Reo Casey is a working musician in the Dallas / Fort Worth area of Texas. Singing and playing a few different instruments allows him to keep the bills paid by playing upwards of two hundred gigs per year. He performs with many different groups and the performances span a variety of musical styles. Getting to spend so much time on stage, often alongside great musicians, is an incredible musical training program. On any given night, an audience in Texas might want to hear Blues, Jazz, Country, Tejano, or Zydeco and that’s just naming a few styles popular with the locals. A working musician in Texas gets to soak up all these sounds. 

 

One Man Band is an album that is a direct result of this musician-for-hire existence in Dallas / Fort Worth. It is an album begotten of hours spent playing in dive bars, under drop ceilings yellowed by smoke, standing on stages soaked in Lone Star Beer. It is seasoned with Texas’ musical gumbo and it worships at the Mecca of guitar that is Dallas. 

 

Like anything else, being a freelance musician can be a blessing and a curse. Its benefits are legion but one of the downsides is this: backing up other musicians all the time can leave one wondering “what’s my own sound?” One Man Band is part of a mission to hone in on Reo Casey’s brand as an artist. With this goal in mind and because of the DIY nature of the project, this album is not a stadium-facing musical fusillade.

 

 It is the kind of music that is played in the early hours of the morning, to the last few bar patrons who still haven’t closed their tabs and gone home. This one-in-the-morning vibe doesn’t lessen the musical quality but it may frustrate some listeners who are accustomed to slick production and entertainment being priority number one. One Man Band might be the precursor to that kind of album but is itself intrinsically experimental and introspective. 

 

Reo Casey is the only musician on this album, except for longtime friend and collaborator Evan Runyon who contributed some percussion tracks on “Macabre Anachromatic Dramatization” and helped with the recording and mixing. Most of the sessions for this album were done at Reo Casey’s home studio, mostly on an analog tape machine and this album can be seen as experimentation within a controlled environment.

 

Despite its solitary making, One Man Band is also an album that is all about interpersonal connections. Every song on this album has a story. One Man Band’s closing song is a cover of the Little Richard classic “Lucille.” It was inspired by an incredible rendition of this song done by Nick Curran at a late-night jam session many years ago. “Henchman” was inspired by tales of Dallas in the late sixties and “Pistola” was a direct result of performing surf music one night and then going to hear a bebop jazz group the following evening. Whiskey & Coke comes from one of the bands that Reo Casey plays guitar in and this band’s bassist, George Guerin, mastered One Man Band in his DES Mastering studio. One Man Band is a hoard of musical bits and pieces, a cacophony of the echoes of people and places, and a mosaic of many disparate musical tiles. 

 

At the end of the day, One Man Band will hopefully stand alone as an enjoyable listen, independent of its backstory or conceptual underpinnings. However, these underpinnings also prove that this album comes by its weirdness honestly. While it may remind you of countless other albums or songs in your collection, it won’t make any of them redundant. One Man Band is a chance to hear something unique that could have only been made through a series of random events, chance encounters, and as a segment of a larger journey towards an unknown destination.