Houndmouth's electrified folk-rock sound calls the mighty Midwest home. The Ohio River separates their hometown of New Albany IN from Louisville KY. Matt Myers, Katie Toupin, Shane Cody and Zak Appleby formed the band in late 2011. Together they create colossal electric-American songs with bouncy half-time beats and punchy guitar riffs. They all like to sing, sometimes at the same time.
It's hard to pinpoint the moment that songs are born, the day casual hummers become singers or scribblers become songwriters. Rayland Baxter certainly can't, and he wouldn't want to. Though he grew up in Nashville to the sounds of his father's pedal steel, he didn't dream of being a rock star. He loved music, of course, but he liked other things, too: being outside, playing sports, working at the bait shop to make spare change. He'd always just let things settle into place naturally, following his gut from Tennessee to Colorado to Israel and back again, not knowing that when he returned home he'd have a handful of songs and the knowledge that, at the end of the day, he didn't want to do anything else but make music. He leads a life without reigns, his work always echoing the ease in which it came to be.