Welcome Legendary Texas songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard

 

Anyone who's followed Ray Wylie Hubbard over the long and winding path he has traveled already knows he possesses the kind of exceptional gift for observation that any songwriter yearns for. His sense of wonder is tempered by an accumulated wisdom and knowledge that comes with experience that has elevated him into the Wylie Lama of Texas Music, freely imparting songwriting verities to all kinds of aspiring musicians, which allows him to lay all his cards on the table and let the listener decide what it all

means.

 

It wasn't that long ago that Ray Wylie Hubbard allowed to an acquaintance that he wouldn't mind being a hybrid of Guy Clark and John Lee Hooker. Now, I'm no seer or mystic, but my instincts suggest that wish came true.

 

Ray Wylie Hubbard writes the kind of songs that make you want to ride along no matter where he's going, because you know it's gonna get strange somewhere along the way. The references to Muddy Waters being as deep as William Blake ("I really do believe it,'' Ray says) and lipstick pickups, resonator slides, the dreams of drunken poets, deceased call girls, opium, wasp's nests, clouds growing a tail, his ability to segue seamlessly from primal exclamations of carnal lust into songs about salvation without pausing for irony;and a craftsmanship that manages to rhyme mescaline and gasoline and Volkswagen with dragon while painting vivid portraits of characters both real and unreal, all evoke a sense of place that is larger than life but in no way made up.

 

In case you're wondering where he's been since his last album Snake Farm, Ray's been writing, only he moved out of the song category to test his chops as a screenwriter, conceiving an outlaw western straight out of the Peckinpah school of blood and vengeance ("set in 1912 so we can have a Buick and a motorcycle and automatic weapons well as horses"). That his first screenplay actually got funded, filmed and slated for release is a testament to the caliber of his writing, the fact that Kris Kristofferson, Dwight Yoakam, and Lizzy Caplan appear among the ensemble of accomplished actors speaks volumes of the respect he has earned among his peers.

 

Besides the movies, a weekly Tuesday radio show and constant touring as well as producing other artists, his focus remains fixed on the song constructing and performing stories set to music that resonate like noone else's. Not for nothing is he the dark literary, cat daddy of Americana songsters who was outlaw long

before it was cool.

 

But don't take my word for it. Ray Wylie is far better versed explaining how the sacred and the profane, the yin and the yang, the eternal and the now, the hippies and rednecks, the saved and the damned are all part of the same conversation.