Kyle Nix & The 38’s Announce New Album “After The Flood Vol. 1”

One of the reasons that the appeal for the music of the Turnpike Troubadours has grown over time is that time has revealed the boys from Oklahoma to be like their own supergroup of sorts, even though the respective players all originate from inside of the band. Cleave off any of Turnpike’s individual members, and you could build a band around them easily.

This theory was put to the test and proven when Kyle Nix took the opportunity of Turnpike’s indefinite hiatus to write and record his own album called Lightning on the Mountain & Other Short Stories released in 2020. It was well received by fans of the Turnpike Troubadours and beyond, and put folks on alert that Nix was not just a fiddler. He could be a songwriter and frontman himself when put to the task.

Though it was Evan Felker’s personal drama that most compelled many of the fans in the Turnpike Troubadours universe and resulted in multiple spreads in Rolling Stone, Kyle Nix went through quite a bit of drama of his own recently, including his own stint in rehab, the loss of his fiddling mentor Byron Berline, and eventually a divorce in 2022. All of this would come out in a flood of emotions that eventually comprised the songs of After The Flood, Vol. 1, due out July 28th via Soundly Music.

“There are things I didn’t understand, or I wouldn’t understand how I felt, but I could write about them,” Nix says. “It was a strange thing with a lot of those songs, because they would just come out. It was almost like my subconscious was finding these things that were wrong that I needed to address, or ways I felt that I didn’t know.”

Just as much as the Turnpike Troubadours could be considered a supergroup, so can Kyle Nix’s 38’s, which came together in part during the recording of Lightning on the Mountain, but since has been forged through the band’s tour schedule, including a recent appearance at Stagecoach.

The 38’s include Bill Corbin, who was the long-time bass player in American Aquarium before some of its most recent iterations, Kevin “Haystack” Foster known best as a multi-dimensional accompanist who is affluent with multiple instruments, Gabe Pearson also of the Troubadours, guitarist Adam Duran, and perhaps the band’s ace-in-the-hole, guitarist, singer, and solo artist Ken Pomeroy.

Together they make the 38’s less of a backing band, and more of a collaborative effort, with band members taking turns singing different songs with Kyle Nix on the new album. “We really just wanted to show what we could all do and that we were a unit together,” he says. “These guys helped me through a lot. The songs are there because I had people to get me through rough patches.”

Where the first Kyle Nix album was sort of a spaghetti Western of character tales, After The Flood, Vol. 1 takes a more personal turn.

Nix tells Saving Country Music, “With the last album I was trying to prove that I could write from a non-personal, empathetic view with most of the songs. With this one, I had to write from a personal perspective so’s to engage in therapy with myself. Lay it all out on the table and do inventory … In almost 15 years of recording of music I’ve never broken down in the studo, and I just lost it singing the last chorus of ‘Summer Plains.’ It took me a half-a-dozen takes not to choke up.”

You hear this come through in the two songs released to coincide with the new album, the bluesy and growling “Play Nice,” and the more intimate, reserved, and rootsy “Another Bad Dream” with Ken Pomeroy singing lead (listen below).

“Play Nice” and “Another Bad Dream” are out Friday, and can be pre-saved now. After The Flood, Vol. 1 releases on July 28th.

TRACK LIST:

1. Foreword (by Shooter Jennings)
2. 5FT & Bulletproof
3. Close The Bets
4. Nothin’ You Can Do
5. Hell and Half of Georgia
6. Fairytale Blues
7. One More Thing
8. Hold Me In Your Arms
9. Poor Boy’s Heart
10. Gunslinger
11. Play Nice
12. Train to Tennessee
13. Another Bad Dream
14. Summer Plains