---
"Izaak Opatz...understands the song’s pitiful core even better than the original"
- Rolling Stone
—--
Izaak Opatz’s (mostly) pop-country covers record Hot & Heavy-Handed is out today on Mama Bird Recording Co. Old Rookie went deep in an interview with Izaak earlier this week, and he also spoke to his local paper The Missoulian about the record. Standout tracks include Opatz’s stripped down, yet upbeat and irresistible cover of Dierks Bentley’s “Drunk on a Plane”; which premiered over at FLOOD Magazine and saw love from NPR Music, Rolling Stone and Glide Magazine; the jaunty first single “Going’ Through the Big D”; and Justin Moore’s “You Look Like I Need a Drink”. Opatz also adds covers of Lucinda Williams, Roger Miller and Tom T. Hall. With the fuzzed-out and raucous “You Made a Country Singer out of Me” and the lost love classic country song “Lubbock for Love”, he’s thrown in a couple original songs for good measure. The new album from Opatz brings together his own brand of dirt wave indie-leaning country music (which has been lauded by The Fader, Rolling Stone Country, KEXP, The Line of Best Fit) and a deep abiding love for pop-country to sublime results. The covers on Hot & Heavy-Handed don’t attempt to skewer pop-country, but instead to reimagine and ultimately showcase the songwriting and skill involved in writing these often-universally-relatable and undeniably catchy radio-friendly songs.
Opatz produced Hot & Heavy-Handed with collaborators Dylan Rodrigue and Malachi DeLorenzo (Langhorne Slim), who also engineered, mixed and played on the album while Kevin Ratterman (My Morning Jacket, Strand of Oaks) mastered. Dylan Rodrigue contributes guitars, keys, bass, backing vocals and percussion. Malachi DeLorenzo is on drums, backing vocals, guitars and percussion. Peri DeLorenzo is heard on fiddle on “I Left Something Turned on at Home”, “Can’t Break It to My Heart”, while Sierra Benhoff adds vocals on “Sundays” and “Lubbock for Love”, and Jordan Bush is on Pedal Steel on “I Left Something Turned on at Home”, “Can’t Break It to My Heart”, “Drunk on a Plane”, “Lubbock for Love” and “You Made a Country Singer out of Me”. Read on below for more from Izaak Opatz on his love of pop-country and the genesis of Hot & Heavy-Handed.
“I've loved pop-country for a long time, which can surprise and flummox friends who are familiar with the kind of music I make, and remains somewhat unexplainable to me. I cry more often to commercially manicured bro-country ballads and truck songs than I ever have to their earnest, dewy-eyed indie equivalent, and I've gotten closer to understanding why since spending time inside some of the nine country covers that comprise most of Hot & Heavy-Handed (two songs, "Lubbock for Love" and "You Made a Country Singer Out of Me", are older originals), especially the more garishly testosterone-soaked numbers, such as Mark Chesnutt's "Goin' Through the Big D", Dierks Bentley's "Drunk on a Plane", and Justin Moore's "You Look Like I Need a Drink Right Now". Once you strip back the cocked-up production and aggressive, swaggering delivery, you realize there's a lot of pathos and sensitivity to the lyrics, which is one of pop-country's best (or worst) tricks - it jackets very vulnerable songs (about divorce, and heartbreak, and watching your kids grow up) in the kind of big-dick bluster that gives people who would never listen to Coldplay license to, essentially, listen to Coldplay and feel their feelings. Unfortunately, it's this over-compensation by pop-country that repels a lot of listeners who value songwriting in other genres, and it was the urge to rescue some of my favorite pop-country songs from their own heavy-handed production that inspired Hot & Heavy-Handed, though I couldn't help but throw in some tunes whose production and delivery I revere, from Roger Miller and Tom T. Hall to Lucinda Williams.”
---
Izaak Opatz’s 2018 debut Mariachi Static packed confessional storytelling into musically surprising garage-pop he’d call dirtwave, a genre Woody Guthrie might've fallen into had he surfed and danced with his hips.
Although he resists being slopped into the alt-country/Americana trough, Montana-born Opatz appreciates country for its love of wordplay, Wranglers, and indulgent sad bastard angle. But he’d rather tweak and sidestep its predictable musical architecture and adornments to create something new and surprising.
2020’s Hot & Heavy-Handed does just that, remaking a collection of two Opatz originals and nine country covers in the dirtwave mold. Made with significant help from collaborators Malachi DeLorenzo and Dylan Rodrigue, the record deconstructs the radio-ready production of many of the songs to reframe their emotional fragility with the trio’s loose-handed and good-humored homemade musical jubilance. Additionally, Opatz’s feels-heavy delivery can’t help but humble many of these songs’ charging swagger to a more vulnerable lope.
The two originals on the record were plucked from Opatz’s college-days outfit, The Best Westerns. "Lubbock for Love" has the bones of a pop-country hit from the 90s, while the cowpunk "You Made A Country Singer out of Me" celebrates and lampoons the genre, gives credit to his heartbreaker for the songs she led him to write, and predicts a future (now real) label head expressing gratitude at the profitability (haha) of his sorrow.
---
Mama Bird Recording Co. is a Portland, Ore. based record label committed to exceptional songcraft. Founded in 2011, their catalog includes acclaimed releases from Damien Jurado, Haley Heynderickx, Courtney Marie Andrews, Vetiver, Jenny O., Saintseneca, Skyway Man, KERA, Matt Dorrien, Johanna Samuels, TK & The Holy Know-Nothings, Luka Kuplowsky and Myriam Gendron, among others.
Mama Bird will be donating 5% of their total income each month to a different organization fighting for racial & social justice. They will discuss and choose the organizations monthly as an artist family. This month, the label will donate to the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, protecting and defending the human rights of Black transgender people by organizing, advocating, creating an intentional community to heal, developing transformative leadership, and promoting our collective power.
—-