Honk-tonk musician Christopher Seymore will release his album King Of Nothing and celebrate with a party at The Heights Theater on Saturday, May 3 with friends and collaborators The Broken Spokes and Sam Turner & The Cactus Cats opening the show.
King Of Nothing will be available for streaming, purchase and on vinyl on Friday, May 2.
“I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” says Seymore. “I feel like all the other songs that I wrote that I don’t play, all the other attempts at making records, all of that stuff, it brought me to this point where I’m truly at peace with this.”
Seymore and his band have been really refining their sound since 2022 with their weekly Hornitonk Tuesday series at Shoeshine Charley’s Big Top Lounge. Currently, the weekly series is being held at the larger Continental Club as the small and whimsical venue has been closed for remodeling but will re-open in May with Hornitonk Tuesdays returning home.
“Some of those recordings existed before Tuesdays ever happened,” says Seymore of the tracks on King Of Nothing, many of which do get played on a weekly basis. Seymore, who prior to forming his Western Cosplay band had been making music on his own and with various projects, viewed his weekly series as a way to form a dependable band.
“How do I find players? How do I create a situation where I have a band ready to go all the time?” When Seymore began his weekly series, he was coming out of a break from playing music and refocusing his efforts not only on creating a new sound rooted in classic country but also building up a community in Houston of likeminded players and songwriters.
King Of Nothing is the result of not only Seymore’s 25 years of playing, but more specifically the last almost three years of gigging regularly, hitting the road, focusing on his songwriting and holing up in pedal steel wizard and the album’s producer, Kevin Lee Skrla’s Wolfe Island Recording Co in Dayton, TX.
The songwriting team crafted instant ear worms like their single “High Life.”
Seymore, Skrla and drummer Avery Davis started out with 22 songs which ended up being split into King Of Nothing and an additional album set to be released in the future.
“This one just felt right together if that makes sense,” says Seymore. “To me it’s a traditional album. It’s got a little bit of everything in it. It covers the gamut of a lot of the genre that I love and I think it represents a wide range of eras too.”
King Of Nothing captures the atmosphere at Seymore’s Hornitonk Tuesdays with cheating songs, traveling songs and drinking songs that all tell good old-fashioned stories of heartache and longing while encouraging boots to hit the dance floor.
“Obviously I teared up the first couple of times I heard it. It just sounds right like it’s supposed to be. I don’t think I cut any corners, and I think every song holds up. It’s been nice to know that as of next week that it’s done. It’s out on its own and it’s alive in the world.”
Seymore knows he couldn’t have achieved his goal without the help and shared vision of Skrla and Davis. The trio recognizes each member’s dedication to the project and pump each other up.
“To have someone busting their ass all the time, how can you not give 100 percent? We tend to fuel and fire up each other which I think is part of what makes this work and we’re dreamers. We always dream big.”
“Forming this band with Christopher and helping produce this album, behind the mastermind Kevin Skrla, has been an amazing process,” says Davis. “Coming into this, Christopher and Kevin already had such a strong sense of identity, direction, and aesthetic for this album. They had already been slowly piecing it together for some years.”
The album release show is a great way for Seymore and his band not only to shed a light on what they’ve done musically but also a way for their friends and collaborators to come together and embrace the community they have worked to hard to uplift keeping Houston Horni one gig at a time.
Christopher Seymore & The Western Cosplay will perform with The Broken Spokes and Sam Turner & The Cactus Cats on Saturday, May 3 at The Heights Theater, 339 W. 19th. Doors at 7 p.m. $18.50.
