Up there Along with Marty Stewart, Chuck Mead is one of the torchbearers of new traditional country music, the punky, twangy, energetic sound that helped revitalize Nashville in the ’90s. Earlier this year, Mead and Stewart teamed up to write “Lonely Boy,” Mead’s latest single with his band The Stalwarts. A new video, directed by Stacie Huckeba, was released for the rock guitarist, whom Mead describes as “The Who on bales.”
“We originally conceived it as a Johnny Horton-style song, but when the band played it, it turned into a Johnny Horton-style song with Johnny Thunders’ vocals, which we thought was great,” Mead says in a statement about “Lonely Boy.”
Mead is as much a New York Dolls as he is a Merle Haggard, and over the course of his career—particularly with BR5-49 at Robert's Western World in Nashville—he has been able to effortlessly blend these seemingly disparate musical genres.
“As a kid, I played in my family’s country band, listening to Hank Williams, Merle Haggard and Tammy Wynette, along with classic rock and roll like Elvis, Carl Perkins and Chuck Berry,” says Mead. “But then I discovered my own rock and roll era with the Ramones, Eddie & the Hot Rods, The Jam, Generation X and the Clash, and all of those elements blended into my heart. I went from country to punk rock and back to country again.”
Mead and the Stalwarts—guitarist Mark Andrew Miller and drummer Marty Linds—are constantly on the road and will be performing in North Carolina, Tennessee and Missouri next week. Earlier this summer, they played the Trucker & Country Festival in Interlaken, Switzerland, as a five-piece band, with Adam “Ditch” Kurtz on pedal steel and Italian guitarist Don Diego.
Meade's “Lonely Boy” co-writer, Stewart and his band Fabulous Superlatives, will open for Chris Stapleton at a pair of shows in Nashville this week.
