“I’m burning down the interstate,” Rob Leines sings halfway through Headcase, an album that finds the road warrior occupying the intersection of blue-collar rock & roll and outlaw country. Pulling triple duty as a songwriter, southern storyteller, and modern-day guitar hero, Leines fills his third album with tales from the fast lane, punctuating each song with amplified riffs and a voice sharpened by a heavy touring schedule. The result is a record for dive bars and dance halls, for highways and honky-tonks, for wheels that spin and and horizons that linger just out of reach. Headcase shines its light on more than surface-level road songs, though. Leines digs deep beneath the blacktop, delivering music about love lost, chances taken, and life lived between the mile markers. Songs like “Double Wide” still raise plenty of hell, but there’s vulnerability here, too — a sense that you can’t outrun your problems, even at 80 miles per hour. “Headcase is about doing whatever it takes to navigate the roads in your life,” Leines explains. “It’s about the things...
“I’m burning down the interstate,” Rob Leines sings halfway through Headcase, an album that finds the road warrior occupying the intersection of blue-collar rock & roll and outlaw country. Pulling triple duty as a songwriter, southern storyteller, and modern-day guitar hero, Leines fills his third album with tales from the fast lane, punctuating each song with amplified riffs and a voice sharpened by a heavy touring schedule. The result is a record for dive bars and dance halls, for highways and honky-tonks, for wheels that spin and and horizons that linger just out of reach.
Headcase shines its light on more than surface-level road songs, though. Leines digs deep beneath the blacktop, delivering music about love lost, chances taken, and life lived between the mile markers. Songs like “Double Wide” still raise plenty of hell, but there’s vulnerability here, too — a sense that you can’t outrun your problems, even at 80 miles per hour. “Headcase is about doing whatever it takes to navigate the roads in your life,” Leines explains. “It’s about the things we do to just keep on trucking.”
Before recording Headcase with co-producers Mike Harmeier (the longtime frontman of Silverada, formerly known as Mike and the Moonpies) and Adam Odor, Leines quit his longtime job as a welder and hit the road in support of his 2021 album, Blood Sweat and Beers. The record became his breakthrough release, earning Leines a year’s worth of gigs with marquee acts like Dwight Yoakam and The Mavericks. Night after night, he hit the stage with his power trio, mixing rock & roll bang with Telecaster twang. “After putting in all those hours and all those miles, we became really confident with our ability to put on a rock show,” he remembers. “That’s what this music is: it’s rock & roll with a cowboy hat.”
To capture the rough-and-rowdy spirit of those concerts, Leines and his two bandmates — along with guests like organ player David Percefull (owner of Yellow Dog Studios) and harmony singer Kelley Mickwee (a fellow Texas-based solo artist, as well as a member of Shinyribs) — headed to Wimberley, TX, where they recorded Headcase during short breaks between shows. “We toured for three months before we started tracking, and we went straight from a gig into the studio,” he remembers. “It meant our chops were sharp, and everything felt familiar.” For fans of Blood Sweat and Beers, Leines’ guitar playing — a mix of hybrid finger-picking, blues-driven rock riffs, slide guitar, and distorted chords from a customized Gregg Tele — will feel familiar, too. Every song is rooted in that instrument, with Leines firing twin barrels of fierce fretwork and heartland hooks. At the same time, Headcase explores new territory. The breezy, bouncing “High in the Cotton” draws parallels between turbine welding and music-playing, two on-the-go jobs that require workers to spend countless days away from friends and family. Having dedicated years to both careers, Leines delivers the song’s spoken-word verses in a deep, weary baritone that channels the exhaustion of a long workweek. Elsewhere, he pays tribute to his grandparents with “Goldmine,” whose funky, fiery riff nods to Jerry Reed. And on the hard-hitting “Black Lingerie,” he replaces the hard-charging speed of his earlier songs for a slowed-down swagger that sounds dark, driven, and dangerous.
Together, those songs turn Headcase into an album that blends roadhouse grit with juke joint grease. It’s the soundtrack for the sort of road trip that never really ends, and Leines has never sounded so dedicated to the long haul.
