It’s 1,376 miles from Dave Alvin’s home in California to Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s in Austin, and you can hear the echoes of each of those miles in the pair’s just released Yep Rock Records album “Texicali.”
Gilmore’s hometown newspaper the Austin American Statesman said the album expands on the pair’s “poetic geographical autobiography.” In 2018, they teamed up for their first collaboration, “Downey to Lubbock,” a travelogue reference to Alvin’s birthplace in Downey, California, and Gilmore’s Lubbock in Texas.
The pair, joined by Alvin’s The Guilty Ones backing band, bring the CD release tour to Rialto Theatre on Friday, July 26. Tucson alt-country singer-songwriter Mark Insley opens the show at 8 p.m.
Gilmore and Alvin have been friends for three decades, but it wasn’t until 2017 that they realized they had never sung together. That realization led to a handful of shows that gave birth to 2018’s “Downey to Lubbock.”
Gilmore and Alvin’s musical styles — Gilmore is solidly country while Alvin is alt-country that leans more Americana with a rockabilly/folk rock twist — found a middle ground, with Alvin’s smoke-stained baritone balancing what No Depression recently described as Gilmore’s “distinctive warble” that “makes everything he sings seem connected to a long tradition.”
The pair penned six of the albums songs, including “We’re Still Here” — “We’re still here, yeah, we’re still here/We’re still standing no matter what you might hear” — the lighthearted follow-up to the title song of “Downey to Lubbock” — “I know someday this old highway’s/Gonna come to an end/I know when it does/You’re gonna be my friend.”
Alvin and Gilmore wasted little time in hitting the road to promote “Texicali.” Their first tour date on July 6 came roughly two weeks after the album dropped. The tour, which opened for a handful of California dates and a few stops in Washington State and Oregon over the past few weeks, crisscrosses the U.S. through early November.
Tickets for their show at the Rialto, 318 E. Congress, are $29.50-$48 through rialtotheatre.com.
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