West Texas Exiles
“You can call me the West Texas exile,” Marco Gutierrez sings on “Exile,” the first song on the first EP from a group that calls themselves, naturally, the West Texas Exiles. Featuring five musicians who grew up in El Paso, Lubbock and Amarillo, the Exiles draw upon the wide-open western reaches of the Lone Star State with an Americana-centered sound that also taps into the members’ fondness for punk and emo, Tejano and Conjunto, Celtic rock and more.
West Texas Exiles arose partly from the embers of the Dirty River Boys, which Gutierrez co-founded in El Paso in 2009. The group moved to Austin a couple of years later and spent the past dozen years touring relentlessly, releasing a handful of albums, EPs and singles before splitting in 2023. The band’s drummer for its last few years was Trinidad Leal, a Lubbock transplant who followed Gutierrez from the DRBs to the WTEs.
The Exiles’ formative moment was a Dirty River Boys show in New Braunfels, which featured an opening act that included keyboardist Daniel Davis. Raised in Amarillo playing piano and organ in church, Davis toured Texas regularly as a sideman with Zach Wilkerson and Ryan Culwell but was also a budding songwriter. Davis and Gutierrez hit it off that night, passing the guitar around after the show and realizing that their artistic visions and musical talents complemented each other well.
Both Gutierrez and Davis had plans to make solo records at Studio 601, an Austin recording haven co-owned by bassist Eric Harrison. Raised in Lubbock, where he’d helped his father run the underground venue Tokyo Joe’s, Harrison moved to Austin in 2008. In addition to playing with indie-pop band Midcentury, Harrison helped launch an audio production company that the Dirty River Boys often hired
Gutierrez and Davis eventually realized their new songs were compatible enough that combining their sessions into a collaborative EP made sense. With a ready-to-go rhythm section in Harrison and Leal, they were suddenly a band. “It felt more right than any other project any of us had ever played in,” Harrison recalls. They booked a few shows in the Texas panhandle before making their Austin debut at, fittingly, a birthday bash for Lubbock’s #1 son Buddy Holly in September 2022.
Also playing the Holly tribute was Colin Gilmore, another Lubbock expat who’d been playing in Austin roots and punk bands for more than two decades as he followed in the footsteps of his father, renowned singer-songwriter Jimmie Dale Gilmore. (Small-world alert: In the 1980s, Colin’s mother sang with an eclectic band called Los Tornados whose members also included Exiles drummer Leal.)
Well aware of Colin’s West Texas background and extensive involvement in Austin music, the Exiles asked if he might join the band. “When I practiced with them, I discovered that these guys have so much of a similar background as I do,” Gimore says.
The band’s debut EP, Volume 1, came out in 2023. Gutierrez’s bluesy “Exile” and the early single “Monday Night” sidled up nicely alongside Davis’s “Charlie,” which recalls the classic roots-pop of the BoDeans. A key track is is the sweetly swinging country-rocker “Hotel Tomorrow,” which all five members had a hand in writing.
The band hit the Austin club scene running to support the EP, playing many of the city’s top venues and eventually nailing down a Wednesday residency at the legendary Continental Club. They also played prominent local events such as SXSW and Willie Nelson’s Luck Reunion, while making high-profile touring appearances at Nashville’s Americanafest, Braun Brothers Reunion and San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival (the latter backing Jimmie Dale Gilmore).
Meanwhile, they continued working in the studio, assembling 10 songs for a full-length debut to be titled 8000 Days that’s due later this year. Gutierrez, Davis and Gilmore all contributed songs; Austin country chanteuse Kelly Willis duets on Gutierrez’s acoustic heartbreak tune “Division,” released in May as a pre-album single. Gilmore’s rootsy rockers “Circles In The Yard” and “The Way We Are” help flesh out the band’s dynamic. Five songs come from Davis, including the exquisitely moody “Bright Yellow Sun” and the Mexican-jazz-tinged “Dark Desire.”
Expect plenty more from West Texas Exiles in the near future. “We all collectively have probably a full album, if not two” ready to go, Gutierrez says. “We have years of backlog that we’re just aching to get out.” Harrison concurs, noting that they’ve made plans to work with Shinyribs’ Kevin Russell and Jamestown Revival’s Jonathan Clay on some of that material. “There’s so much more music to go, it’s crazy,” Harrison says.
They’ll get to it all in due time. For now, they’ll take their cues from the Gutierrez tune that gave them their name: “I’m out here trying to outrun my fate, while I’ve still got my boots on my feet.”
