What kicked off as three neighbourhood kids in small-town Castlewood Virginia (population 2045) with two guitars and a banjo has mushroomed over the past decade into a six-piece, ass-kicking country band. With a pipe dream, three albums, numerous tours and a reputation for hard graft and dynamic live shows, 49 Winchester came to the attention of Nashville record label New West, who signed them up and have recently released the band’s fourth album FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD. With this year’s calendar packed with festival dates, headlining shows and supporting Whiskey Myers on tour, the band’s hard-edged country sound is likely to accelerate them from ‘emerging’ to ‘arrived.’ We spoke with frontman Isaac Gibson to hear about the band’s back story and their latest recording.
Are you at home right now? Tell me about growing up in small town Castlewood, Virginia?
Yes, I’m right here now in my homeplace, Castlewood, Virginia. It’s a great place to grow up, there’s not a lot to do so it’s a hard place to get into trouble. A creative outlet can sometimes be a hard thing to find in a town in Appalachia, but playing music was one of the things that made growing up here so great. The people here are fantastic. You’d be hard-pressed to cross the whole of the U.S. and find kinder or more polite people. It is different here. I didn’t grow up in a place where there was a huge music scene, and I didn’t have access to live shows when I was a kid, so 49 Winchester was like something that just sprang out of the ground and blossomed when we all graduated high school. It comes with its own unique challenges but, overall, it’s a blessing to be where I’m from to be certain.
Are you all from that town?
Me and Chase Chafin, the bass player, we’re next-door neighbours and we’ve both known Bus Shelton a long time. That’s where the band started with two acoustic guitars and a banjo most of the time, just three local boys and kindred spirits that wanted to play some music. Noah Patrick is also from around here and there are six of us in the band now. Our drummer Justin Venable is from Johnson City, Tennessee and keyboard player Tim Hall is from forty minutes up the interstate. All six of us are just a bunch of kids from the mountains.
Were there raised eyebrows locally when you started the band rather than take up nine to five employment?
Both, by and large people told us to ‘go and do it, we’re proud of you,’ and there were some people when we first started out that it was hard to convince that one day, we’re going to be people that get to travel the world, make some money selling records and playing shows. It was hard coming from a place that isn’t a huge haven for art. For many years here in Appalachia the only thing you could do was work in a coalmine or work on a railroad hauling coal out of a coal mine.
Were there particular bands that influenced your musical direction?
We all have a lot of different musical influences and as we hung around with each other the music that we each respectively loved rubbed off on each other. Folk Soul Revival was a big influence, our drummer Justin played with them for a lot of years. What it came back to was a lot of cool funky country and rock and roll sounding stuff. That’s what it was from the start and what has evolved with the band.
The band formed in 2014. Fill in the gaps between then and appearing at SXSW recently?
The most important thing between those two points was a group of people with one simple focus who never wavered from it. We’ve worked really hard, stayed focused and changed our lives to suit this band. There’s a great sense of loyalty and pride that comes with being in this band that we have fostered from the beginning. A whole lot of hard work can be attributed to a slow climb for a number of years and the recent uptick in that curve that we are now enjoying. Eight years of working really hard and trying in a very conscious way to spread our music to as many people as we possibly could.
Does touring as a six-piece create its own complications with personality clashes and different individual pressures, and does the band operate as a democracy?
A whole lot less democracy and a whole lot more family. There’s a great atmosphere of camaraderie and fraternity within the band. We’re more like brothers than bandmates, all of us. The biggest thing that we do is maintain that focus, our life’s mission is this band. We’ve invested so much of ourselves personally that there is no compromise. This is our bubble of protection and the place where we can function in a way that pleases us, pays our bills and gets us in front of the people that we need to get in front of to share our art. We know it’s all business when we are on tour, you need to get out there and work for each other, but there’s a whole lot of peace and love in 49 Winchester and it’s always been that way.
I believe you have a background in metal. How does that translate into what the band is doing now?
That’s common ground among every single member of the band. We’ve all spent some portion of our lives as metalheads. I love the energy, the anger, the drive and the profound emotion that goes with metal. The energy from that music has translated into what we do live, which is a lot of jumping around and a lot of whooping and hollering.
Your songwriting is traditional country, real life stories about where you come from and what’s going on in your lives. Tell me about the progression from you writing the songs and the final product.
I write the songs, the melody and the progression and bring them to the guys to let them flesh out their parts with minimal input from me. As unique and variable as our sound can be, it is because all the guys have creative freedom to play what is in their hearts as opposed to suiting some need for my songs, as if they were sole possessions of mine. It has always been a ‘band thing’ with us. I might write the songs but the band’s input, feelings, emotions and their skill is important to me, and I want it to translate to the records and how we play live. That idea has allowed us to remain true as a band; there’s some healthy non-conformity in our music and I take pride in that.
Your sound has remained consistent from your debut album to the latest recording FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD.
There is a core of things that we have always stayed true to. The process hasn’t really changed, what has changed most is that we have grown and matured so much, both as musicians and people. We are grown men now and we weren’t when we started this band. We were high school kids back then that basically just had a dream and infinite free time that summer. Eight years later it has taken us this far and hopefully is going to take us further.
Where did you record this album and what was the recording process?
We recorded at White Star Sound in Charlottesville, Virginia, with our engineer and co-producer Stewart Myers. The foundations of all the songs had already existed and most of them had already been played live and had worked their way into our live set with a couple of exceptions. We went into the studio, laid down drums and bass, and started building the rhythm sections. It wasn’t live recordings per se. There is merit in a live approach, just going in there and letting it fly, but we were really conscious of how we wanted things to sound and took a week on little intricacies that we didn’t pay enough attention to on our other albums.
What has signing to New West meant to 49 Winchester?
John Allen, the president of New West reached out to us and said that if we were going to be making a record anytime soon, we ought to do it with them. We were going to be putting out our fourth album on an independent label like we always had before. When New West came knocking and we saw their line-up of artists, the past works that they have released and talked with other artists about their experiences on the label, we realised that this was a golden opportunity, given how artist- centred New West is. They are big on maintaining the cool, they are not going to try and commercialise you. There has been an enormous benefit since signing the deal. We were afforded time to get in and work out things the way you need to, instead of scrapping together for cash like we have done on albums in the past. Immediately on recording the album, the wheels were turning in a way that we never imagined. The New West team have knocked it out of the park and they’re working their tails off for us. It’s been a huge difference and a huge blessing.
Is the album title a statement of 49 Winchester’s intent?
You know that song was actually an old 49 song that never made a record. It was one of those songs that I got stuck on, a writer’s block kind of thing. The lyrics for the new version just hit me like a bolt of lightning when we were in the studio. It changed and evolved into something completely different. As soon as we knew that song was going to make the cut, we knew that it was also a great album title for the band.
Which of the album’s songs are you most proud of?
From a lyrical perspective, I felt Russel County Line was always a strong song. I knew it had weight and power, the melody was cool, and the song is bittersweet. I think it still holds up for me and I like playing it live. It’s the song on the album that I’m most proud of and not just for those reasons but also the significance it has to my home, to my lady and to the people, and places that I love here.
Interview by Declan Culliton