Time flies. Just ask the lead guitarist for Richmond-based rock outfit Horsehead, Kevin Wade Inge, who recently stumbled across a videotape his mother had given him years ago of the band’s very first show.
“Right on the side of the tape, the date is September 24, 2004,” Inge says. “I looked down at my watch, looked at all the hair that’s missing from the top of my head, and I was like, ‘Oh, God, it’s been 20 years. We should do something about this.’”
That something is the quartet’s upcoming 20th anniversary show, which will take place at Starr Hill Brewery’s Richmond Beer Hall on Friday, Oct. 4. The local mainstays are leaning into the occasion with a Plan 9 Records pop-up, a local vendors market, guest performers and even a collaborative beer release: the Blood from a Stone Blood Orange IPA, which pays homage to the second track from the 2010 Horsehead album, “Before the Bright Lights.”
“It’s definitely a little lower ABV, so people don’t get too smashed right before we play,” Inge notes. Though lead singer and primary songwriter Jon Brown has a workaround. “They can just buy more of it,” he offers with a laugh.
The bespoke brew won’t be the only nod to the group’s back catalog. Brown says a retrospective set is in the works: “It’s a little bit of the entire period, including songs that aren’t recorded yet. It kind of spans the whole time the band’s been a band.”
Finding a lasting lineup
Being a band for two decades is no small feat. Brown and Inge are founding members, having rekindled a creative partnership that was paused when their previous group, the Dragstrip Syndicate, broke up. In the wake of that band’s dissolution, Brown decided to make a solo record, and when it came time to add lead guitar, Inge was the go-to. “I wanted the best guitar player I could find [and] I already knew him,” Brown says. “So I called him up.”
Despite early changes, Horsehead’s lineup, which is rounded out by the rhythm section of bassist Steve Chiles and drummer Ricky Tubb, has been intact for nearly a decade. Chiles joined up first, earning a spot by familiarizing himself with 30 or so songs for a gig that was a week and a half away. “Gregg [Brooks] was the drummer then,” Chiles says, “and I could have hugged him at the end of that show, because he’s the only reason I made it through… But it was fun. I think I became a member that day by accident.”
Ricky Tubb joined up less than a year later. Tubb’s contributions to Richmond’s music community are spread across multiple bands — including the Waking Hours, in which he sang and played guitar — as well as engineering work at Sound of Music Studios. “Me, Jon and Kevin have known each other a long time,” he says. “The Dragstrip Syndicate and the Waking Hours used to do shows together, so it’s really cool to be playing with them, especially for as long as we have.”
But time can be surprisingly subjective. “I [still] think about it like they joined the band like four years ago,” Brown confesses in relation to Horsehead’s two relative newcomers. Chiles is swift to remind him with a smile, “My kids’ age definitely disagrees with that!”
It’s tempting to chalk Brown’s chronological miscalculation up to his focus on the future. He rarely listens back to the band’s previous albums, in part because the next song is always around the corner. “I write all the time,” he says. “These guys see a fifth of what I write, because it’s just that’s how I view everything.”
A continuous chronicle
The majority of that writing is autobiographical. “There are the flags in life that ask for my attention,” Brown says, “and I write about those little things.”
Heeding those moments of inspiration has yielded a unbroken chronicle starting with 2006’s “Record of the Year” and continuing most recently with the bright and assured 2023 album, “Sundogs Dancing in the Early Morning Light.” Take a listening journey from the former to the latter and you’ll hear all the moods, milestones and shifting perspectives of a life led with deep feeling and introspection.
“I’ll be 48 this year,” Brown says, “and a lot changes in that time. Your 30s is such a discovery… You really come into who you are.” As a songwriter, however, Brown is still becoming his best self: “I always feel like the songs are getting better and better. So when there’s new things, I’m just so excited about the new ones.”
It helps when your guitarist is a wellspring of instrumental ideas. “I won’t say it’s as much as [Jon] writes, but it’s a lot,” Inge says. “I’m constantly pounding the texts over to him like, ‘Alright, I came up with this new thing here…’ It’s almost like exercise.”
“Kevin also keeps us on board with musical theory,” Ricky Tubb says. “If somebody’s screwing up, Kevin’s right there to be like, ‘Nope, you can’t play that.’” That 360-degree awareness has earned Inge the nickname of “Theory Trumpet” within the band. “I think it’s fun. I love those little nitpicky details,” Inge says.
When it comes to attention to detail, few instruments are more demanding than the pedal steel. As central as it is to the sonic fingerprint of country music, and as desirable as it is for rock bands looking to incorporate a little twang, the pedal steel is uniquely exacting — to master, to assemble and to play. It requires both hands, both feet, both knees and the gumption to discover which custom setup works best with your brain’s musical wiring.
Inge made that commitment during tracking for “Before the Bright Lights.” The song “Daddy’s Home” needed a pedal steel part, and Dan-O Deckelman, who recorded, mixed and mastered the album at his Snake Oil Recording studio, called in one-time member of the Jayhawks, Stephen McCarthy. “Stephen came in one day, sat down in front of a Fender Deluxe Reverb [amplifier] with a Sho-Bud pedal steel, and I got to watch him up close doing it,” Inge says. Suddenly, the instrument seemed more accessible. “I went out the next week and got myself a starter pedal steel.”
Horsehead doles out the twang judiciously; you’re likelier to hear Inge reaching into his deep bag of decisively rendered rock riffs when it comes time for a guitar solo. But Inge’s pedal steel adds poignance to tracks like “Rain Delay,” a lament from the 2018 album, “Pageant Wave.” In the song, Brown sings about an all-too-relatable sense of disorientation: “I don’t feel much like me.”
Songs with staying power
Like most musicians, the members of Horsehead didn’t collectively feel like themselves during the pandemic. They dabbled — to their disappointment — in software that enabled virtual collaboration. “That was the worst thing ever,” Steve Chiles exclaims. Even more precarious were the health difficulties Jon Brown faced around that time.
Brown had a stroke during the pandemic and experienced lingering memory issues — a challenge for any musician, let alone a singer who has decades of songwriting to pull from when performing. Before that, he had heart surgery to fix an aortic aneurysm. But Brown has taken those setbacks in stride, and he’s never questioned whether Horsehead would continue charging into the future. “Maybe I’m different,” he says. “I try not to analyze it too much.”
Brown is more apt to assess the group’s trajectory when looking at its 20-year run as a whole. There are the luminaries Horsehead has shared stages with: Drivin N Cryin, Jason Isbell and New Riders of the Purple Sage, to name a few. There’s the rare opportunity to achieve veteran status amid a thriving music community. “There’s always the young guys coming up and making really great music,” Brown says. “In some ways it’s sad to me to look around and see guys that I came up with not playing anymore, and then in some ways it’s satisfying.”
And then there’s the vinyl. Flip through bins in any Richmond record store — or Plan 9’s pop-up at Starr Hill — and you’ll likely find a copy of “Before the Bright Lights,” “Pageant Wave,” 2012’s “Sympathetic Vibrations” (with its glow-in-the-dark cover) or Horsehead’s newest platter, “Sundogs Dancing in the Early Morning Light.” The band has released seven albums in total, a body of work reflecting both detailed personal history and a shared commitment to moving forward.
“We all get kind of bogged down sometimes,” Brown confesses, “and you think, ‘Why am I doing this? I’m not selling out the National or the Anthem or whatever’ — especially at our age. But I’m super thankful that we get to make records.”
As you might expect, the next one is in the works. Brown is writing more than ever, and Horsehead is booking time here and there at different studios, diligently moving compositions from the point of inspiration to the point that listeners can hear them. It’s a modus operandi that requires little analysis, even 20 years in.
“All that stuff — it just happens,” Kevin Wade Inge says of the various stages of songcraft. “When it happens, you just try to do as much as you can.”
Horsehead will perform at Starr Hill Brewery’s Richmond Beer Hall on Friday, Oct. 4. The Atkinsons will also perform. Music starts at 7 p.m. Admission is free. For more information visit starrhill.com/richmond. To hear and purchase Horsehead’s music, visit horseheadmusic.com.
