I Got Your Medicine, Real Alligator
Y’all know, I love hidden connections between seemingly disparate things. So I wanna share a little secret connection between our now classic recording. I got your medicine, which is arguably the first and defining version of the swamp pop driven Shinyribs lineup featuring Tijuana train wreck horns and the shiny soul sisters. We recorded this album in January 2016 as far as I can remember. I’m not great with dates and of course, I don’t write things down—I just remember them as best I can. But as far as I remember, it was January-February 2016 and the record came out in 2017. Which began a little run there where we won album of the year band of the year for a couple years running. Within this time we made Kringle Tingle, our Christmas record. Which led to an opening slot on Robert Earl Keen’s 2019 Christmas Tour.
I remember writing, Real Alligator the title track of our newest record due for release later this year, in my free time after the recording sessions for I Got Your Medicine.
I loved the song as soon as I read it. It just all came together so easily and perfectly, and it was a great story loosely based on a friend of mine and local music writer, Mike Smith. He told me a story as we sat in the Poison Girl bar in the Montrose neighborhood about a girlfriend of his who brought her new beau into the bar, knowing Mike would be there. He recounted the night with me with dialogue, including our own journey out to his truck to smoke a joint with the windows cracked. The alligator shoes and some other embellishments I added for aesthetics and effect.
It happens more often than not during recording sessions that I come up with cool songs. Part of me really wants to record that new song as part of the new record. I have done that before. I am struggling to remember any songs specifically. I want to say I did it during the Gourds run a few times. We made such long records, the Gourds, in the 90s when CDs or compact discs where the primary format that music was released on. And since it had such a long amount of time you could fill up, we just filled it out with songs. In hindsight, we should’ve made shorter records and more records. We could’ve made two records out of some of those full length albums. The first 2 had 16 songs on them each. They were essentially double albums. As we went on, we realized we didn’t need to make records that long, each time pairing it down to 15,14,13 songs. Till I think our last record, Old Mad Joy was 11 songs. With Shinyribs now I usually shoot for 10 songs. Especially in this attention deficit age we live in. We have the shortest attention spans in the history of humanity, coupled with an absurd glut of media churned out and spewed over the face of the Earth now with impunity. Suffice it to say, there’s more content created now than any one person could ever review in a lifetime. And that’s too much.
I’ve been hesitant to really go into it too much to let y’all know that the Tijuana Train Wreck Horns era is officially over. I will occasionally hire horns for gigs and they do appear on the new record. I’ll still record with horns sometimes if the song calls for it. But as a permanent feature and a stylistic foundation, that era has essentially come to a close. That was a special moment when things all organically came together and this Medicine lineup formed out of nothing. It was really kind of magical. We weren’t the best band, it wasn’t filled with the caliber of musicians as we have now in this Real Alligator band. This is by far, now the most talented band I’ve ever worked with. Truly, I can’t think of a weak point in the lineup. I’ve often joked that I was the weak link. In some ways, I am. I’m maybe the least educated musically. Y’all know I operate mostly the way the music feels because to me music is about feeling. Now in order to communicate music compositions among musicians there needs to be a common language. And that language I don’t know very well. I’ve learned it better working with “real“ musicians. But in the Medicine days, it was just whatever language I could use to explain it—I could play parts, I could sing parts, I could describe parts to the musicians and we would arrive eventually at a place we all agreed was good.
The plan originally along was to discontinue touring with the horn section through this spring. I had hoped they would be with us through jazz fest on this most recent tour. But Tiger‘s accident unfortunately derailed those plans. I did employ horn sections to cover the first part of 2026 gigs that were booked. And I’ve since made a concerted effort to communicate from my team, management and booking that we will no longer be touring with horns. We’re still in the process of cleaning up a lot of our little biographies that are floating around out there that reference a Horn section. That will take some time to matriculate out of the Internetosphere. It’s just the messiness, imperfection and the sloppiness of the Internet. It wasn’t thought out by the powers-that-be, how it would affect, Time + Commerce. But just so you all know that for your average Shinyribs show now it’s gonna be a seven piece band with no horns. That’s the operation— for this year, anyway. Going forward, year to year I can change that. Main reason being I want my freedom as a human being, as an artist from an ongoing commercial operation that relies on me keeping it alive through personal appearances. I don’t want to necessarily have to make a payroll 12 months out of the year. Because if I do, then I’d have no time for myself and this is why I am “the hardest working man in Shobiz.” I’ll be 59 this May—staring down 60 is a wrinkled eye opener. When I hit my 40s I didn’t think I had much time left to be relevant with my music career. I felt like I had wasted some time in the Gourds when I could’ve been making solo records and pursuing my own personal music career. So I hit it hard making up for that perceived lost time and that is what Shinyribs was then. In my 50s I felt like I was gonna slow it down a little bit, but I didn’t. If anything I did more and worked harder, what was I gonna do, say no to offers? So I’m telling myself the same thing about my 60s. I want to enjoy my life a bit more with a better work/life balance. Easier said than done, of course. I love my work. I love all of you for being here and supporting me in this work. I trust that you all get something of value from what I create. And that is literally me living the dream I had as a boy. A dream that I’ve spent a lot more time reflecting on, lately. It is not lost on me how unlikely it was and the small minor miracle that it actually did. Again, thank you so much for being here and thank you for encouraging me to continue with this thing called Music. You make me feel like a Real Alligator
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