Country duo Muscadine Bloodline is made up of self-proclaimed “normal dudes” who cut their own grass and pick their own weeds and last year, found themselves losing their way trying to make it in Nashville. So the duo, made up of Charlie Muncaster and Gary Stanton, stopped and reassessed everything in their lives as they realized an underlying problem.
“We realized we were playing it too safe…and we are not going to play it safe anymore,” Muncaster, 29, tells PEOPLE. “We always have kind of toed the line between Texas and Nashville. But now, we’re going to be 100% unapologetically… Alabama. We are going to be exactly who we are and who we want to be.”
Of course, the predicament that Muscadine Bloodline found themselves in somewhere along the way to country music stardom isn’t that unusual.
Since breaking onto the scene back in 2016 with “WD-40,” the duo followed the country music playbook, releasing songs they thought would succeed on radio and somewhat shedding their gritty look in an increasingly buttoned-up industry.
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But then the pandemic hit, and along with it came a brand-new mindset.
“I think one thing Gary [Stanton] and I learned in the pandemic is that it’s okay to slow down a little bit and focus on what’s really important,” says Muncaster, who has been open about the mental health. “Our priorities changed a bit.”
“Nowadays, people can sniff those kinds of things out,” says Stanton, who alongside his bandmate released Muscadine Bloodline’s debut full-length albumBurn it at Both Endslast year. “We wanted to sing songs about things that we have lived. That’s what the listener wants to hear.”
One of their tracks, “Dyin' for a Livin',” is the first of an entire volume of music to come from Muscadine Bloodline, a powerful volume of music that they ended up creating during the pandemic.
“There were no timelines,” says Muncaster of this completely creative time. “We just kept getting after it in order to find our true sound.”
In front of a fire pit in the backyard with no fire burning within it, the men of Muscadine Bloodline teamed up with songwriter Jordan Fletcher to write “Dyin' for a Livin,'” a song that serves as a lyrical explanation of the world they have been living from the moment they decided to give country music stardom a go.
“There are musicians like us all over the world who are killing themselves to chase their dreams,” says Muncaster. “It has a double meaning of sorts, but yeah, it’s about literally craving the chance to make this career happen and doing whatever it takes.”
“It sounds like a negative, but it’s so much fun when you’re out there and you are doing this every night, even if you’re taking 20 years off your life,” says Stanton with a laugh. (The two first forged a friendship with Muncaster back in 2012 when he opened a show for Muncaster’s band.)
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And as much as the song brings the party back to Muscadine Bloodline’s live show, it also symbolizes so much more.
“We’ve been doing this for close to six years now, and it feels like, to us, that we’ve been trying to figure out our sound for that long,” says Muncaster. “We’ve been doing a lot of experimenting, putting out a record and EPs and singles, but we have found a new direction. It feels like we’re making the music that we were born to make.”
“We’ve always moved within this industry with one foot in and one foot out of Nashville,” adds Stanton. “We’ve always kind of toed that line. And we are not saying that we missed the mark on our past projects, but this project is completely honest. We’re just really doing what we love. We are no longer solely thinking that ‘it has to sound like this to go to radio’ or anything like that. We are just concentrating on what we really want to do.”
Muscadine Bloodline will kick off their tour next month.
source: people.com
