Our guests this week are Gabe Dixon and Mike Mattison of the Tedeschi Trucks Band, the Grammy-winning roots ensemble led by Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks.

Formed in 2010, their debut album, Revelator, won the Grammy Award for Best Blues Album, and the group has since become one of the country’s premier live bands, selling out Madison Square Garden and playing more than twenty shows at Red Rocks.

Mike Mattison has been working with Derek Trucks for more than two decades. He joined the Derek Trucks Band as lead vocalist in the early 2000s  and became a founding member of the Tedeschi Trucks Band. He is also one of the group’s principal lyricists and co-wrote one of its best-known songs, “Midnight in Harlem.”

Keyboardist, singer and songwriter Gabe Dixon joined the Tedeschi Trucks Band in 2019. Before that, he led the Gabe Dixon Band and built a solo career of his own.  Within Tedeschi Trucks Band, Dixon has become a key songwriter, vocalist and instrumentalist.

The band has appeared on Austin City Limits, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel Live

NPR called the band “a deeply skilled and spirited ensemble,” while Rolling Stone has praised its “freewheeling, soulful sound.”

I got a chance to catch up with Gabe and Mike  to hear about their musical journeys so far.

Originally from Mount Vernon, Ohio, author Stephen Markley now makes his home in Los Angeles, California. He did his undergraduate work at Miami University in Ohio before being accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Simon & Schuster published his debut novel, Ohio, in 2018. The book was widely praised for its unflinching portrait of post-9/11 Rust Belt America.

In 2023, he returned with the massively popular novel The Deluge, a work of fiction about climate change that The New York Times named one of its notable books of the year.

Markley also works as a screenwriter in Los Angeles and was a member of the writers’ room for the Hulu comedy series Only Murders in the Building, starring Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez.

The New York Times Book Review wrote that The Deluge shows the range of its author’s gifts: “polyphonic narration, silken sentences and elaborate world-building.”

And none other than Stephen King called the same book “simply put, a modern classic. If you read it, you’ll never forget it.” He also named it as his favorite book of the year.

What a thrill it is to welcome such a profoundly talented artist onto the show, especially one who falls outside our usual realm of expertise. I think there’s a lot for songwriters to learn from this cross-disciplinary episode of the podcast.

Our guest this week was born in Birmingham Alabama but, just like Davy Crocket, got to Texas as soon as he could.  Dale Watson began his musical career playing the clubs of Houston before decamping to Austin and becoming a fixture in the Live Music Capital of the World.  The music machine in Nashville never fully embraced Watson’s traditionalist combination of Western swing and rockabilly country music, but he’s built a devoted cult following the world over on his own.  It’s a style of music that he calls Ameri-politan.

He’s toured with all the greats:  Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson.

He’s appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman, Jimmy Kimmel Live, and of course Austin City Limits.

He’s appeared at StageCoach, Bristol Rhythm and Roots and a host of other festivals.

The Austin Chronicle calls him their “local honky tonk hero”.

And Saving Country Music says that: Dale Watson is all about keeping the honky tonk traditions alive