T. Stevens

At a time when the entire music world, and country music in particular, continues to mourn the loss of Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, there still exist those artists and creators who share the musical spirit of these icons, if not their decades of real life true grit experience.

Among these is a "veteran newcomer" called T. (Tex) Stevens. A veteran because he's been writing and singing his songs his whole life, a newcomer because it's only since Cash's passing that he's been persuaded to commit these musical snapshots of his wanderings to recorded media for posterity.

A newcomer to professional recording, but a veteran of the deserts and plains of our great country, Stevens is the son of a California oilfield worker who was a cross between Indiana Jones and John Wayne. Larger than life, now also passed on to a better place, Stevens’ dad kept him in the sweltering Inland Empire town of Riverside each summer of his pre-teen life.

So it’s appropriate that Tex returned to the Inland Empire to record his debut collection and enlisted co-producers Kim Fowley and Roy Swedeen to keep him grounded, in the land of cactus and tumbleweeds, at Redlands International studios, once the site of hobo jungles and freight train riders' broken dreams.