VIDEO PREMIERE: Joe Stamm Band Share Fiery Country-Rock Title Track Off New LP ‘The Good & the Crooked (& the High & the Horny)’

The Joe Stamm Band makes countrified roots-rock with an emphasis on the roots, drawing on Stamm’s small-town upbringing in rural Illinois for a sound that blends heartland hooks with Nashville twang. It’s a sound that’s taken the songwriter from the college apartment where he strummed his first chords to venues beyond the Midwest, sharing shows with personal heroes like Kris Kristofferson and Chris Knight along the way. With his debut studio LP, The Good & The Crooked (& The High & The Horny), which is due out September 25th, Stamm begins building his own legacy, leading his band of road warriors through an album rooted in all-American storytelling and guitar-driven swagger.

Recorded in a converted barn outside of Iowa City, The Good & The Crooked (& The High & The Horny) is a studio album that owes its electrified energy to Stamm’s live show. It was there — onstage, guitar in hand, headlining a club in Peoria one night and playing with artists like Tyler Childers and Easton Corbin the next — that Stamm sharpened the edges of his self-described “black dirt music,” rolling Americana, country, and blue-collar rock and roll influences into his own style. Some songs were autobiographical, spinning true-life stories of love, loss, and life in Middle America. Others, like the barn-burning “12 Gauge Storyline,” were character-driven and fictional. Whittled into sharp shape by a touring schedule that kept Stamm and company on the road for as many as 150 days a year, those songs took new shape in the recording studio, shot through with amplified riffs, grooves, and arrangements that rolled just as hard as they rocked.

Today Glide is excited to premiere the the video for the album’s title track, a coming-of-age anthem that finds Stamm writing about the humor, heartache, charm, and chaos of youth in America. Brimming with a mix of honky tonk, Southern rock and roll, heartland twang and plenty of country swagger, the song finds Stamm drawing from experiences both fictional and autobiographical. Taking on the role as a sort of trailer park Jesus, Stamm wanders through different party scenarios before rocking out in a packed garage that may be a nod to his roots. With its fun and unforgettable chorus, not to mention plenty of blistering guitar work, the song nicely captures the special dynamic behind this band. 

“Everyone falls into at least one — and usually several — of those categories,” he says of “The Good & The Crooked (& The High & The Horny).” “That song really captured a sense of things, a sense of people, and a sense of what it’s like to grow up in America.”

WATCH:

Joe Stamm Band’s The Good & the Crooked (& The High & the Horny) is due out September 25.

Photo credit: Elise Kingland