Lucero has been road-doggin' it for nigh on 16 years, playing nearly every shithole in every town imaginable. Theirs is a tour schedule that would drain even the youngest and stoutest of bands, let alone a bunch of guys in their 30s and 40s. But frontman Ben Nichols is an especially restless sort. While the country-punk crew is taking some (brief) R-and-R back home in Memphis, Nichols is hitting the road on his BMW 1200GS.
"The solo tour is mainly an excuse to ride the motorcycle," Nichols explains. "I like being at home as much as I can, but riding the motorcycle is pretty damn fun too."
This is the third such jaunt for Nichols, with the first happening two years ago. This time the tour's dubbed the Bikeriders Midwest Run, and it'll be the second time he's been accompanied by tattoo artist Oliver Peck, who will be setting up shop in various studios along the way. The tour also gives Nichols the chance to dust off the tunes in his solo catalog that aren't often featured in Lucero sets. His lone solo effort is The Last Pale Light in the West, an EP that came out in 2009 and was inspired by the Cormac McCarthy novel Blood Meridian.
"I may do one or two songs off that record a night with Lucero," Nichols says. "Oftentimes I don't do any. So yeah, it'll be nice on the solo tour. I'll actually get to play most of the record."
The only other song attributed to Nichols the solo artist is "This Old Death" from The Walking Dead's soundtrack.
"I would like to do more solo stuff and actually record more solo albums, but all my writing energy kind of goes into Lucero at the moment," he explains. But the writing process for the EP was separate enough from Lucero that he felt comfortable making it his own thing. "Basically, if it was a song that was about Blood Meridian, then it was going on this kind of concept album. That might be why I haven't done another solo project since then, because I don't have another book to steal from yet."
But even if there isn't new solo stuff to fill the set lists, the most recent Lucero record is bare-bones enough that it should translate pretty easily. After a trio of records that found the band dabbling in bigger arrangements — horn sections and keys and other hallmarks of Memphis soul — last year's Texas & Tennessee EP is an intentionally stripped-down affair. Nichols says the four songs on Texas & Tennessee came about unexpectedly. The original plan was just to work again with North Mississippi All Stars' Cody Dickinson, who recorded Lucero in its more raucous early days.
"I figured I wanted to do something acoustic," explains Nichols. "I really wasn't sure what we were going to do. I thought we were going to do a couple cover songs, maybe revisit some old songs." But then Nichols got involved with a girl from Texas, who has since moved to California. "We weren't necessarily planning on recording new material, but I don't know; I guess inspiration struck at the right time."
Lucero will start writing a new record when Nichols gets back to Memphis, and the singer says Texas & Tennessee might signal the direction they'll take on their next full-length. Or it might not.
"With each record, it kind of tells you what it wants to be," he says. "You can make as many plans as you want, but it seems like every time we start a new record or a new writing process, the songs themselves just kinda dictate what they want to become."
Meantime, Lucero has a double album slated for later this month called Live From Atlanta, the band's first live record after tens of thousands of miles on the odometer. Recorded over the course of three nights in November, the collection spans the band's career, with old songs updated with the new horns-and-keys approach.
"There are plenty of bootlegs and live recordings floating around out there, but we'd never done an actual proper live album until now," says the frontman. "It can buy me a little extra time to write some new songs for a studio album."
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