McBride and The Ride: Amarillo Sky

Mcbride and the Ride
Amarillo Sky
Dualtone
2002-05-21

There’s an irony in “Amarillo Sky”, the first song and title track of McBride and The Ride’s fourth album after a nearly 10-year hiatus, that pretty much sets the tone for the record. The song is about a hardworking farmer who heads for the field every day knowing “Those burning rays are wearing down his body / And diesel’s worth the price of gold / And it’s the cheapest grain he’s ever sold”. But, we’re told, “still he’s holding on”. While spending his day on a tractor, he’s thinking about his crops and kids (in that order), “underneath this Amarillo sky”.

Of course, the irony is that his diesel tractor sends some pretty ugly stuff into that sky he loves so much — but he’s not thinking about that.

And therein lies the fundamental musical tension in Amarillo Sky: McBride and The Ride, now on indie label Dualtone as opposed to MCA, keep saying they’re doing what they want musically, but this one’s got the Nashville formula all over it.

That’s not to say that McBride and The Ride’s signature harmonies don’t sound great — they do, with Terry McBride’s lead tenor blending perfectly with Ray Herndon’s and Billy Thomas’s harmonies. Plus, it’s great to hear pedal steel on something besides an Alan Jackson song, but then there’s that almost overwhelming Nashville-pop production, courtesy of Matt Rollings.

Just think of it as diesel smoke.

Before this tractor metaphor becomes anymore exhausted (sorry — couldn’t resist) than it already is, a bit of background is in order.

In 1989, MCA Records executive Tony Brown heard some songs written by Terry McBride, a bass player from Austin and son of Dale McBride. Then, Brown decided to introduce McBride to two other players: Ray Herndon (guitars/vocals) and Billy Thomas (drums/vocals). The three met at Fanfare, formed McBride and The Ride, and began touring and recording (after signing with MCA, of course).

Although things began slowly, the group eventually found success. They were nominated for major awards by both the Academy of Country Music and the Country Music Association and had their first #1 hit, “Sacred Ground”, in 1992. (Ultimately, they would score six Top Ten hits, and the “Can I Count on You” video was 1991’s longest running on “Country Music Television”). Then after their third album, Hurry Sundown in 1993, McBride and The Ride decided to, well, ride off into different sunsets. (It’s worth nothing, however, that the members say that parting was amicable.)

After that, McBride, Herndon, and Thomas kept busy, both as songwriters and as players with a variety of Nashville acts, until September 2000 when Herndon raised the idea of a reunion for an anniversary party.

In a press release accompanying the album, Herndon says, “[I]t was like we never quit. When we got together after seven years, we were like, man, this is a band! This is an entity that’s just strong”.

So McBride and The Ride decided to saddle up again, going into the studio with their long-time friend and producer Matt Rollings. They announced their decision on 19 October 2001 from the stage of the Grand Ole Opry during their debut performance. “I talked to the guys and said we could shop this around to major labels”, McBride says. “But we knew what that was about. We had a huge deal with MCA for five years. Tony Brown was great to us, but we thought we should do things differently this time around. Have a little more say and be more in control of the whole process”.

McBride and The Ride used their freedom at Dualtone to move beyond the Nashville model of making records. “We played our own instruments on all the tracks”, McBride says. “And we sang all of it. We’re a band. And unlike before, where I wrote the bulk of the songs, this time we made a conscious effort to get together amongst ourselves a write a few songs”. (Of the ten tracks, only three, “Amarillo Sky”, “Squeezebox”, and “Why Not Colorado”, are from outside sources.)

Although on Amarillo Sky, McBride and The Ride move beyond the Nashville recording model, they don’t fare so well when it comes to escaping the Nashville-pop sound.

And that puts us back on the tractor in “Amarillo Sky”, one of the strongest tracks on the album despite those eco-contradictions. McBride and The Ride’s harmonies and the song’s big sound capture the grandness of the Texas sky — and anyone who’s done much farming knows that when driving tractor, there’s not much to look at but the sky.

Also interesting are “Why Not Colorado”, another song where the big production works. (Ironically, this is a song about leaving Texas. “Why die in Amarillo”? McBride asks.) “You Take My Heart There” and “Squeezebox”, a Who song that here becomes a country-rock-blues tune, also work well.

But then there are the Nashville-required sentimental ballads: Big, massive songs of undying love and loss with uncomfortable echoes of a VH-1 Divas show. Providing a case in point are “Anything That Touches You”, “Yours”, and “When Somebody Loves You”.

Or there’s the positively confusing “Hasta Luego”, despite its title a song that’s virtually free of Latino references except for a few mentions of “senorita” and “mi amor” as well as faint echoes of a Spanish guitar and some maracas.

Great albums work like a novel or a short story collection: They’re organic, and to remove one song or change the track order is to alter the entire work. Then there are smorgasbord albums, collections of songs put together in hopes of creating single that will appeal to the largest demographic — Nashville tends to work like this, and Amarillo Sky falls into this category. That’s unfortunate because there’s clearly potential for more here.

In the end, McBride and The Ride would fare better under the Texas sky without Nashville clouding things up.