There’s a particular kind of musician who doesn’t just love old music — they understand why it worked. Mikey James is that musician. As the co-founder of New York-based Singing River, he’s spent years digging through 78s and handwritten scores the way a scholar digs through archives, not to preserve something under glass but to figure out how it breathes. Shoutin’ Good Time, the band’s new four-track EP, is the sound of that understanding put into motion.
The band has grown considerably since their 2024 full-length Talkin’ Destination Blues, where James and co-founder Anthony Kuhn recorded primarily as a duo. Here they arrive as a six-piece, adding Evan Dobbins on trombone, Jeremy Stoner on electric bass, Pete DeLoe on guitars, Tommy Formicola on pedal steel, and Christos Dembeyiotis on drums for two of the four tracks. The expanded lineup isn’t window dressing. It’s the whole argument.
“Lost by the River” opens the EP with twangy guitar tones and a harmonica that earns every second of its presence — a No Depression anthem built on the tension between staying and leaving. “We got the highway blues,” James sings, and the line doesn’t land like nostalgia; it lands like a decision. The chorus builds through layers of brass and frolicking guitar into something genuinely triumphant, with the lyric “leave this old smug-town” sharpening the escapism into something pointed. Nickajack Cave — a real Tennessee cavern with a deep history — gets name-dropped as a place to be lifted out of, and the specificity does real work. This isn’t vague wanderlust. It’s a map.
The title track pivots hard into rollicking jubilance, the three-way pull of Nashville twang, Memphis soul, and driving rock giving the song a momentum that resists easy categorization. That’s the point. When James says the American song tradition is “literally in us,” Shoutin’ Good Time is his evidence.
“I Thought I Heard Bob Dylan Say” is the EP’s most formally playful track — a ragtime-inflected number that conjures Dylan, John Fogerty, Frankie Laine, and a nameless preacher as a kind of chorus of witnesses. Dembeyiotis joins on drums here, and the fuller percussion gives the track a revivalist energy that matches its lyrical restlessness. The invocation of Dylan isn’t reverence; it’s a conversation across time, exactly the kind of active engagement with tradition the band believes in.
Then comes “King of the Minor Leagues,” a rockabilly gem that does what the best nostalgic songs do: it finds the humor without losing the ache. The story of a teenage infatuation remembered across decades — “she gets close and you’re gonna freeze” — plays out over a driving backbeat that keeps sentiment from curdling into sentimentality. The reference to Dixie Lee Boxx in “Long Gone” lands as insider delight, the kind of lyrical detail that rewards listeners who’ve done their homework.
Produced by James and Dave Drago at 1809 Studios in Macedon, New York, and mastered by Rob Kleiner at SE Mastering in Los Angeles, Shoutin’ Good Time has the feel of a room full of people who know each other’s instincts. Nothing sounds arranged. It sounds decided. That’s a harder thing to pull off than it appears, and it’s what separates bands who understand tradition from bands who merely wear it.
B-Side Guys 
Leave a Reply