Jonathan Terrell Goes Rogue

Somewhere along the road in Europe, opening 3,000-4,000-person shows for fellow Texans Midland, Jonathan Terrell realized he didn’t have the right songs. Over the past decade, he had honed his sound behind highway ballads and a road-worn poetry bolstered by big guitar licks and an unbridled on-stage charisma, but the troubadour was now feeling the pull to expand his sound beyond just country and Americana.

“Touring with these bigger bands and watching the audience move and how they want to move, people want to dance a certain way, and if you don’t let them dance, then they leave,” he attests. “So I’m like looking at these songs, I’m looking back in my catalog, and I’m going, ‘I don’t have a song that makes them dance this particular way.’ 

So that means to me there’s a gap in our communication, and that means I’m not talking to my audience the way that they need to receive the message. They want to feel cool at a show. They want that hard backbeat. And I’m missing that conversation in my show.”

Dove, Terrell’s freshly released fourth LP, takes flight in search of these new directions. From the hard kick-drum opening of lead-off boogie “Born on a Saturday Night” and the bass and banjo groove of “10 on 6” to the epic dark sweep of “Dunes” and low reverbed rumble of “Midnight Machine,” Terrell exposes his more eclectic influences like Nineties darkwave alternative and big-hooked rockers.

Part of Terrell’s evolving direction comes from having jettisoned a record deal and deciding to release the album independently. Although he had to hustle for the past couple of years behind endless DJ gigs and songwriter rooms to raise the money to record, he knew he wanted to take advantage of the new creative freedom and ability to assemble the producers and players each song needed.

“I scrapped almost everything and just started fresh,” he says. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’m not going to be a mainstream country artist, I need to understand that.’ And I look at all my heroes, the songwriters that mean the most to me – the Townes Van Zandts, Nick Caves, the people that are in their own lane and don’t give a fuck about what’s outside of that lane – and I was like, ‘How are all these people my heroes and I’m not willing to follow their footsteps?’ I’m trying to live in the shadow of the opportunity that I have with these bigger bands, and I just kind of had to figure out how to free myself from that idea and go rogue.

“I don’t owe anybody any money. The gloves are off. I don’t have to appease anybody,” he continues. “I don’t have to get this record approved by anybody but my peers. So it’s like, why don’t I work with as many producers as I want to work with? Why don’t I pick a song and say, you know who would crush this fucking song?”

Among the artists that Terrell collected for Dove are local luminaries like JaRon Marshall, Tony Kamel, and Simon Page, as well as Silverada, who backs “Born on a Saturday Night.” He brought in Adrian Quesada to produce the slow burn of “Midnight Machine” and even recruited Depeche Mode drummer Christian Eigner and Austrian artist Niko Stoessl to produce and provide rhythm on “Dunes” and the hard groove of “Mona.” 

The result is less an eclectic range on the album than a melding of seemingly disparate influences that shades Terrell’s searching introspection and highway anthems with a darker edge. It hearkens his early outfit Not in the Face, but with an experience and control that drives into new territory for the songwriter.

“I’ll be 45 in October, and I’ve never been more motivated and more excited to experiment in my whole life,” he declares. “I love that idea of shedding the skin to survive, and I feel like I kind of stepped out of a cocoon and I can literally do anything I want.”

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