“Eventually, life starts to knock you around. You have to be ready to fight with a smile.” Tony Kamel’s grandmother Dolores gave him that advice a few years ago during a rocky period for their family, and its wisdom suffuses his sophomore solo release, We’re All Gonna Live, out now on Blue Corn Music.
Variations of the lyric “we’re all gonna die” appear in many of the album’s ten tracks, but make no mistake: this is not a bummer of a listen-quite the opposite actually. The former frontman of GRAMMY-nominated bluegrass group, Wood & Wire, Kamel knows how to get people up and moving, even with a decidedly smaller band than his last effort, Back Down Home.
We’re All Gonna Live was recorded live in one room in a few sessions at The Bunker, Bruce Robison’s all-analog studio in Lockhart, Texas, and produced jointly by Kamel and Robison. Its arrangements are sparse, but mighty, giving a little bit of extra life to Kamel’s already technicolor storytelling. “Each tune on We’re All Gonna Live is essentially a story about an inevitable struggle of one kind or another, but I tried to focus on the positive parts of those struggles,” says Kamel. The overwhelming theme of the ten-song arc is good times for the bad times. Kamel may be looking mortality in the eye, but that’s not about to stop him, or us, from having a good time and making it count while we’re here.
