Moonpies hitting the road
‘Steak Night at the Prairie Rose’ recording a little poppy, kind of dirty
Mike Harmeier’s life is going pretty well.
He’s got a couple of days off before heading out on tour. And there’s a new album he’s been playing lately with the band. Harmeier is the lead vocalist for Austin, Texas-based honky tonk outfit, Mike and the Moonpies.
The band is currently touring in support of its latest album, “Steak Night at the Prairie Rose.” The album was released in late 2017.
“We recorded the album in April of last year and it took five days,” he says during a recent interview. “The most difficult part was holding onto these songs for so long because the album took some time to be released. I hate to ruin the songs before the record comes out. It was hard to not play them in the set.”
The album was recorded at Yellow Dog Studios in Wimberley, Texas, and produced by Adam Odor.
Harmeier went into the studio with Catlin Rutherford, Kyle Ponder, Preston Rhone, Zachary Moulton and John Carbone.
It was Odor who recorded, mixed and mastered their live album, which in turn landed him the gig helming “Steak Night.” This marks the first time since the Moonpies inception that Harmeier ever felt comfortable handing the reins over to someone else.
“Adam ended up just killing it on the live record, and I think we immediately knew that we were going to make another one together,” he says.
Harmeier wanted to keep the writing simple enough for the other members to join in on the record.
He wrote or co-wrote all but one of the album’s 10 tracks.
“The only thing I really wanted was for the band to just have fun playing the songs because I wanted the album to showcase the players on top of the songs that I wrote — just like the live record did,” he says. “I love that country music era coming out of the outlaw thing and going into the more ‘contemporary country stuff,’ where the production starting getting a little bit more poppy but was still kind of dirty. For me, that’s when things started to get really interesting musically, and I think this whole record kind of has that ’80s thing to it — probably because there’s so much Wurlitzer all over it.”