Gimme a Three for Texas

After coming up on the same scene, Texas-bred lonestars Jesse Dayton, Johnny Moeller and Ian Moore put their heads together as the Texas Headhunters

- JIM BEAUGEZ

THERE'S A MOMENT that happens between seasoned players when the song stops being a structure and starts being a language. For Austin-bred guitarists Jesse Dayton, Ian Moore and Johnny Moeller, that moment came not at a rehearsed gig but inside a recording studio – Willie Nelson's Pedernales Studio, in fact – where the three longtime friends threw down a few tracks with no real plan.

“I don’t think we had any idea what it was gonna sound like when we went in,” Moore says. “We just went in and started recording.”

What happened was “Everybody Loves You,” “Independence Day” and “Maggie Moved Back to Mineola” – three songs tracked quickly, with enough chemistry to stick in the back of Dayton’s mind long after they packed up. “I was putting out a solo record at the time, and I was like, this sounds better than anything on my record,” he says. “I was sold on it.”

The recently released Texas Headhunters, the eponymous debut album for a band they didn’t quite know they were forming, makes official an idea that had been brewing for a while.

“Three or four years ago, I kept bumping into Johnny,” says Dayton, a Beaumont native who’s split time between punk, outlaw country, horror-film scores and modern blues. “I suggested we get together with Ian, work on some tunes and just see what happens.” After that first session, the trio, who had shared many stages over the years (Moeller cut his teeth with the Fabulous Thunderbirds, and Moore opened for the Stones and Bob Dylan before forging his own soulful path), went back to their own lives and careers. But in time, the pull of what they’d started, not to mention the decades they spent chasing each other’s leads across Texas, sent the trio back to Pedernales to finish the job.