Goodnight, Texas

Overview

If you take out a map and measure the midway point between San Francisco and Chapel Hill, North Carolina — the homes of songwriters Avi Vinocur and Patrick Dyer Wolf, respectively — you'll find an unincorporated town called Goodnight, Texas (population at last count: 18). That's what the duo discovered when they went looking for the center of their long-distance collaboration, a musical project that sounds, appropriately enough, like a cross-country drive on Interstate 40: Expansive, full of possibility, American in every sense of the word — the perfect place for missing someone but regretting nothing, for losing yourself in the crackle of guitar through speakers and having a good long think.  The band's contagiously entertaining dynamic at live shows, as well as the album's energy, soul and range — from red-blooded, foot-stomping rock 'n' roll to wistful front porch ballads to haunting tales of doomed romance — has made devotees out of both music critics and a growing legion of fans spread out across the country. Goodnight, Texas spent the last year and a half out on the road, supporting acts like Shakey Graves and Rusted Root, in addition to playing two sold-out hometown shows at the Fillmore alongside Bombay Bicycle Club and Nicki Bluhm and the Gramblers. The band released their sophomore record, Uncle John Farquhar, in the summer of 2014. Uncle John Farquhar showcases this talent perhaps better than ever, with the two songwriters' styles playing off each other to great effect, balancing a wry sense of humor with an obvious respect for the ghosts of this country's past. Whether in Vinocur's realm of epic sagas of loss and animated hit-the-road tunes or Wolf's natural gift for deceptively sparse, emotion-driven songwriting, we can feel the sun-baked earth, taste the sweat of a day's labor, hear the hound dog howling in the yard. Our protagonists are lonely travelers and scorned lovers ad sympathetically conjured bank robbers, and for the duration of a song, we are rooting for them with all we've got.