thedailytimes.com : Your 24/7 news source

Brendon James Wright has added a little firepower to his blue-collar roots-music songs.

When Wright last talked to The Daily Times, he was gigging as a solo singer-songwriter, working hard and paying his dues. Saturday night, he’ll celebrate the release of his full-length debut album, credited to Wright and his band, the Wrongs.

“I definitely think that, along the way, I’ve wanted everything I’ve written to have a full band,” Wright told The Daily Times this week. “I’ve always imagined a full band sound when I write, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. All of these songs work, because I’ve got a great band helping me play them.

“Barry (Hannah, guitarist) — he’s a tone hound. He can make anything sound right, and he really does an incredible job of jumping between genres. He’s a great blues player, a great jazz player, a great hard rock player. And that’s kind of indicative of everybody in the band — Daniel (Kimbro, the bass player) and his brother Cory (on mandolin) can both do it all, and Bones (drummer Mike “Bones” Allen) spent so many years with The MacDaddies, he has a lot of blues roots, but if you ever saw him, you’d think he was a metal-head.

“Not only does it work, it works better than I thought it would,” Wright added.

Playing with a full band is a refreshing change for Wright, who played roughly 200 nights a year in bars up and down the Cumberland Avenue “Strip” and Kingston Pike, and in bars and restaurants throughout the Old City and Market Square. With guitar in hand and a batch of hardscrabble Americana songs about hard-luck prisoners, melancholy lovers and the everyday people of blue collar America, he made a name for himself as an roots-music troubadour.

He’s been a songwriter for as long as he can remember, as soon as he learned to play guitar. It’s always come natural for him, and as he grew older and his tastes more refined, he found himself drawn to the roots rock of singer-songwriters like Steve Earle, Chris Knight and Darrell Scott.

Although the Wrongs is Wright’s latest foray into playing with a band, it’s not his first. A few years ago, a band he helped found — Stillshine — won a local radio station’s battle of the bands contest. The group fell apart not long after, however, but he has higher hopes for the Wrongs.

“I think it’s just that we like hanging out with each other,” Wright said. “That’s the main key, the most important thing — we have a really good time hanging out with each other, and we’d probably be hanging out if we weren’t in a band together. At the end of a day, nobody’s out to bring attention to themselves.

“I know I say that with the name being Brendon James Wright and the Wrongs, but if you see us play live or rehearse, there is no ‘look-at-me’ moment, and there’s nobody stepping out and saying, ‘I’m a badass because of this.’ Everybody just wants the songs to sound right. We just have a lot of fun, especially working up new arrangements and working new ideas out, challenging everybody to work their mojo and make it sound good.”

Already, Wright is looking ahead to the next record. Some of his best songs (including “Circle of Light,” a fan favorite about a prison inmate’s reflections on a life lived on the wrong side of the law as he lays dying from a guard’s gunshot) weren’t included on the group’s self-titled CD, although he’ll continue to perform them live.

“Given all of the elements involved, I think we did the best job we could possibly do with this record,” he said. “Everybody learned a lot, especially about the recording process. Personally, I’m still figuring out the best way to do it — how to record vocals and create a song from the drum tracks up. I feel like it’s a success, and I’m really proud of it, but as soon as you’re done, you sit there and say, ‘If we had done this,’ or, ‘If we had thought about this beforehand, we could have made it sound better.’

“It’s really exciting to look toward the second record. I have probably another 100 songs sitting around, and I’m working on another 25 that are unfinished. A good example of doing that is ‘Mason Brown,’ which was actually a song I wrote probably eight years ago. We had never played it as a full band, never talked about it or done anything with it. I was like, ‘Here’s a song; let’s do it,’ and when we started, it was a magical moment.

“We didn’t have to spend a lot of time working it up, and we didn’t have a lot of pre-ordained arrangements in our head,” he added. “It’s really strong moment in the record, as far as I’m concerned, and I think there are a lot of those moments on there.”