It’s easy to imagine that some of the best songs are never heard by anyone other than those who created them. With their latest project, Working My Way Down due out on March 24, Mike Stinson and Johnny Irion took on the task of making sure that their departed friend Andy Jones’ songs would be heard.
“He was just such a great writer,” says Stinson. “He wrote better songs than we did by a mile and he wrote all those songs with us in mind and he basically gave them to us as a gift. Those songs would have just been lost to history if we hadn’t recorded them so that was part of our mission.”
Mike Stinson and Johnny Irion will be performing as a trio along with bassist Dave Hennessy Phenicie at The Continental Club on Friday, February 25 for the album release party. The trio will be supported by Luba Dvorak who opens the show.
Stinson and Irion have a long history of making music together starting in the ‘90s in Los Angeles where both players were recruited by Chris Robinson of The Black Crowes to be part of a project with Irion on guitar and Stinson on drums.
The two hit it off and started their own band which by their own account changed names frequently but most often than not was known as the Space Heaters. “We didn’t strike gold but we played a bunch of gigs around Hollywood for a couple years and we cut our teeth as songwriters,” says Stinson.
The two bonded not only over musical taste, but their ability to harmonize with one another, a skill Stinson admits few singers have when matching his singing style. Stinson, who worked with Jones side by side for three years in the tape room at Polygram Music Publishing, also struck a deep friendship with Jones.
Though Jones came from a different musical background, playing in his progressive rock band Bigelf, he wrote a number of songs that he gifted to the Space Heaters. The songs sat unrecorded until during the Covid shutdown, Stinson made it to Irion’s home studio in Massachusetts where after working on a few singles, the two decided to finally give these songs their due recording them on a 24 track two inch tape recorder purchased by Irion from Jackson Browne.
“He’s kind of the ghost writer on this album because we did five of his songs on this record. Andy Jones was our secret weapon,” says Stinson of his friend. “He was just such a great writer and he wrote better songs than we did by a mile and he wrote all those songs with us in mind.”
Working My Way Down is a wonderfully rich album that shows off not only the late Jones’s songwriting skills, but also Stinson and Irion’s writing talents as well as their knack for balancing off of one anothers distinct sounds with Stinson bringing the laid back country sound and Irion adding a rock and roll flare.
The project also allowed Stinson to get back behind the drum kit, a place where he hadn’t been in ages but where he feels right at home. “I got away from playing drums because I got into singing and writing my own stuff but drums was my first instrument and it’s still the instrument that I know the best so Johnny has gotten me back into it here in the last couple of years.”
“This is the X factor between us,” says Irion of Stinson’s playing describing Stinson not only as his friend but one of his favorite songwriters.
“We are very different writers no doubt about it but we have good chemistry. We make a good team because his strengths are my weaknesses and vice versa,” says Stinson. “Right away we just had a good musical chemistry going on before we ever sang a note together. We played well together and so we’ve picked up where we left off here in the last couple of years and all that chemistry is still there.”
That chemistry is palpable on Working My Way Down. Watching the two pal around while recording Jones’s “The Bottle And Me” it’s clear these two picked up right where they left off and have one of those friendships where time seems to have paused allowing them to pick up where they left off only with more experience now.
“We just took the liberty to let things grow and do their own things and experiment,” describes Irion explaining how both men decided to scrap how they used to do the songs and instead open their creative space to new approaches.
“That was like a lightbulb that went off when we started doing it. I was like this is going to be much cooler than I had anticipated so it was pretty intense,” he says of revisiting the older songs. The trio has been performing them every Saturday at Austin’s Continental Club for their month long residency where they describe getting emotional initially as they played them for the first time.
“We just didn’t know how it was going to turn out but we left enough room for the spirits to walk in and it worked out that way.”
Mike Stinson and Johnny Irion will perform with opener Luba Dvorak on Friday, February 24 at The Continental Club,3700 Main. 9 p.m, $17-27.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
