Drummer Cody Hart flashes his Buck Rogers Disintegrator pistol, while bassist and vocalist Davie Landry reveals a Calvin and Hobbes Spaceman Spiff piece. Guitarist and vocalist Keith Lawrence went with the Point of View gun from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Each are positioned on the inner ankle, precisely where someone would carry a boot gun.
“None of us are gun people, so we thought it would be weird if we got real guns, so we got space guns,” Hart explains.
“We found the one guy that would do it,” Landry adds.
Now a five-piece, including new guitarist Harry Edwards and keys player Steve Terry, getting inked isn’t necessarily a requirement to be in the Denver band, but the body art symbolizes everything the rockers have been through together since first forming in 2018.
After dropping a handful of singles and an inaugural EP, Take What You Got, in 2020, Boot Gun pushed through the back end of the pandemic and shared its debut full-length, One for the Willing, in February last year. Boot Gun played the ten latest songs live as much as possible, which helped Edwards get up to speed on the material.
“I think it was a big sigh of relief that we finally got the album out, and we were so excited. But the hard part was we were out of songs,” he shares. “This whole year, we’ve been writing so much more new music that it keeps us so excited to keep playing this album.”
And for good reason. One for the Willing is essentially a “greatest hits” collection, as Lawrence calls it, with nine originals and one cover, “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone,” the 1967 tune by the Monkees that’s been a staple of the Boot Gun live set for a few years now. The band also just released an animated music video by Beaux Latham for the song, which is an amped-up rendition of the flower-power classic and indicative of the group’s approach to high-energy rock and roll.
Such tracks as “‘Til It Ain’t,” “Primal Scream,” “Everybody’s Talkin’” and “Do This Twice” are prime examples of the Boot Gun formula for writing ragers — it starts with a classic-rock foundation, complete with keys and horns arrangements, but built up with the alternative grooves and edge of 1990s desert rock.
“As silly as it sounds, it’s Queens of the Rolling Stones Age,” Lawrence explains, citing the influence of the Rolling Stones and Queens of the Stone Age. “It’s everything in that gamut. It’s family-friendly, filthy rock and roll.”
See it for yourself during Boot Gun’s first show of the year on Saturday, January 11, at the hi-dive. Local alt-rockers Ipecac and Radio Fluke are also on the bill.
Looking ahead to 2025, the dudes are heading down to Texas in March to lay down the next EP at Sonic Ranch studio with producer and Futurebirds drummer Tom Myers.
“Our outlook on music is forward, and we want to go and keep exploring the next step for Boot Gun," Landry says, "so putting that album out just triggered me to start writing more songs and cohesion and write the songs together instead of independently."
Lawrence agrees. “Those are the best songs we had, and while we’re proud of them, there is more cohesion, and we’re thinking of bigger picture,” he adds of life post-debut. “We’re thinking this larger rock-and-roll sound. You know, with any band, you mature over time.”
Davie Landry, Keith Lawrence and Cody Hart each have custom tattoos commemorating what Boot Gun means to them.
Courtesy In The Barrel Photo
“You have your whole life to write your first album,” he says. “Then there’s nothing to light a fire under your ass, like, ‘Okay, the clock’s ticking.’ The day the album came out, people were like, ‘All right, what’s next?’ It was like, ‘What do you mean, what’s next?’ People are just ready for the next step.”
That includes the musicians themselves, as Lawrence admits to using the anxiety of emptying the writing well on One for the Willing as fuel now moving forward.
“Yeah, it was scary. Like Keith said, it was the greatest hits. It was the best songs I could think of and write. Now I’ve got to write more. Then you write your sad cowboy songs because I grew up in Texas,” he says. “You just keep going where the wave is taking you. I think the best thing that came out of this album is the new cohesion of Boot Gun, that we really are thinking as a unit, not as anything else.”
The tattoos are pretty cool, too. For the record, there are no plans for Edwards and Terry to get a space gun of their choice blasted onto themselves anytime soon.
“It would just show them being stupid enough to do it,” Hart quips.
"All of us are just antsy to get going on new stuff, writing more material and still playing the shows, but figure out what the next step for our sound is,” he concludes.
Boot Gun, with Ipecac and Radio Fluke, 8 p.m. Saturday, January 11, hi-dive, 7 South Broadway. Tickets are $23.
