September 2026: It's Happening Again

There are stretches when keeping up with new music feels a little like homework. You save a record and make a mental note to come back to it. Before you listen to it, somebody texts you another one. Friday comes around again and suddenly there are 87 more songs sitting there waiting on you. It's like drinking out of a fire hose. Nobody gets to live with a record and let it slow burn anymore. Unless you're intentional about it. I used to break my neck to try to keep up. I gave up on that. I love and appreciate music, so I'll get to it on my own time...even if that is on a different timeline than the algortihm overlords.

Ray Wylie Hubbard has a new record.

Silverada has a new record.

The Wilder Blue has a new record.

Mason Lively has a new record.

And those are just the ones sitting near the top of the stack.

Maybe it’s coincidence. Release schedules bunch together. Records get finished when they get finished. But taken together, this recent run feels like something more interesting than a busy month on the calendar. It feels healthy.

Ray Wylie Hubbard releasing another record at this point in his life would be enough simply as an act of endurance. He could reasonably spend the rest of his days accepting lifetime achievement awards, playing “Snake Farm” and telling stories about Jerry Jeff Walker.

Instead, he made another extremely good Ray Wylie Hubbard record.

And not one that sounds particularly interested in acting its age.

It moves. It growls. It tells stories. There are guitars and grooves and characters who probably made at least three poor decisions before lunch. Even after all these years, Hubbard still sounds like he’s finding another back road somewhere between the blues, rock and roll and whatever strange little patch of Texas dirt he’s occupied for the last half-century.

Then, on the other end of the timeline, you’ve got Mason Lively making a record called The Hill Country Sound. The title tells you plenty. He's leaning into his influences. He's putting some heavy hitters on the track list next to his own originals.

Mason Lively has always sounded like somebody who understands where he comes from, and this record leans straight into that lineage. The Hill Country, Luckenbach, Gruene Hall, Jerry Jeff, REK, Willie, Billy Joe and all those songs that somehow seem permanently attached to limestone, cedar and long drives down two-lane roads.

It isn’t about trying to recreate the 70's and 80s'...it's about knowing why all that happened.

Every healthy music scene needs young artists who know the history without being trapped by it. Somebody has to carry those records forward without treating them like museum pieces.

Silverada is doing something different entirely. They’ve been at this long enough now that you can hear the mileage. The clubs. The vans. The festivals. The lineup changes. The name change. All the normal wear and tear that comes with trying to keep a band together while the music business changes underneath you. And yet they somehow keep evolving.

There was a time when a lot of us probably would have just called them Mike and the Moonpies forever no matter what the marquee said.

That band isn’t gone. You can still hear it. But Silverada increasingly sounds like a band that has stopped worrying about what anybody expected the next record to be. There’s freedom in that.

Then there’s The Wilder Blue.

If there’s a band right now that seems capable of connecting several different generations of this audience, it might be them. They can stand in front of the old heads who grew up on Eagles records and Pure Prairie League and make perfect sense. They can stand next to the current Texas and Red Dirt crop and make perfect sense.

They can play a festival, a theater, a listening room or probably somebody’s back porch and make perfect sense there too. The harmonies are the obvious thing. Five voices locking together will get your attention. But the longer they go, the songs and musicianship are becoming the bigger story.

Cinco feels like a band settling into exactly what it wants to be. And maybe that’s the thread through all of this. Nobody here is chasing the same thing.

Ray Wylie isn’t trying to sound like Wilder Blue.

Wilder Blue isn’t trying to sound like Silverada.

Silverada isn’t trying to sound like Mason Lively.

Mason isn’t trying to cosplay some version of Texas Music that disappeared 25 years ago.

They’re all pulling from the same soil and growing different things out of it. Which is probably healthier than whatever version of a “scene” we sometimes convince ourselves we need. For years, people have tried to define this music. Texas Music. Red Dirt. Americana. Roots.

Whatever name somebody needs to put on a playlist. Maybe it was never supposed to fit neatly inside one of those boxes. Maybe Texas Music works best when it looks more like this.

An old cosmic cowboy still making greasy rock and roll. A veteran road band finding another gear. Five guys standing around microphones singing harmonies that make you want to drive somewhere. A younger songwriter looking backward just enough to figure out where he wants to go next.

And a bunch of other records and singles arriving around them that we’re still working our way through. Some will stick. Some won’t. That’s always been part of the fun.

But every once in a while enough good music lands close together that you can feel the temperature change. This feels like one of those times. And I'm going to take my time soaking it all in.