The Armadillo Paradox, the creative partnership between bluegrass aficionado Sol Chase and storyteller/former hip-hop artist Jared Huskey, are preparing to release their debut LP, Out of Gas in Oil Country, a ten-track collection of songs that gallivants between country, Americana, folk, bluegrass and alt-rock with soft lyrical styling and experimental acoustic instrumentation.
Out of Gas in Oil Country, produced by acclaimed sound engineer Charles Godfrey (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Ruston Kelly, The Mountain Goats), is a satirical vignette of a culture blinded by its own purview. The duo’s new single “Reincarnated Werewolf Astronaut” is a spacey & reflective ballad that features soft crooning vocals, ambling percussion and electric mandolin flourishes courtesy of The Greencards’ Kym Warner.
The Armadillo Paradox’s Jared Huskey about “Reincarnated Werewolf Astronaut”
“Reincarnated Werewolf Astronaut” was written on a brutally cold night in Albany, New York back in 2015. I had just seen Rocky Horror for the first time in the Palace Theatre and was inspired by its soundtrack to try to make a song that wouldn’t sound out of place if it was played at a Halloween party. Years went by without me ever revisiting the song, until Sol and I were jamming one time and I dug up the lyrics to “RWA” from one of my old notebooks. I’d written the song originally just on a piano, so I hadn’t ever heard it with any other instruments added. When Sol started riffing on mandolin over it, we both looked over at each other at one point and knew we had something cool. I was excited to be returning to this thing I’d written at an entirely different phase of my life, when I didn’t have nearly as many musical resources and was writing songs whose most hi-fi recordings were voice memos on my phone. Filling out the sound of “RWA” with Charles Godfrey and everybody was really nostalgic for me, but even more so, it was an elevating experience. We were taking an old song and making it sound a hundred times better than I could have ever imagined when I first wrote it.
Sometime in 2019, Sol and I went to a Robert Earl Keen show at John T. Floore’s Country Store and saw Robert’s mandolinist, Kym Warner, shredding on an electric mandolin. We were both blown away by it and Sol wanted to get an electric for himself to play. He reached out to Kym, who patched him through to an electric mandolin maker based somewhere in Africa. He ordered a mandolin from him and everything, but when covid hit, contact between Sol and the mandolin maker got less consistent and we were worried he wasn’t going to get the mandolin in time for recording. We ended up reaching back out to Kym and asked him if he was down to play his own electric mandolin on “RWA” with us, and–thank god–he agreed. Seeing Kym in the studio wailing on his electric, Sol and I were just completely in awe. This man had played with Robert Earl Keen, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and tons of others, and now he was here with us, going wild on this electric mandolin that sounds almost like a Les Paul, on a song I’d written about an astronaut reincarnating into a werewolf. After giving the song a listen, Kym, in his Aussie accent, just said, “That’s a twisted song, mate.”
Within the context of Out of Gas in Oil Country, “Reincarnated Werewolf Astronaut” is this wild card of a song that still manages to cover a lot of the album’s overall themes: death, love, failure, the feeling of expendability. The ridiculousness of the song can distract you from how depressing it all really is, because at its core, “RWA” is the story of a guy who dedicates his life to a dream–a dream that kills him before he can ever achieve it. He has this family he’s left behind, but it’s hard for them to miss him when he was never around that much in the first place. And even in the afterlife, this guy is cursed to just obsess over his unfulfilled dream forever, while his family goes on without him. As an artist, it’s easy for me to relate to the guy in the song: shooting for the stars, knowing that finding success as a musician can be about as rare as getting hired by NASA. “Reincarnated Werewolf Astronaut” is kind of like a drawn-out nightmare that’s rooted in one of my biggest fears, which is the fear of never being able to come to terms with my failures.
More here: https://solchaseatx.com/armadilloparadox