Jason Boland and the Stragglers Bring Their Best to Little Rock's Rev Room

by Julian Spivey

Julian Spivey Photo

Jason Boland and the Stragglers at The Revolution Room in Little Rock, Ark. has become almost an annual tradition for me – I’ve seen the group many times at the venue (and a few times elsewhere). The band’s most recent Rev Room stop was Saturday, June 13, after being delayed a month following the death of Boland’s bulldog, Gary. One of the first things I noticed upon the band taking the stage on Saturday night was that Boland has Gary’s name tattooed on his knuckles.

Boland and the Stragglers opened their Saturday night show with “Take Me Back to Austin,” one of the highlights off the band’s latest album, The Last Kings of Babylon, which came out in March of 2025.

The band would play four songs from that album throughout the night, with “Drive,” “One Law at a Time,” and “Irish Goodbye,” which came during the encore, also on the setlist.

When you go to a Jason Boland and the Stragglers show, you know you’re going to get a lot of the fan-favorites you’ll always hear, but that’s A-OK because you love them so much. You honestly probably wouldn’t want to go to a Stragglers show that didn’t include songs such as “Pearl Snaps,” “Comal County Blue,” “Dark & Dirty Mile,” “Gallo del Cielo” and “Somewhere Down in Texas,” which Boland actually joked he’d recently left off a set by accident and polled the audience if it was a song they needed to hear, which was a resounding yes.  

You can always count on Boland to throw in some beloved stuff that you may have heard live before, but not always. On Saturday night, my favorite example of this was “Obsessed,” off the band’s 2011 album, Rancho Alto, which was my introduction to the group. He also performed the rocker “Pushing Luck” off that record on Saturday night.

Stragglers shows always seem to ramp up in intensity as they go on, with so many of the fan-favorites coming in the second half of the show. The band will go effortlessly from “Pearl Snaps” to “Somewhere Down in Texas” to “Gallo del Cielo” and just keep things rolling with the best of their best through the end of the show.

My favorite moment of Saturday’s show was unexpected, mostly because I could see the setlist on the stage from my vantage point in front of it, and this wasn’t on it. Following a raucous performance of “Fuck, Fight, and Rodeo,” off 2015’s excellent Squelch, Boland turned to the band and informed them he was adding a song, which turned out to be Bruce Springsteen’s “Tougher Than the Rest,” off The Boss’s 1987 album Tunnel of Love, which is one of his greatest deep cuts. It might be my favorite cover I’ve ever seen live from any artist I’ve ever seen.

The band’s encore began with the aforementioned “Irish Goodbye,” before going into “The Bourbon Legend,” another frequent Stragglers tune, before wrapping up with “Outlaw Band,” which I have on at least one occasion in a review called the greatest set ender I’ve ever heard. It’s just one of those performances that is electric every time you hear it, with its wonderful lyrics, from Bob Childers, Randy Crouch and Layle Stagner, about a group of loners who form a band out of their mutual love of music, and its wonderful musicianship, which includes mesmerizing fiddle and mandolin numbers, currently played by Nick Gedra.  

I never tire of seeing the Stragglers live, but there was one little difference this time, and I have to assume it's on the part of The Rev Room. I haven’t been to the venue, one of my favorites, in nearly a year, but the sound on the vocals was harder to hear on Saturday night than I’ve ever experienced in more than 20 shows over the last 15 years of attending concerts there. Hopefully, it was just an off night for the sound system.