It’s no secret that the past few years have been an incredibly strange time for just about everybody on this planet.
Back in 2020 and into 2021, COVID-19 was in full force and it appeared that there was no end in sight as everything was shut down, and masking and social distancing ordinances were set in place everywhere you went.
The entertainment industry was hit especially hard, as all of a sudden venues were shut down and artists’ careers on the road came to a sudden halt – not to mention the ability to pay their band, crew and staff.
A lot of musicians used that sudden time off the road for songwriting, including Kyle Nix, fiddle player for the Turnpike Troubadours, and his band the 38’s.
Nix released a solo album, Lightning on the Mountain & Other Short Stories, in 2020. But shortly after that album, he formed his band Kyle Nix & the 38s, featuring bassist Bill Corbin, guitarist and vocalist Adam Duran, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Kevin “Haystack” Foster, percussionist Gabe Pearson (who is also a member of Turnpike Troubadours); and guitarist and vocalist Ken Pomeroy.
But during that same time period, Nix was going through the most difficult time period of his life. Not only did the pandemic have the world shut down, but Turnpike Troubadours was on an indefinite hiatus, and Nix was personally struggling with binge drinking that would eventually lead him to check himself into rehab in 2021.
It’s these experiences that ultimately led to Nix and his band creating their debut album, After The Flood Vol. 1, slated to drop July 28th.
Nix weighed in on the project, discussing his struggles when the pandemic first hit:
“I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t really have any other ideas, and that was a scary position to be in.”
He admitted he resorted to binge drinking, which ultimately led him to checking into rehab in March of 2021. And on top of that, his longtime friend and mentor, bluegrass fiddler Byron Berline, passed away, and Nix and his wife divorced in 2022:
“It was just a real strange time, because I just wanted to grow as a human being, and I didn’t know how to at the time.
There are things I didn’t understand, or I wouldn’t understand how I felt, but I could write about them. It was a strange thing with a lot of those songs, because they would just come out. It was almost like my subconscious was finding these things that were wrong that I needed to address, or ways I felt that I didn’t know.”
And all of these experiences have resulted in After the Flood, Vol. 1:
“We really just wanted to show what we could all do and that we were a unit together.”
38’s bassist Bill Corbin added:
“As a musician, I wouldn’t be interested or excited about a one-dimensional ‘divorce album,’ so to hear a record that’s as multifaceted as the subject itself is inspiring.
For me, going into the studio was all about being empathetic and trying to deliver on the feelings conveyed within the lyrics themselves. I think the whole band really did a wonderful job of just trusting their guts and doing justice to the songs.”
Through all of these experiences, Nix is grateful for his band, expressing how much the folks in his band mean to him for helping him get through this difficult stretch in his life:
“These guys helped me through a lot. The songs are there because I had people to get me through rough patches.”
