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Twenty-three albums and several million miles after he first hit the road, Joe Ely presents his first road album Driven to Drive. The collection of songs about and inspired by motorized travel was curated by Ely, who in the mid-1970s swept off the flat plains of the Llano Estacado of West Texas like a whirling tornado, fronting a legendary band that was too rock for country, and too country for rock. The wild, wide-open honky-tonk roadhouse sound of the Joe Ely Band gave their hometown of Lubbock its first music hero since Buddy Holly. 

“I’ve been traveling all my life in search of whatever I find,” Ely says circumspectly. With all that roadwork in his rearview mirror, he has been taking stock of the trail he blazed. “Revisiting some of my studio files, I noticed there were a lot of songs I had written on the road about traveling,” he says. “I had recorded them in my studio every time I got off the road. I compiled a selection of songs like that from different eras. That’s Driven to Drive.” 

The project stitches together recordings made at Spur Studios, his home recording facility outside of Austin, over several decades, assisted by musician/neighbors Joel Guzman on accordion, keyboardist Bill Guinn, singer Eddie Beethoven, and fiddler Richard Bowden. Last year at The Zone in Dripping Springs, Texas, Jeff Plankenhorn added his guitar to three tracks and engineer Pat Manske, who mastered Driven to Drive, added percussion. 

"San Antonio Brawl" is the outlier, recorded in a motel room somewhere in Oklahoma when Ely stacked mattresses up against the wall and rigged up a small studio. 

Movement in these songs is measured in many ways: cars, sixteen-wheelers, motorcycle, Greyhound bus. There are pedal-to-the-metal anthems ginning down a straight strip of two-lane blacktop; a lazy meander on the Gulf blues highway; a tale of going on the lam on the Interstate; stories of getting from Here to There, and songs about going nowhere at all.   

The Lord of the Highway is calling. Joe Ely wants to take you for a ride.