Amarillo native Kevin Fowler rocks the country wordplay

Country music isn’t my main music, but it’s definitely in the mix. Amarillo native Kevin Fowler is one of the reasons. He writes songs with an awesome twist that all the best country songs have. Great wordplay, stories and humor. “Don’t Touch My Willie,” a song about not letting a girl play his Willie Nelson CD on the first date, is just classic. I have heard he also puts on a great, high energy show. I’m about to find out for myself on Saturday. I interviewed him for an article in the Dec. 8 Elgin Courier, and he comped me a couple of tickets. I can’t wait. Details on the blog afterward of course.

Courier article is posted below:

Country singer Kevin Fowler to rock Coupland Dance Hall, Dec. 11

Country singer Kevin Fowler has played his share of big venues, but it was the small dance hall that kickstarted his career. Fowler will perform at the Old Coupland Dancehall on Saturday, Dec. 11 as part of his Deck the Dance Halls holiday tour. Doors open at 8 p.m.

“That’s one of the bars we started out at,” he said in a Friday interview. “Coupland was one of the first places to give me a chance. For the holidays, we wanted to go to all the dance halls where we started.

“When I was a kid growing up in Amarillo, my dad  listened to Buck Owens and we watched Hee Haw on Saturday nights on TV,” Fowler said. “I grew up in a country household.”

Fowler, who played with the Austin-based heavy metal band Dangerous Toys for a while in the ’90s, is known for his rockin’ attitude as well as his knack for a clever turn of a phrase, with such hits as “Don’t Touch My Willie,” “Ain’t Drinkin’ Anymore,” and “Cheaper to Keep Her.”

As he grew up, Kevin started playing in bands and began looking for his own music. He was drawn to rock bands like AC/DC and Van Halen.

He still loves rock ‘n’ roll and says he went to see Judas Priest perform twice in recent years. “When I go to a concert, I want to see a show,” he said. “Rock bands know how to put on a live show.”

For that reason, Fowler wanted his country band “to have a really rockin’ edge to it. Into that soup, throw a little country.”

At the same time, he can’t resist the urge to write songs with stories and wordplay — the kind of songs country is known for. “Country music is really about the lyrics,” he said. “Rock is more about the melody. A lot of times you can’t really understand the words.”

As he started out his career, Fowler became a guitar player for hire and performed both country and rock. “I became dedicated to becoming a songwriter,” he said. “It was a slow evolution to try and find my own thing.” Fowler said the high energy country that he became known for “just turned out to be the songs I wrote.” Fowler likes the diversity he finds in today’s country music scene.

“Nowadays, country is kind of a catch-all for different kinds of music. It’s changed. You don’t have to be Merle Haggard. Anything goes in country music nowadays. That’s kind of cool.”Fowler said he loves the Texas music scene. “It’s all about the fans in Texas. Going to a show, it’s a very one-on-one relationship with the fans and musicians. The fans get to hang around and get autographs,” he said. “You don’t really do that with a lot of the national country artists.”

Texas also lets him put out the kind of music he wants to make. “You can do your own thing down here,” he said. “Anything goes as long as it’s good.”

Fowler released a collection called Best of… So Far on Dec. 7. It features 18 tracks, including four previously unreleased songs. He also has a studio album in the can, which will be released sometime next spring.

Edit: I see a lot of people searching their way into this article and they might want to know how the show was. Here’s my follow-up from after the show.

‘World Music’ – thanks for giving me a new set of ears

A few days ago I heard a BBC News report on the local NPR affiliate that a British DJ named Charlie Gillett had just died. I’m not British and I never heard his radio show, but I quickly realized that I owed Gillett a huge debt of gratitude. So do a lot of others around the world, whether they know it or not. Gillett and three other music enthusiasts were the ones who came up with the term, “world music.” It seems trivial until you think about the implications. Lots of wonderful music would remain virtually unknown without the term.

Every so often I get into arguments with people over “world music” – one of the many types of music I love. Isn’t it Anglo-centric? Isn’t it insulting? Aren’t America and England part of the world too? Shouldn’t music be designated according to style, no matter what country it comes from? All very good questions, but in the end pretty much irrelevant. It might be overgeneralized and imprecise, but the concept of world music was created for a reason, and I’m grateful to the people who came up with it.

What does it mean exactly?  To me it means basically “stuff that’s based on different folk traditions than those I’m most familiar with.” I think it’s a way for people who don’t want to be quite so anglocentric to open their minds and explore. It isn’t really a genre, per se. It’s a marketing term. A way to reach – and help create – people with a “generalized sense of musical xenophilia.”

When I walk into Waterloo Records in Austin, they have a specific section for World Music (I think they call it International), where the music is in turn divided up based on countries and regions. I might go through that section and see a country I hadn’t even thought about and pick up a CD out of curiosity. I like being able to do that. If all the music got split up into its various genres, I might not be able to find it. It would get lost among the more familiar American and British groups.

I first got into World Music through the Luaka Bop label, founded by David Byrne – which has a lot of authentic folk-based music from primarily Latin countries; Peter Gabriel’s Real World label, which has African and Asian artists, which put out some great albums by Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; the Hannibal Label, which has released a lot of African pop, Celtic music, and Eastern European folk-based stuff; and Bill Laswell’s Axiom label, which combines “world music” with genres like hip hop, dub, rock, jazz and funk. Rough Guide and Putumayo have also put out some great World Music compilations, all mixed up and broken down by region. I’ve never heard one of those I didn’t like. I’ve also discovered a lot of good stuff through a World Music show on 90.5 KUT, the local NPR radio affiliate.

World music did something else for me: It opened my ears to the traditions I grew up with. Even though I grew up around it, I never gave country, folk, or anything remotely like that a chance, until after several years of listening to “world music.” It also taught me to appreciate the conjunto music I had heard all my life before that–as I tuned past on the radio–but never liked.

This Guardian article from 2004 explains how the concept of world music came about and why: We created world music.