Though Dale Watson’s recording career spans two decades, the maverick country traditionalist has never before released an album like this. “There’s nothing here that’s retro,” insists Dale of Carryin’ On. “I was really hoping to make a record with today’s technology, but with the musicians who played on the music I grew up on. I’m pretty happy with the way we’ve merged today with yesterday on this album. It will remind people of the old records, but it sounds like something new.”
The new album on a new label marks a fresh start for Watson, a major leap from the hardscrabble honky-tonk that has won him an international following, earned him induction into the Austin Music Hall of Fame and established him as a leading crusader against the “Nashville Rash” plaguing the country music industry. Without compromising his musical values, he sounds here like a singer with nothing to prove and no one to fight. The angry young man has matured. The result, says Dale, is “the pinnacle of what I’ve done, in terms of the songs, the production, the musicianship.”
The project features a dream band of Nashville A-Team studio alumni, virtuosos whose playing graces so many of the “countrypolitan” classics of the 1960s and ‘70s that remain touchstones for Watson. Steel guitarist Lloyd Green, whose resume extends from Johnny Cash and George Jones through the Byrds and Paul McCartney, helped Watson assemble the band, with guitarist Pete Wade and pianist Hargus “Pig” Robbins providing the nucleus. Add fiddler Glenn Duncan, acoustic bassist Dennis Crouch and the seasoning of background vocals on many of the tracks, and you’ve got more a polished sound than the rougher, roadhouse style that has dominated Watson’s career.
Yet the results are pure Dale Watson. He produced the sessions. He wrote all the material. He even financed the project, so that there would be no concessions to outside forces. And it was his decision to loosen his own grip, to see what some studio masters would bring to his music, to make a recording in Nashville that would have a different feel than his live shows and previous releases with his great Texas band, the Lonestars.
