Conventional wisdom says the two frontmen of a band shouldn’t live on opposite sides of the United States, but that’s never seemed to deter Avi Vinocur and Patrick Dyer Wolf.
Goodnight, Texas is a tough-to-define storytelling folk rock band whose strength lies in unexpected sweet spots. Drawing their name from Pat and Avi’s onetime geographic midpoint (the real town of Goodnight in the State of Texas, a tiny hamlet east of Amarillo directly betwixt San Francisco, CA and Chapel Hill, NC), the five-piece band also exists at the center of its songwriters’ contrasting styles — via a 1913 Gibson A mandolin and a 2015 Danelectro Baritone Guitar, at the crossroads of folk and blues and rock ‘n’ roll, in a place where dry wit and dark truths meet hope and utmost sincerity.
The band’s new single, “RUNAWAYS,” trades the thought-provoking, earthy blend of folk-rock for which they’re known, for a beast of a hard-rock song. Indelible riffs, thundering rhythms and a positively scorching lead guitar, from none other than metal giant and Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett, prove that this band is not afraid to push their own musical boundaries.
“This is the hardest we’ve ever rocked on a recording,” Patrick explains of the new single. “That’s thanks in no small part to an actual and absolute vintage Kirk Hammett wah solo on his legendary Greeny guitar, about which I am self-pinching daily. The main riff of the song had been lurking in my drafts like a caged animal since our last album, and at some point in the past year we decided it was time to set it free.”
“We’re not abandoning our banjos and mandolins, and in fact, there’s banjo in there; if you squint you can hear it. For now though, we’re slinging double electrics, Scott traded brushes for drumsticks, Chris is grinding the low strings, and we have a metal legend coming in at the 2:25 mark.”
2022 brought the band’s highly anticipated fourth album ‘How Long Will It Take Them To Die’, a dark yet lighthearted shoebox of knick-knacks and newspaper clippings – perhaps reflecting on either two years of global isolation, or the whole of American history. Where past Goodnight, Texas albums have traveled cross-country and throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, this new offering falls on a z-axis somewhere between the aurora borealis and six feet underground.
Of the album’s first single ‘Hypothermic’, singer and co-songwriter Avi Vinocur says:
“Stories from different corners of the American past can often be dark and heavy. Our band’s music has always followed along, telling tales of fiction and non-fiction with sonic landscapes to match. Many of our past songs and albums had taken place in the American South, Northeast, Midwest, and Southwest – but I had written a story in my notebook of a character braving the frigid tundra of Canada by car, north toward the distant U.S. state of Alaska – through hallucinations, paranoia, and exhaustion – to escape something unknown. It matched the sinister sound of this strange heel-thumper I had been working with on guitar – and together they were a perfect pair. “Hypothermic” is the result – our attempt to tell stories of America’s furthest corner, under a darker headlight, and attempting to sonically capture the heaviness of not only America’s past, but its present.”
In March 2020, as the world confronted a new indoor reality, two long minutes of the GN,TX mainstay “The Railroad” found themselves in the intro sequence of the first episode of Netflix’s “Tiger King,” which shattered streaming records with 34 million views in 10 days.
In 2021, Goodnight, Texas were invited by Metallica to contribute to The Metallica Blacklist, a collection of reinterpretations of their legendary 1991 album Metallica (the Black Album). Goodnight, Texas was the only band to cover “Of Wolf and Man” gaining praise from press and even Metallica themselves – they used the song over the PA following their live performances in late 2021.
