As someone who has been catching Mike & The Moonpies for nearly 15 years; including their legendary @whitehorseatx residency that wrapped up about a dozen years ago – Living Proof feels like an absolute breath of fresh air.
We already knew Silverada could blow your speakers and light your hair on fire. That part was never in question. But when longtime steel player Zachary Moulton bowed out, it opened the door for a new chapter. In steps keyboard player Parker Twomey.
This wasn’t a change that could go unnoticed, so a change in direction was inevitable.
Living Proof still sits comfortably on the dusty shelf in your favorite honky tonk, but reach for it and you’ll find something a little different. The Texas country DNA is still there, but now it’s tangled up with the sounds that swirled through the 70’s & ’80s – reminiscent of Bob Seger, Jackson Browne & Dire Straits. The pedal steel may have left the room, but the songs gained a new kind of space.
Recorded live-sounding and impassioned at Sonic Ranch in West Texas over five days, with frontman Mike Harmeier stepping up to co-produce, Living Proof captures a band that sounds less interested in recreating the past than seeing how far they can push what comes next.
“You can sound like whatever the fuck you want to sound like,” Harmeier says – and Living Proof sounds like a band finally taking itself at its word.
There’s something liberating about that.
Harmeier has spent years writing songs about the people, places, heartbreak and highways that make Texas country what it is. On Living Proof, those stories remain, but the sonic walls around them have been knocked down a little.
The result is still Silverada – just Silverada with the windows down, the amps turned up and a whole lot more road between here and wherever they’re going next.
