Introducing Horsetail: Four Horses EP Review
- Anna-Kay Reeves
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Words by Anna-Kay Reeves
Photos by Katelyn Gummere
Alt-folk band Horsetail is taking the guardrails off the folk genre. Scrap the harmonies, keep the grief, don’t pull any of anger’s punches. The band’s first EP, “Four Horses”, is all about reckonings — with sexuality, with politics and with loss, within the larger reckoning of what it means to be from Texas: “But to kill a mockingbird, you must use a gun. If you think that sounds fun, well then the point is moot. I’m already trampling bluebonnets in my cowboy boots.” In its debut, Horsetail negotiates space for itself and its listeners to come to terms with social ills and personal grief, thereby creating a new, emotionally intelligent space in country rock.
Austin acts like Pelvis Wrestley, Next of Kin and now Horsetail are reinterpreting country music not into queer country, but into country music that doesn’t ignore queerness. Horsetail lends a less cynical meaning to the concept of the “performative male” when they get onstage and play their debut single, “Texas Bisexual Blues.” Truth be told — the truth they tell — masculinity is a drama that doesn’t exist outside performance. Sentimental piano and acoustic guitar mingle and meld with a harder twang while the amplified instruments sing the part of bitterness. “I wanna kiss all sorts of men and hold tight to women, too. Call it what it is, the Texas Bisexual Blues.”
The songs on “Four Horses” were written by lead vocalist and born-and-raised Austinite Riley Hamilton (he/they) as a way to navigate a difficult emotional landscape of graduate school out of state, compounded by COVID and further compounded by an illness close to home. “One month into lockdown, my mom was rediagnosed with cancer, and it was a horrible, brutal time,” Hamilton said. Six months after moving back to Austin, Hamilton’s mom died.
The specificity of unvarnished grief in “Dollhouse” makes the song feel as personal as reading a journal entry: “And my mother was sick from the day I turned 18 / Yeah, adulthood’s been highways and learning about disease. As if life wasn’t hard enough before / I learned too young what memories are for.” Performing such personal music as a band requires a shared understanding of the value of bearing your heart. Hamilton found that in Horsetail bassist Henry Smith (he/him), guitarist Jake Morgan (he/him) and drummer Christian Haddad (he/him).
Each member brings their own flavor to the band, but the collaborative playlist of musical influences they made for me shows a shared appreciation for raw emotion. “Horsetail Heroes” is chock-full of masters in the art of emotional reckoning: Lucinda Williams, Leonard Cohen and Sufjan Stevens.
The godlike status of the Sad Song™ in country and folk music is something of a joke, but we need sad music because misery doesn’t just love company; healthy misery needs it. Pain is less corrosive when it’s seen and felt by others. Sad art is an essential way to validate our worst experiences and move past them. On playing songs inspired by their personal grief with a band, Hamilton said, “You know, I think it adds a togetherness that can turn something that is bitter and ugly and painful and terrible into something that is shared, and others can hold some of that weight.”
Before the EP was recorded, Hamilton found community in guitarist Jake Morgan, who is also a songwriter. “Riley played some of the songs he'd written, and I felt a real connection and kinship with the lyrics. I write my own stuff too, and I'm trying to bring the personal element to sort of the bigger situation that we're in. I feel like specificity sometimes can be universal in a lot of ways. The things that matter to us matter to other people, too,” Morgan said.
To Morgan’s point, the specifics of everyday life put personal grief in a context everyone can relate to on “Four Horses.” The opening of “Texas Columbine” — “The flowers in the vase are moldy / A beauty only a cockroach could love / And I cannot decide what to do with them / I’m no different than the bugs” — runs parallel to the scene-setting lines in “Angel from Montgomery” — “Flies in the kitchen / I can hear them buzzing / and I ain’t done nothing since I woke up today.” After all, aren’t we all just having an existential crisis at the red light?
Horsetail members’ empathy and identification with one another is almost surprising in the context of music culture dominated by lead musicians who play with a band under their own name. For the members of Horsetail, creative leadership means holding space for the next member’s contribution. Drummer Christian Haddad quipped, “Even though Riley and Jake have so far been the ones to bring a song’s foundation, like when I start drumming on a thing that [they] brought, and I say, ‘I picture the song like this’, no one says, ‘Hey, you suck.’”
There was perhaps no greater test of the band’s collectivist spirit than the addition of bassist Henry Smith one week before “Four Horses” was recorded. Smith described his initial hesitation when asked to join the band, “Am I just latching on or something? The songs had so much momentum. The band already had so much momentum,” Smith said. “But we still had space to figure out what we were together.”
Horsing Around
After learning the “Four Horses” track list in time to play on the record, Smith settled into Horsetail as the visual artist in residence. A designer and printmaker, Smith creates show posters and band merch, including the cute and campy Horsetail T-shirt. Fun fact: Smith enlisted each member to contribute a horse drawing for the shirt’s design. Can you guess whose horse is whose?
“That assignment showed the wide spectrum of what a horse can be. So I'm excited to conduct more experiments. And I think of merch and all the printed things as little artifacts,” Smith said.
Get in line for the next batch of artifacts and sad songs to lighten the load at Horsetail’s upcoming shows: December 4 at Hotel Vegas, December 10 at Carousel Lounge and December 20 at Friendly Rio Market.
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