Almost ten years into their career, Muscadine Bloodline have kept their foot on the gas from project to project. Gary Stanton and Charlie Muncaster, both hailing from Alabama, have created a sound and identity that their fans can recognize instantly. Blending southern rock, gospel, and red dirt country, they’ve honed in on a specific brand without ever feeling mundane.
“We just don’t want to make the same record twice. Let it be cool because it was cool, and let’s not try to double down just because it worked,” Gary Stanton said, considering the band’s creative process.
Their latest record, The Coastal Plain, released this past Friday, centers around their upbringing in Alabama and the characters that have played roles in their lives. Now, with their fourth LP, the pair and frequent collaborator Ryan Youmans have drawn on many inspirations from their past while focusing on building atmospheres and environments around the stories they try to tell in their music.
“We try to come in with a well-crafted concept without it being a concept record. We’ve gotten into world-building writing, and it’s more like building people to a place, and then there can be things that are very on the nose, but too, there can be stuff that’s a little loose,” Stanton explained.
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Although the marquee each night may only display Muscadine Bloodline as the duo, their creative team is much deeper than one might think. Producer Ryan Youmans was one of the first relationships the duo created in the music industry, and that one connection turned out to become one of the strongest friendships in music. “We’ve always been friends, and we kind of just operate on loyalty,” Stanton said of their relationship with Youmans.
On each record, they invite their touring band to record with them; Stanton remarked that it creates a more natural environment with everyone being so close and friendly. “We’ve grown with these guys. We just get all better, and then with our touring band playing on our record, they don’t feel pressure anymore. It’s just guys having fun making a record. And that’s all we want to do.”
Their 2023 album Teenage Dixie introduced a “world-building” concept in their songwriting that they’d been trying to develop. Harkening back to the early days of the Turnpike Troubadours, Stanton describes the influence that writer/frontman Evan Felker had on him: “Evan Felker is so good at world-building. Chris Knight, he’s one of my favorites. He just writes what he knows. He’s like, “they’re my short stories, and when I want to end them, I end them.””
During the development of Teenage Dixie, they developed a style of music that felt authentic and represented a direction that they wanted to continue into their next record. “It felt cool, it felt unique, it felt creative. And we expanded on that more, and we want to to chase that rabbit more. It was kind of a last record, like a proving ground for us to be like, Oh, well, that’s really cool. Let’s build some more ideas,” Muncaster stated.
Long before the Teenage Dixie and The Coastal Plains era, they released an EP featuring who is now maybe the most popular woman in the genre. Before Lainey was this mega-superstar, she was simply Stanton and Muncaster’s friend. “Lainey was my first friend in Nashville when I moved here. She hit me up via Facebook in the old days,” Stanton said.
In 2020, the duo released their EP Turn Back Time, which included the song “Pieces” featuring Lainey Wilson. After Little Big Town put the song on hold, Muscadine Bloodline decided to take a shot and record it themselves and invited to sing. Despite Wilson having her own smash hits years down the road, Muncaster says the bond they share and how it hasn’t changed, “She was the same person that you know now as she was when we were hanging out with her back in the day too.”
Now owning their own label, the pair have been able to put out authentic music, telling the stories that they want to.. Consistently putting out LPs, the journey of an independent act hasn’t always been as steady. “I feel like in the beginning of our career, we weren’t necessarily, like, geared toward albums,” Muncaster said. “Mainly because there was a lack of funds. In the beginning, we didn’t have enough money to put much out. You’re just broke.”
However, now, with many more resources at their disposal and once again independent, they’re able to take their music in whichever direction they want, whenever they want. “I feel like we have; it’s just as much artistic freedom as we ever have, and that’s one of the beauties of our model,” Muncaster said. “There’s no pressure from the outside.”
Now, with four albums under their belt, Muscadine Bloodline has no intentions of letting up on the gas pedal. Constantly working on music, the duo hasn’t announced any future plans, but Stanton did comment, “We have some cool stuff coming down the pipeline; we have the next record done.” With anticipation constantly in the air for their next album, it’s clear that these Alabama boys have many more stories to tell.
