Conductor by Goodnight, Texas

Conventional wisdom says the two frontmen of a band shouldn’t live on opposite sides of the United States, but that's never seemed to deter Avi Vinocur and Patrick Dyer Wolf.

Goodnight, Texas is a band whose strength lies in unexpected sweet spots. Drawing their name from Pat and Avi’s onetime geographic midpoint (the real town of Goodnight in the State of Texas, a tiny hamlet east of Amarillo), the four-piece also exists at the center of its songwriters’ contrasting styles — with a Gibson A mandolin from 1913 and a Danelectro from 2015, at the crossroads of folk and blues and rock ‘n’ roll, in a place where dry wit and dark truths meet hope and utmost sincerity.

Conductor is GNTX’s third full-length. It’s ambitious, dynamic, and more electrically inclined than 2012’s A Long Life of Living or 2014’s Uncle John Farquhar, carrying the listener from barn-burner to soul-searcher to banjo ballad and back again, all built on a powerful foundation from bassist Scott Griffin Padden and drummers Alex Nash and Kyle Caprista. It’s a record colored by grief, confusion, joy, the weight of the world: in the four years since the band’s last release, they lost Pat’s dad, Avi’s grandfather, and Scott’s mom. Pat and his wife had a baby boy. Alex became a professional baseball umpire. Britain left the EU and Donald Trump is the president of the United States.

But Conductor is, more accurately, a record about turning points — personal, political, musical, global — and their possibilities. A Long Life of Living drew inspiration from the Civil War and Appalachia; Uncle John Farquhar, from family lore, in the midwest in the late 1800s. Conductor wanders through the American Southwest in the early decades of the 20th century. It’s a moment when the United States has claimed the land from sea to shining sea, poised to become the world power, a great furnace of both progress and destruction. Electricity is coming into its own. The world’s population is about to explode. Against a backdrop of desert sunsets from a century ago, these songs exist on a precipice — as do their creators, as does the listener, as do we all.

Goodnight, Texas is the garage roots Appalachian collaboration of San Francisco’s Avi Vinocur (formerly of The Stone Foxes) and North Carolina’s Patrick Dyer Wolf.
The band conjures a feeling of a different heavy era in the United States - part 1930s, and part 1860s. The trick: heaviness comes from organic acoustic instruments. In this case, a banjo, acoustic guitar and a 1918 mandolin.

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