Jet Black Roses

Jet Black Roses are two brothers and the producer who joined them, and they call what they play rock and roll with a country soul.

They turned up at the McBastard studio with a jar of family moonshine, which Brad drank on air, and with a video for King of Fools they had just shot at the Clermont Lounge in Atlanta. Brad told them the couch they were sitting on had been pulled out of the Clermont in 1969. Their publicist set the episode up, though Andrew had already found the show through Cody Matlock, another Atlanta musician who had been on.

Trey and Andrew were raised on Haggard, Cash, Waylon Jennings, Buck Owens, Gram Parsons and early Stones, and wrote for EMI. Tyler came to Atlanta in 2008 to produce and worked mostly in hip hop and R&B, with a first placement on a Rick Ross record. A mutual acquaintance called him about two brothers with a country act who had no budget and could pay in THC cartridges. He met them in Nashville at a club called Analog and they wrote two songs the night they met. The workflow now starts on a voice memo. Trey sends it to Tyler, Tyler sends back a structure, and Trey has a verse and the front of a chorus back inside the hour. Andrew calls it the Atlanta workflow, which mostly means nobody goes home at two in the afternoon because the song is not finished.

They cut a whole record in Nashville and walked away from it. It was good music, Trey says, and it was not them. They went back to Atlanta and cut it again at Tree Sound, where the staff told them they had not had a rock band in the building in about twenty years. There are something like ten records in the can that nobody has heard and maybe never will. Trey's father never told him a song was good when it was not; the answer was usually that it was not the best he had done. There were also years of decisions that made better songs than they made sense, like a ten thousand dollar publishing advance that turned into flat screen televisions and scratch offs. Before this record Trey was having straight up panic attacks on the road, on top of the anxiety and depression he has carried a long time. He went home, and his father said the line he still repeats.

Greg Archilla, their producer and business partner, engineered and mixed Collective Soul, Matchbox 20 and Neil Young records, and they call him the fourth member. Tommy Shaw came out while they were sound checking to tell them they sounded good, which he did not have to do. They go to the merch booth after every set, where people keep telling them it is refreshing to hear a band with no tracks and no auto tune. The tour opened September 13 at the Lyric in Baltimore with Styx, then Cheap Trick at Bike Fest in Ocean City the next night.