doubled; the new “Caveman” is his third release since 2020. And he says he already has three more in the can, plus another that’s nearly finished.

“A lot of people dried up during COVID; they just couldn't find anything to write about. I know a bunch of people who had that going on,” he says. The opposite was true for Morlix. When the pandemic hit, “all of a sudden I was writing way more songs than ever before. I'm not sure why, but I wrote like three times as many in a year as I normally would.”

Related:Our review of Gurf Morlix's 2020 album "Kiss of the Diamondback"

Part of it was filling time that might otherwise have been occupied by touring — Morlix hasn’t played a show since March 2020 — and producing records for other artists. But it’s more than that, he thinks.

“I think that my songwriting has gotten better, and I’m learning to trust things that I now know about myself,” he says. “So I'm going with my intuition on it, and I’m recording the ones that I think are good.”

The 10 songs on “Caveman” are the fruits of that labor. They’re uniformly well done, digging deep into the raw, bluesy rock & roll sound that has marked Morlix’s music. But there’s also a lighter element here, something Morlix refers to as “kind of lowbrow, dumbbell rock & roll.”

“I love ‘Wooly Bully’ and ‘Hanky Panky’ and those kinds of songs,” says the man who contributes “Hodgepodge” to the genre on his new album. “My goal was to make a lamebrain rock & roll album. I think it probably ended up somewhere in between what I normally do and that goal.”

This wasn’t necessarily something new for Morlix, who scored a minor hit with the goofy “Bonanza”-themed song “Dan Blocker” from his first record.

“My songs have gotten pretty heavy over the last 20 years,” he says. “It's been 22 years since 'Dan Blocker' came out. and people love that song. That side of me is still there, but it wasn't showing up in songwriting. And I thought, I want to try to write some funny songs.”

For subscribers:48 never-before-seen portraits of stars at ACL Fest

Thus we get the title track, which likens pandemic isolation to cave-dwelling; “Mud Bugs,” a merrily rollicking ode to Cajun cuisine; and “Fork in the Road,” which imagines the tire damage caused by a literal fork in the road.

There’s also “1959,” which is not so much humorous as wondrous. Morlix reels off a list of cultural and technological milestones dating back to that specific year, including songs such as “Mack the Knife,” albums like Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue,” movies including “North by Northwest,” the TV show “Twilight Zone,” and a sunburst Les Paul guitar.

“Everything I mention in that song is the pinnacle,” he says. "Those films, those books, those albums, those guitars, those cars — that was the golden year, as far as I'm concerned. All that stuff happened that year. And there was more; I had to leave a bunch of stuff out.

“It's interesting that a Les Paul guitar from 1959 can sell for $350,000, and a Les Paul from 1960 or ’61 will sell for like $20,000. There's a reason for that: Everything came together right then. It was just remarkable.”

Perhaps the album’s most special song is the only one Morlix didn’t write. The down-and-dirty groove-rocker “Crash All Night” was on the 2000 album “Poison in the Well” by Jim Whitford, an old friend from Buffalo who was Morlix’s first client at the home studio he’s operated near Lakeway for more than two decades.

Morlix’s version of the song includes an unlikely guest on drums: Donald Lindley, who died of cancer in 1999. Morlix and Lindley had played together in Lucinda Williams’ band for many years, and Lindley had recently relocated to Austin.

More:25 years later, Lucinda Williams and Gurf Morlix look back at breakthrough record

“He was the best drummer I've ever played with,” Morlix says. “The reason I put the studio in (the house) was because Donald had moved here from L.A., and I had moved here from L.A., and we're just sitting around not recording every day. I thought, we should be recording every day. We should have a rhythm section, and we should be an album factory.

“So I bought the recording equipment and I got it set up. And then Donald got cancer. He had been diagnosed and not feeling well, and he was taking chemo. I called him up to see if he could come play on some of this Jim Whitford record.

“He was emaciated and not his former self, but he still played amazing. He told me I caught him on the only day he could have performed at all. I think he played on three songs on that album, and it was the last time he played music.”

Morlix still had the tapes from those sessions in a closet. “I lifted Donald's drum track, because I think it's spectacular,” he recalls. “I dumped that into my system, and I re-recorded the song in a different key with me playing everything else. And every time I hear it, it just makes me feel so good.”

Here’s “Crash All Night,” featuring Lindley on drums:

More new music from Austin (and beyond)

Here’s a look at more music by local artists, or with Austin connections, released this month.

Melissa Carper, 'Ramblin’ Soul'

On the heels of her acclaimed 2021 album “Daddy’s Country Gold,” Carper further extends the old-time country-swing vibe that marked her previous Austin trio the Carper Family with this 13-song collection recorded in Nashville with producers Dennis Crouch and Andrija Tokic.

Renowned guitarist Chris Scruggs, who appears on the album, has been known to refer to Carper as “HillBillie Holiday,” and it’s easy to understand why when you hear the distinct jazz influences on tunes rooted in country and folk music. Carper’s heavily twangy vocal tone is different from Billie Holiday’s, but it’s similarly distinctive, and very much a signature of her sound.

Carper wrote 10 of the songs on “Ramblin’ Soul,” due out Nov. 18 via Mae Music/Thirty Tigers. She teamed with Gina Gallina on “I Do What I Wanna” and tapped her friend and recent tourmate Brennen Leigh’s catalog for “Hanging on to You.” A cover of Odetta’s soulful “Hit or Miss” is among the album highlights; in a video for the song, she performs it as a duet with Shinyribs’ Kevin Russell (though he doesn’t appear on the album version).

Playing Nov. 30 at Waterloo Records and Dec. 2 at Stateside at the Paramount.

Here’s the video for the title track:

Angela Strehli, 'Ace of Blues'

Though she’s lived in the Bay Area for decades now, Strehli always will have a home in Austin, where she was a key figure in the rise of Antone’s as the city’s “home of the blues” in the 1970s and ’80s. The trio album she made in 1990 with Marcia Ball and Lou Ann Barton remains a benchmark of the local blues community.

Strehli hasn’t recorded much in the past 20 years, which makes this fresh disc a welcome surprise. Due Nov. 18, “Ace of Blues” marks the New West Records’ relaunch of the Antone’s imprint that released dozens of classic blues albums from 1987 to 2006 (including Strehli’s debut “Soul Shake”).

The material here is mostly familiar, including songs popularized by blues masters such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Otis Clay. There’s also Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell” and “Two Steps From the Blues,” the title track of Bobby Bland’s 1961 debut album. All of it is delivered in Strehli’s signature sweet-yet-tough R&B style, with horns and piano fleshing out the guitars-bass-drums core.

The album concludes with Strehli’s lone songwriting contribution, a tribute to her close friend Stevie Ray Vaughan titled simply “SRV.” You can feel the deep connection in Strehli’s voice when she remembers the late, legendary guitarist: “And I think you must have known how many hearts you changed/ When you closed your eyes so tight and let your fingers burn like flames.”

More:Remembering Stevie Ray Vaughan

Strehli returns to Austin for a pair of record-release shows at Antone’s on Tuesday (with Ball and Barton as featured guests) and Wednesday (with Jimmie Vaughan and Sue Foley).

Here’s the opening track, “Two Steps From the Blues”:

Various artists, 'Live Forever: A Tribute to Billy Joe Shaver'

“I played my first gig with Billy Joe when I was still in high school. He fell through my drums. That was the beginning of a long and lasting friendship.” So writes Freddy Fletcher, Arlyn Studios co-owner and co-producer of this labor-of-love tribute to the late, legendary Texas songwriter who died in 2020 at age 81.

Fletcher worked with Austin guitar star Charlie Sexton to record and assemble these dozen tracks by 11 artists. (Willie Nelson, one of Shaver’s closest friends, fittingly gets two cuts, “Live Forever” and “Georgia on a Fast Train.”) It’s often said that you can’t go wrong with good material, and that’s certainly the case here: Shaver’s writing was so bulletproof that this album probably would’ve been good if a hundred monkeys recorded it.

As it is, though, the lineup is impressive, and well-suited to the songs. In addition to Willie, you get (in order of appearance) Ryan Bingham, Rodney Crowell, Miranda Lambert, Edie Brickell, Nathaniel Rateliff, George Strait, Amanda Shires, Steve Earle, Margo Price and Allison Russell.

Fletcher and Sexton clearly prioritized a cohesive feel to the album, which comes out Nov. 11 on New West Records and was largely recorded in Austin at Arlyn (plus a few tracks in Nashville and a couple at Nelson’s studio in Spicewood). Sometimes tributes can be a hodgepodge, but this one hangs together well.

In addition to the primary artists, a few notable guests appear: Lucinda Williams dueting with Nelson on “Live Forever,” Nikki Lane singing with Bingham on “Ride Me Down Easy,” and Jason Isbell playing guitar with Shires (his wife). Perhaps most poignantly, Willie’s sister Bobbie Nelson, who died earlier this year at age 91, appears on two tracks, in what likely were her final performances on record.

Here’s the Willie Nelson version of “Live Forever,” which opens the album:

Various artists, 'The Supper Session Collection' box set

A long time ago, in a Threadgill’s far, far away … well actually, just up North Lamar Boulevard, a few blocks past Koenig Lane. That’s where the 69 songs on these four CDs were recorded, at the now-shuttered restaurant’s iconic original location. Country yodeler Kenneth Threadgill, who opened Threadgill’s as a gas station in the 1930s, eventually introduced music on Wednesday nights, and a young University of Texas student named Janis Joplin was among those who sang there regularly in the early 1960s.

Fast-forward three decades, to the era when restaurateur Eddie Wilson had taken over the joint after his legendary Armadillo World Headquarters closed. Wilson had re-established Wednesday music at Threadgill’s in the late 1980s with hosts Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Champ Hood, and in 1991 local DJ Roger Allen Polson helped them record one of the shows for a homemade Christmas cassette titled “Supper Session” that sold so well it eventually got a CD release on Watermelon Records. Another night of recording in October 1995 yielded a sequel, “Second Helpings,” issued in 1996.

Related:Austin's iconic Threadgill's closes for good

But there was a lot left on the cutting-room floor. During pandemic isolation, Polson sorted through dozens of additional tracks from those two nights and added a disc full of outtakes from each one. Discs one and three are the originally released recordings from the 1990s; discs two and four add 34 more tracks. With Hood leading a band of guitarist Marvin Dykhuis, bassist David Heath and drummer Ron Erwin, the recordings feature more than a dozen vocalists, including Gilmore, Marcia Ball, Walter Hyatt, Butch Hancock, Tish Hinojosa, Sarah Elizabeth Campbell, Toni Price, Christine Albert and Rich Brotherton.

“The Supper Session Collection” is a limited pressing available only at thesuppersession.com. A release show Nov. 27 at Saxon Pub will include several regulars from the original shows, including Dykhuis, Brotherton, and Hood’s son and nephew, Warren and Marshall Hood.

Here’s “The Ramblin’ Blues,” the opening track on the original “Second Helpings” disc:

Whookilledkenny, 'Strictly Business' EP

Launching his career in 2018 with a string of singles, native Austinite Whookilledkenny issued the EP “No Refunds” last year. He follows it up with this five-song set of hip-hop grounded in smooth, soulful grooves.

Here’s the video for “Worth It”:

Dog Beach Rebels, 'Just Enough' EP

A follow-up to the 2020 debut EP “Take Sides,” this new five-song set from Dog Beach Rebels further documents the band’s mix of reggae, rock and ska sounds. Release show Nov. 11 at Flamingo Cantina.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: New music from Gurf Morlix, Melissa Carper, Angela Strehli and more