Premiere: Joe Stamm Band prep debut album with hazy hangover tune, ‘Good Times’

We all have those I-might-still-be-drunk hangover spells. After downing the sixth or seventh Jägerbomb, and perhaps dancing on the bar to “Highway to Hell,” we’re left with nothing but shame and regret when the sun rises the next morning. Americana singer-songwriter Joe Stamm perfectly captures the high and the inevitable fall, one with a headache so severe even the slightest sounds rip through your skull. With “Good Times,” premiering today, Stamm was literally soldiering through his own hangover one day last year when the lyrics fell out of the sky.

“The birds ain’t been singin’ for an hour or so / The wife’s gone to work and the coffee’s run cold,” he sings, painting the opening stanza with a lonesome specificity. “And now everything I’ve ever done wrong / Keeps runnin’ through my head.”

Frontman of Joe Stamm Band, the self-proclaimed “black-dirt country” four-piece also comprised of Dave Glover (guitar), Bruce Moser (bass), Tim Fiers (drums), out of the mid-west, Stamm buries his vocal in the cold hard earth. There’s a sinewy, rootsy texture to his inflections, always evocative and drenched in a rock ‘n roll spirit. He carves around his words, and it’s never once overwrought or undercooked. It tastes just right.

“Pull back the curtains, draw up the shades / Breathe a little deeper, ain’t gonna give in today,” he later remarks on the second verse. Only a tinge of regret laces up his lips; instead, he simply observes the truth of the matter. “But a beer turns into a whiskey, turns into a call / And my jaw keeps swingin’ a little wider with every time I talk.”

On the song, Stamm writes to B-Sides & Badlands over email, “Hangovers have never been an excuse for me – I’ve always tried to push through them and force myself to be productive. That’s what I was doing one day last year,” he says. “I was sitting on a bench at the gym, starin’ at my sunken eyes in one of those mirrors they have wrapped around the walls in them places, and I thought, ‘The good times are running me down…they’re keeping me down.’ I immediately got up, drove home, pulled the blinds and wrote [this song]. This is one of them pounding headaches, blankets over the windows, watching reruns of Cheers, what am I doing with my life kinda songs.”

“Good Times” anchors Stamm’s forthcoming debut album, The Good & The Crooked (& The High & The Horny), slated for September 25. If “Good Times” is any indication, we are in for a real treat.

Listen below.

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