Haylee Ryan’s mural of the late singer Chadwick Murray. Photo by Jeffrey Liles
Corners, the sophomore album from Dallas’ Bastards of Soul, drops Friday.
It’s the culmination of years of painstaking work by band members who include bassist Danny Balis, the East Dallas guy you might also know as The Black Cloud on The Ticket radio station. If you’re a listener, you’ve heard Balis talk of his heartbreak, which seems to happen too much, most recently the unthinkable loss of Bastards front man Chadwick Murray.
As Balis discussed on air months ago and Chris Vognar for Texas Monthly details, Murray, 45, died in September of a rare autoimmune disease, just as his wife was giving birth to their son.
“Father and son never got to meet, though they were in the same hospital, one leaving this world, one entering,” Vognar writes.
The Corners record-release show is this Saturday (March 12) at The Kessler in Oak Cliff. It marks a major accomplishment for a band that took this project exceedingly seriously, according to Balis, who says every member was getting better as they worked on it, that much motivation came from the fact that they now had Murray, a singer with the X factor who could so command the stage.
About three weeks before entering the hospital, Murray recorded his final vocals for Corners.
Vognar calls the album “a true rarity: an original throwback soul album, written by the band, harking back to the sounds of Memphis and beyond.”
He calls out a line from a song:
“I need you to hear me when I say goodbye. Come Around.”
“The line that now resonates with newfound poignancy,” Vognar writes. “The Bastards aren’t sure if there is still a band, or what form it might take.”
Danny Balis also was roommates and band bates in Sorta with the late Carter Albrecht, who was shot and killed in 2009 by an East Dallas homeowner who mistook him for an intruder. Sorta founder Trey Johnson died a few weeks ago at age 52.
Tickets to Saturday’s show here. It also is a fundraiser for the Murray family.
