The son of four generations of coal miners, Erik Vincent Huey grew up along the banks of the Monongahela River in West Virginia. On his debut solo album, Appalachian Gothic (due out January 20th via The Orchard/CEN/Appalachian AF), Erik takes a nostalgic deep dive into the Appalachia of his youth while wrestling with the hard contemporary realities of a region that’s been left behind in so many ways yet remains richly interwoven into the cultural fabric of America.
“My father, grandfather and great grandfather, who came over from Country Cork in Ireland, were all coal miners in the Monongahela Valley,” Erik says. So many immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, Italy and Eastern Europe—along with African-Americans from The South—came to Appalachia to mine coal, and this song is an attempt to tell their story and the story of the generations that followed in their footsteps,” he says. With these songs, Huey takes a nostalgic deep dive into the Appalachia of his WV youth while wrestling with the contemporary realities of a hardscrabble region that’s been left behind in many ways.
The album was recorded at Cowboy Technical Studios in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and produced by Eric “Roscoe” Ambel, the legendary Rock ‘n’ Roll guitarist (Joan Jett, Del-Lords, Steve Earle & The Dukes) and producer (Bottle Rockets, Jimbo Mathus, Yayhoos, Sarah Borges).
Today Glide is excited to offer an exclusive premiere of the standout track “Drink All Day,” an ode to the hair of the dog that finds Erik leaning into full honky tonker mode. Letting his vocals complement the twang of a pedal steel and the barroom piano, the song is almost a meta take on the country music lifestyle. While the tune may be a celebration of boozing the day away, there is also a sense of light-hearted sarcasm permeating throughout the lyrics as Erik slyly touches on the downer moments that come from embarking on a daytime bender. Ultimately, he gives us a fun honky tonk anthem that serves as the perfect soundtrack for the exact act it celebrates.
Erik describes the inspiration behind the song:
I wrote this song in 10 minutes one hungover morning in the San Jose Hotel in Austin, Texas. I had been overserved across the street at the Continental Club the night before. It’s always sounded like a George Jones song to me. I just wish he’d lived long enough to sing it! The whole thing just spilled out in its final form, and it hasn’t changed since. Leonard Cohen once said, “if I knew where good songs came from, I’d visit there more often.” This is one wellspring I’d love to tap into again.
The morning we filmed the video, I was going for realism, so I actually WAS taking swings from those Budweiser bottles and the Jameson flask. I was reminded yet again that morning drinking is a young man’s game. When we were filming the shower drinking scene, the director Fahnon Bennett sprayed a bunch of canned fog for a steam effect. This somehow triggered the optical sensors in the hotel, which sent the maintenance crew, the manager, and the NYFD (in full gear, with firetrucks and axes!) running to the door. It was 8 am and there was a film crew, guy in a robe, and a bunch of bottles everywhere … they must’ve wondered what the hell was going on in that hotel room.
WATCH:
