Hi Ho, Six Shooter consists of 5 members including:
Justin Brown, Matthew Higginbotham, Steven MacLauchlan, Patrick Stinnett, Adam Tsai
Here is a biography written by our kind-hearted friend Mr. Billy Wallace:
Imagine, if you will, a New Mexican boom town immediately following the American Civil War, complete with deserted soldiers gambling and drinking in a dingy saloon. They recount their tales of battle to the women who work the brothels, telling them of lost friends and long gone lovers. Still with me? OK, now imagine that the Replacements are providing the house music for that saloon. If you can do that then you might have an idea of the sound that Lynchburg’s own Hi Ho, Six Shooter! has created with their new album, Empire.
As in the recent indie-rock traditions of artists such as Sufjan Stevens and the Decemberists, Hi Ho, Six Shooter! see themselves as storytellers and character actors rather than rockers. Every song embodies a different persona and a different folk tale. It is the difference in the approach to their balladeering, however, that this writer found refreshing. There are no college degrees or five-dollar words here. Instead, this is country-punk rock music made by boys who had barely outgrown playing cowboys and Indians when they suddenly discovered ideas of death and loss.
The band began one night when Steven MacLauchlan, Patrick Stinnett, and Jared Brown, all members of the former regional favorite indie rockers Born With a Tail, decided it would be fun to write some ridiculous country songs. The trio quickly realized that the joke wasn’t just silly, it was actually pretty damn good. A few songs were recorded, but the members’ prior obligations still took center stage, and much of the original material was discarded.
What did survive went on to become The Rough and Tumble Versions, the first Hi Ho, Six Shooter! EP. Shortly thereafter, Jared left to join to The Silent Press. Steven and Patrick continued writing songs, however, and eventually recruited Jared’s brother, Justin, to play drums for their next album. This album, Passing Through Just Like a Ghost, was the beginning of Hi Ho, Six Shooter! as we now know them. MacLauchlan explains “Before we started on (Passing Through) we talked about what we liked about westerns and decided to make our music more like a Clint Eastwood movie than a Johnny Cash song. So that's when our music started to get more narrative, and less ‘country’.”
And indeed, the music does become more narrative; from the ladies who work the bordellos in At the Top of the Stairs, to the spaghetti western horns of My Last Day in the Rattlesnake Territory, the boys spin a series of musical tales that would sound as much at home in a Charles Bronson shoot ‘em up as they would at a basement punk show.
Hi Ho, Six Shooter! took their songwriting to a whole new level of storytelling with their next release, The Battle of Mine Creek. “After (Passing Through) came out, we wanted to fully flesh out the idea of an epic so we recorded our 7",” MacLaughlan says. Based on an actual Civil War battle, Mine Creek became a landmark for the band. Although only a single, the song takes place in five movements, offering views from both Union and Confederate soldiers. It has the dynamics of a classic rock opera song while maintaining the simplicity of an uneducated soldier’s journal entries. Perhaps even more importantly, it opens the door to a much darker side of the band. And it helps further cement the band’s identity as storytellers rather than singers.
After the release of Mine Creek, Hi Ho, Six Shooter! expanded – both creatively and in numbers. Adam Tsai was added to the lineup to play trumpet and keyboards and Matt Higginbotham was brought in to play bass. Equipped with these new additions, Hi Ho, Six Shooter! set out to record a new EP, A Brief Discourse on Death and Dying; or the Gravedigger’s Muddy Shovel. As you probably surmised from the title, they took the dark side first explored in Mine Creek and ran with it.
Unlike their previous recordings, there is a grave tone consistently present on this EP, but it is underlined by a playful innocence. Beginning with the horns of the opening track, In the Desert Dawn; A Pale Horse, they manage to paint a picture that is both jubilantly sad and reflective (see The Trans-Atlantic Railroad Wasn't Built in a Day). It is sometimes surreal (The Fetters that Bind the Dead to the Living) and sometimes tragic (the surprisingly heartbreaking title track), yet it manages to never take itself too seriously, as epitomized in the rollicking bar room stomper It Don't Mean a Thang if it Ain't Got That Twang.
All of this musical evolution brings us to their latest opus, Empire. MacLauchlan explains, “Basically the new album is going to set the groundwork for a huge epic plot we have in mind. We aren't going to be totally lame like Coheed and Cambria or something where the songs make no sense unless you've read our comic books or whatever, but an overarching story will connect all (or at least most) of the songs. Since we're such a narrative band, we just thought it would be more satisfying to form a huge story around our future songs, and sort of create our own little world to pull ideas from. So I won't give away too many details (and truthfully, the songs don't either... like I said it's sort of subtle), but I will say that this album only really serves to introduce the characters and the location, and a little bit of back story. That location is a (fictional) city called Empire, New Mexico. The city is something like out of an H.P. Lovecraft novel, or Twin Peaks or something. It's prosperous and pretty to the casual viewer, but underneath all that is some seriously evil business going on.”
Upon listening to the songs, however, there’s a lot more going on in Empire then a just a creative back story. The production blows everything else they’ve done out of the water; it goes from absolutely huge to quietly contemplative in all the right spots. An even bigger (and monumentally more important) leap has occurred in MacLauchlan’s songwriting. This album is a collection of songs that function as a cohesive unit yet still manage to stand strong independently of one another.
The songs have also become more layered, not only in the production arena but in the actual attitude of the lyrics themselves. MacLauchlan no longer just creates a character to sing about, he is the character. He now places himself into the song whereas before he seemed like more of a first person reporter – like if the History Channel were hosted by a the front man of a punk band.
This becomes most evident on The Writer’s Confession, where the album’s fictitious characters and the band’s actual members are combined into one and the same. The characters’ regret meet the writer’s creative struggle in the lines “They say your eyes are the window to your soul/ Then mine are darkened ‘cause they’re hiding what I stole/ I have stolen, I am stealing, I will steal all/ the feeling ‘cause my songs are always cold.”
Despite this newfound seriousness, MacLauchlan still clings to the playful nature that first inspired the band – “Now that this band that started as a joke has somehow turned into something serious, I think the music reflects that, but stays true to the lightheartedness that was there when we started. Even though we might sing about people going off to hell (see The Big Black Train, The Revelation), it's done in a lighthearted fashion. Songs about betrayal and regret are so serious, that they're funny. So I still think of us as a joke band really... it's just the joke is more subtle. We write super serious songs about civil war soldiers making a pact with the devil in the woods so that they can live (see Snow Dog’s Final Ride). That's funny to me!”
Find out more about our releases by looking at our discography page.