Tate Mayeux and Brian Broussard make the kind of country music that wouldn’t have been completely out of place at Gilley’s in its Urban Cowboy heyday. It has the requisite fiddle runs and Tele riffs, along with a lazy Texas swagger that Mayeux compares to Hayes Carll. But these guys — Texans, both — aren’t afraid to get a little bit dirtier than Johnny Lee or Kenny Rogers ever did. And that’s exactly what they do on their upcoming High Times & Good Rhymes, the follow-up to 2012’s While the Gittin’s Good.
On “Gather Myself,” one of the new album’s cuts, Mayeux confides, “‘Gather Myself’ is one of my most painful confessions, when I think about it. It’s about waking up and asking yourself, ‘What the hell did I do last night?’ Not necessarily because you indulged too much and can’t remember, but because you can’t believe the bad decisions you made … again.”
But, as with so many great country cuts, that’s just Saturday night talking. Sunday morning shows everything in a whole new light. “It’s about pulling it all back together at the beginning of each day, knowing that it might all be gone again by the time night falls,” Mayeux continues. “We all create the lives we have. If you ain’t happy with yours, remember that you made the decisions that led you there, and you can always make the decision to change your path toward something better.”