Like so many of us, Jeff Mamett had to put family ahead of art. Though he began performing at 13, and worked hard at it all through his teenage years, he put music to the side when he and his wife had a family, spending 25 years working in the cattle business. Mamett’s time in the cattle business has clearly influenced his new album, Carry Me Back, his second since he returned to making and performing music in 2013, in its western, cowboy-flavored sound. On “Bing Bang Boom,” he sings “I never let a woman get a hold on me / Like a mustang on the open range.”
But there’s more to Mamett’s Americana sound that just cowboy country. In his time away from the music business. Mamett continued to listen to great artists like Guy Clark and John Prine, and he kept up reading classic American authors like Mark Twain, which you can hear in his music, too. And there are lines like, on “Jiggle In Her Wiggle,” where Mamett sings things like “Beyond metaphysical / I’d say it’s something mystical.”
Mamett plays bass on the album. Brian Wooten provides more than capable acoustic and electric guitar work, and Brent Wilson’s electric guitar solos shine. Wayne Addleman’s (Trace Adkins) pedal steel and “tick-back” bass and Tigar Bell’s fiddle lend country-fried sounds to the album. Addleman also produced the album. This is western Americana guaranteed to get you up in the saddle. Listening to Jeff Mamett sing on Carry Me Back is like being on a cattle drive down the plains along the Mississippi River with Ernest Tubb, Alan Jackson, and George Strait all rolled into one cowboy poet leading the trip. See for yourself, here: https://jeffmamett.com/