“Texans, don’t get nervous, there’re a lot of Oklahomans in the house tonight,” JD McPherson quipped to the crowd at the Parish in Austin on Tuesday night. He wasn’t lying either, as this two-night run was spearheaded by Oklahoma natives JD McPherson and the young singer-songwriter Parker Millsap, who hails from Guthrie, OK. The Texans in the house probably weren’t nervous, but they definitely had their collective mind blown by both acts. If anything, most people in the room were probably trying to wrap their heads around the fact that the land of the Red Dirt has recently produced some of the best acts around right now.
It would be easy to let Parker Millsap’s boyish looks fool you into thinking he’s some angsty Conor Oberst wannabe. That couldn’t be less true. Millsap is only 22 and has already released two acclaimed albums, proving that he is a prodigious talent. But while his albums may be impressionable, it’s on the stage where Millsap shines. Songs like “Put Your Hands Up”, the old standard “Hesitation Blues,” and “Palisade” showed Millsap and his band creating boisterous sounds that displayed their deep love for blues and folk music. At times, Millsap’s voice brought to mind that of Jack White in its urgency and ability to jump between high and low notes. His voice carried an emotional tremble on “Heaven Sent”, a haunting ballad about a son coming out to his father that, like many of his songs, took on a more natural depth with the compliment of a fiddle. There were also the more upbeat songs like the road song “Truck Stop Gospel” and a thoroughly rocking “Morning Blues”. Millsap and his band may be youngsters, but they all know their way around a tight set of music and together they have a sound that you can easily picture wowing a much larger giant crowd. Millsap is also a damn finer guitar player, and if there were two big takeaways from his rousing set it was imagining what he could do with an electric guitar and what he will be capable as he continues to mature as a musician. Based on the massive applause, this writer clearly isn’t the only one eager to find out.
Few acts have been as successful as JD McPherson when it comes to making music that is decidedly retro in its influences yet is palatable to larger audiences. With a smooth voice and mean guitar chops, McPherson has always stayed firmly close to rockabilly, lounge-y soul, and boogie woogie music. Somehow he has crafted a sound out of the exact right amounts of all of those styles, appeasing the genre purists and record nerds as much as people who don’t know shit but just want to dance and have a groovy time. The band kicked things off with “Bossy”, a raucous single off their most recent release Let The Good Times Roll, easily a contender for album of the year. From then on JD and the boys never stopped swinging and the audience never stopped dancing. Songs like “North Side Gal”, “Fire Bug”, and “It Shook Me Up” made the Parish feel like a swinging and jiving New Orleans nightclub in the Fifties, whereas more intimate numbers like their cover of Nick Lowe’s “Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day” and “Bridgebuilder” swooned and charmed with the best kind of sentiment. JD even invited Parker Millsap to the stage to join the band for a cover of the Rolling Stones classic “Happy” that found both of these Okies showing off their chops.
By the time JD McPherson closed out the night with a handful of tunes that included a cover of “Your Love” by Austin’s own soul shakers The Bellfuries, any silly Texan resentment of Oklahomans was squashed by the fabulous tunes brought by both acts on the bill. If anything, the Texan crowd should be maybe a little intimidated but definitely delighted that their neighbor to the north has such astonishingly good music coming out of it these days. When JD McPherson and his band finally left the stage, there was no question that everyone felt real good about not just these Oklahomans, but about the hope for music as a whole.
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