“There’s so much style in playing blues. The new blues scene is kind of like guitar teachers. They’re great players, but it’s a different thing”: How the triple-guitar threat of the Texas Headhunters is keeping a Lone Star tradition alive

There’s a moment that happens between seasoned players when the song stops being a structure and starts being a language.

For Austin-bred guitarists Jesse Dayton, Ian Moore and Johnny Moeller, that moment came not at a rehearsed gig but inside a recording studio – Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Studio, in fact – where the three longtime friends threw down a few tracks with no real plan.

“I don’t think we had any idea what it was gonna sound like when we went in,” Moore says. “We just went in and started recording.”

What happened was Everybody Loves You, Independence Day and Maggie Moved Back to Mineola – three songs tracked quickly, with enough chemistry to stick in the back of Dayton’s mind long after they packed up. “I was putting out a solo record at the time, and I was like, ‘This sounds better than anything on my record,’” he says. “I was sold on it.”

The recently released Texas Headhunters, the eponymous debut album for a band they didn’t quite know they were forming, makes official an idea that had been brewing for a while.

“Three or four years ago, I kept bumping into Johnny,” says Dayton, a Beaumont native who’s split time between punk, outlaw country, horror-film scores and modern blues. “I suggested we get together with Ian, work on some tunes and just see what happens.”

Texas Headhunters - Maggie Went Back to Mineola [Official Video] - YouTube

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After that first session, the trio, who had shared many stages over the years (Moeller cut his teeth with the Fabulous Thunderbirds, and Moore opened for the Stones and Bob Dylan before forging his own soulful path), went back to their own lives and careers.

But in time, the pull of what they’d started, not to mention the decades they spent chasing each other’s leads across Texas, sent the trio back to Pedernales to finish the job.

“I remember me and Ian playing in Dallas together in Deep Ellum,” Dayton says of their early days playing the Texas scene. “We both sat there and changed our strings and talked about music, and all of us were hanging out and life was new and exciting. We were so lucky to have that kind of community to grow in.”

Texas Headhunters - Gimme Some Love [Official Video] - YouTube

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That community shaped not just how they play, but how they listen. On Texas Headhunters, you can hear three players working in conversation. All three sing, write and play guitar, but no one’s trying to outshine the others. When Moore goes celestial on Kathleen, stretching David Gilmour-inspired bends into the stratosphere, Dayton is there to bring it down safely with a descending slide run.

Cut in five days with no overdubbing marathons or perfectionist paralysis, the group’s debut leans into what happens when three lifers know exactly when to lean in and when to get out of the way.

“We weren’t sitting there beating ourselves over the head,” Dayton says. “We weren’t punching in over and over. We weren’t worried about scales or anything like that. This thing’s got a real loose kind of vibe to it.”

Texas Headhunters - Kathleen [Official Video] - YouTube

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Moeller’s pocket playing, Moore’s restless fire and Dayton’s sharp-edged swagger don’t cancel each other out; they sharpen each other.

“Johnny is steeped in this whole kind of Austin blues thing, and so is Ian,” Dayton says. “But Ian has a rock thing to him, this component that takes his playing to a different place. Then I have country and blues and those kinds of things. We’re all three in the same wheelhouse, but we are incredibly different. As soon as you hear the record, the guitar playing – you know who it is.”

That clarity comes in part from the way they deliberately steered away from overlap. The arrangements were built around contrast. If one of them opened up a tonal space, the others filled in from a different angle. “We tried to do contrasting things so we weren’t living in the same world,” Dayton says. “Sometimes we’d just let Johnny rip the whole thing. It’s a real coin toss, man.”

Texas Headhunters - Pocket [Official Video] - YouTube

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It’s not just in the songs with vocals where they stretch out. Instrumental songs like Headhunters Theme dip into looser territory. “On the instrumentals that we have, there seems to be this kind of ’70s, funky Jeff Beck thing that slipped in there,” Dayton says. “And I’m proud of that because I always loved Beck’s Wired and Blow by Blow when I was a kid.”

The result is a band that doesn’t rely on a shared ZIP code – Moeller’s in New Orleans, Moore’s in the Pacific Northwest – but thrives on the muscle memory built from years of watching the same players, coming up through the same rooms and internalizing the same unspoken rules about when to rip and when to lay out.

“Be it the Continental Club or Antone’s, you’d be in there watching a gig and Jimmie Vaughan might bop in,” Moeller says. “We were all three right there.”

That era left a mark. But these guys aren’t chasing ghosts, even if they modeled Texas Headhunters loosely after Showdown!, the 1985 album featuring fellow Texans Albert Collins and Johnny Copeland plus Robert Cray. Moore thinks the studious nature of some players today misses the point.

“There’s so much style in playing blues,” Moore says. “And the new kind of blues scene is kind of like guitar teachers. They’re great players, but it’s a different thing.

“To me, the blues felt like high art in a weird way. There are so many little things most people don’t know – what you don’t play, when you do play, why you play it when you play it. It’s really deep, and I think a lot of people lose that because the blues is such a simple form of music, they think.”

In Texas Headhunters, Moore, Moeller and Dayton play the kind of music that knows better. It’s not just how well you can play, but what you’re brave enough to leave out. That kind of trust only comes from time.

“When you play with different guitar players, you’re just pulling stuff out of your ass,” Dayton says. “If he’s taking a right, I’m taking a left. It’s fun to see where you land.”

• Texas Headhunters is out now via Blue Elan.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.