Quality Americana

Kyle Nix & The 38’s “Close the Bets” is one of the wildest releases on the Americana Music Association singles chart and features some of the fiercest guitar picking we’ve come across this year.

The runaway-freight-train feel of the drum beat and lead guitar in this recording are softened with warm harmonies that bring us back to 90s country gold as our narrator faces the ups and downs of a relationship.

“Poison in her tongue, now she’s coiled for war,” Nix sings. “Sleep on a bed of nails after dark with eggshells at the bedside floor… But I can’t carry on just living this way. No matter what you say, baby, I’m gone.”

At this break we hear an unbelievable guitar solo that reminds us of Hank Williams III’s albums in the early 2000s. The song could easily be a bluegrass number with mandolin lines in a different universe. The combination of soft and sharp notes really forces the tense feeling Nix must have had while writing “Close the Bets.”

“I used a paper and pen for therapy,” Nix said in an interview with Rolling Stone. Nix, raised in Perry, Oklahoma and fiddle player for the Turnpike Troubadours, was facing divorce as he penned After the Flood. “Having problems in my marriage can be, by itself, an intense ball of fire. On top of that was the uncertainty of what was going to happen in my life: The Troubadours had stopped playing. Covid had hit the world. It created kind of a vacuum, where I just had to pull myself into the void of writing and just write, and write, and write about what I was going through.”

Nix is currently on tour with the Turnpike Troubadours. More information on Kyle Nix can be found here.

Press photo distributed by Kyle Nix Music.

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