Years ago, Houston raised artist Tony Kamel’s grandma Dolores gave him some sage advice. “Eventually, life starts to knock you around. You have to be ready to fight with a smile.”
Kamel uses these words as the root for his latest album, We’re All Gonna Live. Kamel will celebrate the release of his album with a hometown performance on Friday, May 2 at Dan Electro’s and support from opening band Supper Party.
“I was writing the songs for it that started to emerge and just reflecting on difficult things that I’ve been through and will go through and that my family will go through and I think it’s sort of a reflection of how I got through those times,” explains Kamel.
A little over ten years ago, Kamel’s father passed away. As his family would gather in the hospital, it was Dolores who, despite grieving her own son, would offer sweet smiles, embraces and words of encouragement to others.
“I’ve learned that you want to be overwhelmingly positive in everything but you also need to soak up the darkness too and feel it and accept it before you can walk towards a light when it eventually appears,” says Kamel.
In We’re All Gonna Live Kamel, his tight band and co-producer Bruce Robison were able to represent the pain and simultaneous beauty of life using Kamel’s soulful voice, stripped down instrumentation and rich lyrical stories.
“It’s a reflection of difficult things in life but I wanted it to be a positive record, and I hope it is.” Throughout every story Kamel sings on We’re All Gonna Live, the importance of smiling in the face of adversity and rising above it all is the central theme.
The intimacy of Kamel’s stories are captured and deepened by the approach he and Robison took to recording, a process documented in videos released for various songs on the album recorded at Robison’s Lockhart studio, The Bunker, where Kamel recorded his previous album.
“Everything was just smaller,” says Kamel comparing We’re All Gonna Live to his 2021 release Back Down Home. “It was a smaller band, we didn’t have horns, we didn’t have electric guitar,” says Kamel describing how they used electric mandolin to convey the feeling of an electric guitar. “I wanted something that I could recreate.”
True to Robison’s all analog approach, Kamel and his band of fabulous players stood together in one room to really hone in on the feeling of connecting to one another and the message behind the songs.
“He has really made me demand more of myself from a songwriting perspective,” says Kamel of working with Robison. “He has made me really hold myself to a higher standard songwriting wise and that’s just by him leading by example not him telling me my songs suck.”
“I wanted this record to be tied up into a bow,” says Kamel. “I wanted it to feel like a journey. I wanted it to feel cohesive and connected but I also wanted it to have varying soundscapes and I think we accomplished that and we did it all live.”
When performing live, Kamel admits he likes to turn up the volume a bit and his hometown show will be no different.
“We are playing Dan Electro’s and people go there to see an energetic show I think so we’re going to turn up the energy a little bit. We’re going to do these songs, some of them exactly how they were done on the record, and some of them we will change up just slightly to make it more cohesive to the room but it’ll be fun,” says Kamel hinting at a surprise guest for the Houston show.
Since starting with his Grammy nominated Wood & Wire band in 2011, Kamel has increased his audience with the band and his solo career.
“I’ve managed to grow the Houston audience in the last couple of years. Honestly, the foundation of the Houston audience is just my friends and family that have been supporting me for many years and the growth outside of that still stems from those people and they spread the word to their friends and we kind of make it a reunion whenever I do stuff like this and its awesome.”
Tony Kamel will perform with Supper Party on Friday, May 2 at Dan Electro’s, 1031 E. 24th, 8 p.m. $20.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
