In this week's paper, Christian Schaeffer interviewed Jon Langford of the Waco Brothers, who are returning to town to headline the last night of Twangfest 12 at Off Broadway. His interview is here (as well as his interview with Caleb Travers, one of the night's opening acts; Ha Ha Tonka and the Everybodyfields are also playing.) Here's an MP3 and a few choice outtakes
MP3: The Waco Brothers, "Do What I Say"
How would you describe the Waco Brothers to someone who has never seen you play live? The live album is a pretty good representation of our show. Sometimes the songs are much better, more formed when we play them for a couple of years. The live shows are very high energy, very noisy. We’re a rock band basically, but we’ve been laboring with this country thing.
How did you become interested in country music? I started listening to classic honky-tonk back in the ’80s. We never had a plan for that band; there were two of us, then three and then six. We started just doing covers and Bloodshot asked us to put out an album of covers, but we started writing songs. They could have been done as traditional country songs, but what we were doing was taking country songs but not playing them in the country style.