The Gougers

The Gougers are Shane Walker on vocals, guitar and harmonica; Jamie Wilson on vocals and acoustic guitar; Cody Foote on electric and upright bass; and John Ross Silva on drums and percussion, who kept his talents secret while he mastered the recording and then joined the band as it tours from Houston to Oklahoma City. Silva (with engineering credits for Dixie Chicks, Shawn Colvin, John Alagia and Lloyd Maines) had been a friend of the band and its incarnations for years, and it was he who brought in country-rocker-producer Keith Gattis, who oversaw the production.

The two Texas songwriters teamed up this way: Walker, the deep singer/songwriter who played drums and piano by age 4 (and later guitar), heard Wilson singing harmony in a cantina in College Station where together they attended Texas A&M and was blown away. Both had grown up in small towns: he from Crawford, she from Sealy. Jamie was raised listening to good country music and soaking up influences from Bob Wills to Bruce Springsteen, while Walker was absorbing the songwriting skills of high-caliber pistols like Gram Parsons and Townes Van Zandt, and the symbolic anthropology of Joseph Campbell.

When the four put their talented heads together, what results is an eclectic blend of new music and lyrics refined to the basics ? as stark yet as loaded with meaning as the band's logo and band members' tattoos: a crying bird ready to fly from its perch atop a broken heart.