Jason Boland & Stragglers Bring Stripped-Down Delectric Tour to The Rev

by Julian Spivey

Julian Spivey Photo

Jason Boland & the Stragglers brought their excellent brand of red dirt country music or “folk music” as Boland likes to say to The Revolution Room in Little Rock, Ark., one of the band’s usual Arkansas haunts, on Friday, March 10 for a unique evening of their music in a stripped down fashion they’re calling The Delectric Tour.

This is the sixth time in the last 10 years I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Boland and the Stragglers, the last being in February of 2020 just before live concerts basically shut down for a year-and-a-half due to COVID-19, but it was a new experience seeing the band do an entire show acoustically. In fact, in all of my years seeing live shows it’s the only one I’ve seen done completely acoustic.

The band has made a few changes since the last time I saw them – guitarist Cody Angel is no longer in the band with AJ Slaughter in as the new pedal steel and guitar player. Maybe more importantly, Nick Worley is no longer the band’s fiddle player with Nick Gedra taking the fiddle and mandolin slot in the band. Both Slaughter and Gedra were amazing on Friday night as steel guitar and especially fiddle play a huge role in the Stragglers’ music. It’s terrific how Boland can find new members just as good as those of the past. The rest of the band featured bassist Grant Tracy, the only other original member of The Stragglers besides Boland, playing an upright bass this time with Jake Lynn on drums and Andrew Blair on piano.

The stripped-down version of the band’s music allowed them to play many songs they don’t typically play in their more raucous, electric honky tonk shows. Four of the first five songs performed on Friday night were ones I’m almost certain I’d never seen the band do live in my five previous concert experiences with them, including the show opener “Hell or Bust,” off 2004’s Somewhere in the Middle. The others were “Spend All Your Time,” “No Reason Being Late” and “Predestined” with my favorite of the bunch being “No Reason Being Late” off 2008’s Comal County Blue. Boland mixed in the raucous truck stop song “Truckstop Diaries,” which I had heard before.

My favorite performance of these stripped-down ballads that don’t usually find a space in Boland’s sets was “Obsessed,” a love song ultimately about not being lonely which was on 2011’s Rancho Alto, which was my first experience with Boland as a songwriter and performer thanks to a local radio station that played red dirt country at the time and featured multiple tracks off the album, which was new at the time, on air.

Despite being a stripped-down, acoustic show, the band really can’t be tamed all that much – though I’m a bit surprised Boland managed to remain seated on his chair at center stage the entire time. He’s a guy who likes to move around and kind of do a honky tonk shuffle with his boots while performing. Deep down they’re a hardcore troubadour honky tonk band no matter if their instruments are plugged in or not.

Boland fit many of his usual crowd favorites into the set like “Pearl Snaps,” off the group’s 1999 debut of the same name, which I consider a modern country classic (and the damn thing doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page).” The group also played “Somewhere Down in Texas,” my favorite performance of the evening, and “Proud Souls,” which wasn’t on the setlist but they performed as a request from a couple in the front row celebrating their anniversary, from the debut.

The band played a surprising amount of songs that weren’t on their original setlist, which I could see taped to the stage from my spot right in front of Slaughter’s Emmons pedal steel guitar. This shows the loose style of performance Boland and the band has. Among the songs performed off the original set was the title track from their most recent album, 2021’s The Light Saw Me, “Down Here in the Hole” off Rancho Alto and “Fuck, Fight and Rodeo” off 2015’s Squelch.

Other highlights of the show included 2011’s “False Accuser’s Lament” and 2013’s “Dark and Dirty Mile,” two regulars in Boland’s sets.

Boland took the opportunity on Friday night to debut two new songs for us: “Take Me Back to Austin” and “Truest Colors,” which were both incredible and have me wanting the group to get their next album out ASAP. If you’re a fan of the band I think you’re really going to dig these songs.

The group finished their main set with a terrific performance of “Ponies,” from their debut album, that led directly into the tornado song “Blowing Through the Hills,” which appeared on the band’s terrific live album High in the Rockies in 2010, which is one of the most epic songs the band does live and it being done acoustic does not change that fact whatsoever.

The band finished the evening with a two-song encore of the raucous “When I’m Stoned,” the entire Rev Room crowd shouting alone, before finishing with the quiet, sincere and fitting for the evening “See You When I See You.”

If there was one slight disappointment to the evening it was not seeing “Outlaw Band,” my favorite performance at every show I’ve seen them do previously, which they always seemed to end their shows with. It’s the absolute show-ender, but for a stripped-down night of music “See You When I See You” was probably the right call thematically.

Thomas Csorba (pronounced with a “ch” sound), a country singer-songwriter from Texas who looks incredibly young, opened the show for Boland and the Stragglers and he’s a performer you’re going to need to pay attention to. He’s released two albums thus far: 2017’s From the Foxhole and 2020’s well-received self-titled album and he’s working on another one. Many of the songs from his set on Friday night were new, and thus I didn’t get song titles for them, but they’re impressive and make me anticipate the album greatly.

Csorba’s stage presence was a bit funny; he talks a lot between songs kind of in an uncomfortable, anxious rambling manner. I found it to be winsome, not sure if the majority of the audience who’d likely never heard his name before did or not. I did think talking about how he’s heard great things about the White Water Tavern, another local Little Rock venue, which he said he hoped to play one day and see us there while at The Rev Room was a bit of a faux pas, but he’s young and again seemed a nervous chatter.

The songs he performed that have appeared on his albums thus far were all terrific, including “Walking Sideways,” “Green Velvet,” “Goodbye to Goodbye” and “Plastic Jesus (Reborn),” a traditional song you may know from Paul Newman’s emotional performance in the movie “Cool Hand Luke,” which Csorba added more verses and a chorus to to great effect.

Definitely keep an eye on Csorba. I think he could be one of the next big things in singer-songwriter country music that borders on Americana.