Trick Pony, America's orneriest and feistiest barroom-rockin', butt-kickin', hard-core honky-tonk band, looks you in the eye and lays its new album, RIDE , on the table. And in this game, everybody's a winner.
But that's just the first hand. RIDE mixes their dancin'-and-drinkin' sound with songs that reflect the challenges that Ira Dean, Keith Burns, and Heidi Newfield have confronted over the past couple of years.
Plenty of artists have been derailed by such events -- positive and negative, personal and professional. But maybe they haven't been toughened enough on brutal club tours, or forced to handle heights and depths of emotion within one brief stretch of months, or drawn together in ways that only the tightest bands can understand.
And nobody puts on a show like these three -- certainly no one woman put on a show like Heidi before she crashed onto the scene, with her headfirst stage dives to body-surf audience waves to the bar for one fast shot and then back again in time to hit the next verse.
Trick Pony has done all that. They're still doing it. And judging by the passion and pain and celebration and flat-out, honest-to-God country soul of RIDE , they'll be doing it long, long past last call. …
Their journey began in 1996 with a statement of faith in their mission, as Keith and Ira left two steady backup gigs -- with Joe Diffie and Tanya Tucker, respectively -- to start from scratch with their own group. When Heidi joined them it was like jamming into high gear and hitting the highway as they tore through the Southern circuit and built their reputation for playing -- in every sense of the word -- harder than any other outfit in the territory.
Trick Pony made Nashville's famous Wildhorse Saloon their home base and scored a major label deal. Sparked by three singles, including the Top Five hit "On a Night Like This," their first album, Trick Pony , exploded in 2001: The album went gold, the Academy of Country Music hailed them as the "Top New Vocal Group," and they won an American Music Award as "Favorite New Country Artist." A year later, they followed with On a Mission , another package of great songs and raucous performances -- but things were getting complicated.
Unlike On a Mission , their second album, which was recorded partly in hotel rooms on solo tours and while opening for Brooks & Dunn, their new release, RIDE , is the product of undivided attention, with no distractions. It began with their own songwriting and with an exhaustive search for other material. They listened to hundreds of blind demos -- no songwriter name, no publisher identification, nothing to go on but the music. It would have been faster to rely on some favored middleman, but quality was all that mattered.
Chuck Howard, who produced their first two discs as well as projects for Eddy Arnold, LeAnn Rimes, Hank Williams Jr., and other headliners, once again proved essential from the earliest stages. With a sharp ear for matching material and artist, he brought in songs like "Ain't Wastin' Good Whiskey," knowing that it was right despite an odd lyrical twist or two. ("It's almost an anti-drinking song, which is kind of funny coming from us," laughs Ira. "But that chorus is huge, and crowds go ape when we play it live.") Other songs came out of the blue: While waiting to play at Farm Aid, the group hung out a while with Los Lonely Boys, who played through one of their recent compositions, "Senorita." That's all it took for Trick Pony to realize that even with its Tex-Mex flavor, this would be a perfect fit for RIDE .
But Heidi, Ira, and Keith remained their own best sources. Working in pairs or all three together, or paired off with other writers, they came up with a set that builds on that throwback raw vibe that they'd reintroduced to country music and yet visits places they'd never been. For instance, “Nothing To Lose” pulls from Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan as much as from Hank Junior. They even surprised themselves: Ira co-wrote "Cry Cry Cry" with Jeffrey Steele as a tear-it-up rockabilly showcase for Heidi -- but everyone was so taken with his own demo that they sent him back to rewrite the song from the male view and sing it himself. (It was originally titled "You Left a Good Woman in a Bad Way.")
Keith's titles include "When I Fall," a collaboration with Billy Dean, and "Sad City," which he wrote with Mark Oliverius during a visit to Los Angeles. "We were sitting by the pool and this line came up: 'Sad city, when the sun goes down,'" Keith remembers. "I looked at Mark and said, 'You know what? It feels these days like everybody's sad.' That was enough to put myself into the story -- a guy working a regular, day-to-day job on an assembly line -- and come up with the song."