The Damn Quails: Clouding Up Your City
The Damn Quails highly anticipated album Clouding Up Your City firmly reclaims the group’s status at the forefront of Red Dirt and Americana music. Following Down the Hatch (2011) and Out of the Birdcage (2015), fans hadn’t expected another release from the group after an abrupt cessation of touring in June 2016. Band members needed time to tend to their families and personal well-being. Life goes on…but so does the music.
The Damn Quails started as a weekly residency between duo Bryon White and Gabe Marshall at The Deli, one of Oklahoma’s most fertile proving grounds for great musicians. Soon, a semi-stable caste of backing musicians could be expected to show up each week as the crowds filled the small brick-laden venue. Oklahoma is not short on talent – as word spread about this song-swapping duo, more musicians wanted to join the ranks of “the covey.” Perhaps filling in for a friend who was out of town on another tour, maybe sitting in for three songs while another player filled up his famous Deli red cup…the ranks of the covey soared. Everybody knew the songs. Or if they didn’t, they had proven themselves more than adequately skilled to look, listen, and feel their way through a performance which would lead to standing ovations.
Producer John Calvin Abney, a celebrated songwriter, composer, and performer in his own right, is one such member of the covey. "Working with John Calvin Abney on this record was an incredibly enriching musical experience," Bryon White notes. "I have known John for many years and the Damn Quails were fortunate to count him among our own for several tours. I’ve always had a lot of respect for his songwriting and his guitar playing, but he shined the brightest on his keyboard and piano tracks on this record. The process for recording a song was pretty simple, but extremely effective: Gather the band around the piano in the tracking room, spend five or ten minutes running through the basics and working out any kinks, and then [engineer Michael] Trepagnier would hit record and we’d start playing."
“I literally gathered two of the most genius people I knew, Abney and Trepagnier, stuck them in a room together, and gave them each total creative freedom. Many of these songs were recorded in one take.” White has known Trepagnier for decades, before Michael attended The Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences or worked at The Looking Glass Studios in New York City.
Despite a lengthy hiatus, the chemistry of The Damn Quails covey was just as alive as ever. Clouding Up Your City was recorded at Trepagnier’s Cardinal Song Studio in Oklahoma City in just four days. This sense of urgency to release this clutch of songs is nascent from both resilient determination and retrospective edification. Nowhere is this better distilled than in “Peace in the Valley (King of the Hill).” Kierston White (Bryon’s sister, who currently holds a Thursday night residency at the Deli) lends goosebump-inducing harmonies to build and crescendo with Abney’s tasteful piano. Bryon’s unique tenor is further highlighted in ballads “Harm’s Way” and “Good Times?!”
It wouldn’t be a Damn Quails record without some air of debauchery and punchy Okie-Folk to make us consider where these gents might have hung their hats last night or what their take on politics might be. The title track “Clouding Up Your City” should incite simultaneous smirks and head bobs. The only track not written by Bryon on the whole album, “Punxsutawney Rambler” might remind a listener of the syllabic jigsaw perfection of The Beatles “Come Together” but with more hi-hat and cocaine. A long-time member of the covey, penman Buffalo Rogers reminds us of the Golden Rule with his second Damn Quails album cut.
Other notable contributions to the record include Ben McKenzie, Jamie Lin Wilson, Chris Jones (who recently released a new single), and Kevin “Haystack” Foster on harmony vocals, Andy Adams on harmonica, Johnny Carlton on bass, and Walt McMurry on drums. “This is a collection of some of the most personal songs I’ve ever written during some of the happiest and most depressing times of my life throughout the past decade,” notes Bryon White.
Be it four-piece acoustic, six-man jam, or full on twelve-piece philharmonic, the covey flies again. Catch a show. Clouding Up Your City is a long awaited #reddirtsuccess
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