‘The band was built on reimagining tradition, on honouring the old ways while pushing them someplace new,” is how Athens, Georgia band The Pink Stones are described on their website. With their feet firmly in the traditional country music groove, the band’s third album THANK THE LORD...IT’S THE PINK STONES revisits the classic country sound of the 1960s with songs that recall the best recordings of Gram Parsons, Louvin Brothers, and Porter Wagoner. But much more than simply a tribute band, their own unique identity is stamped firmly on their material, as was also the case with their two previous albums, INTRODUCING THE PINK STONES (2021) and YOU KNOW WHO (2023). We recently spoke with band leader and songwriter Hunter Pinkston about the new album, his early influences, and his passion for artwork, as well as songwriting.
I understand that your father played in bands when you were growing up. Was that your early introduction to music?
Yes, he played drums in some bands in the late 70s. He was born and raised in Georgia and really into all the Georgia stuff, The Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. But he also taught me about Otis Redding, James Brown and Little Richard.
I presume you were not listening to country music back then?
Definitely not. When I was a teenager, I rejected country music. Living where I lived, you couldn’t go into a grocery store without hearing country music. It’s the same nowadays, except it’s the new kind of country music, which I still reject very much. When I was young, I wasn’t ready for country music. As a kid, the first band t-shirt I had was The Ramones, because my dad used to wear a Sex Pistols t-shirt; he loved the late 70s punk rock thing.
There are many similarities between punk and where you are now, in country music.
There are, and I’m often asked the question as to how I made the switch from punk to country. As I've grown older, I’ve found them to be more and more similar, particularly in their lyrics and music content. When you look back at how people like Bob Willis did their thing, those guys were travelling and playing every night, just as punk rockers were doing decades later. They weren’t playing the same music, but they were doing the same thing.
Was there a particular artist or band that brought you back to country music?
It was Gram Parsons’ stuff that was the big push. When I got his LPs and read on the back that RONNIE and James Burton had played on those albums, I started digging further. I heard stories about how Merle Haggard was going to produce Gram Parsons, which also opened my eyes and led me to finding older stuff that I hadn’t listened to before.
What is the current Pink Stones lineup?
We just got off the road a few days ago after a ten-day tour. The band consists of me playing guitar and singing, Adam Wayton, who has been with me since the beginning, on bass, Michael Alexander, our new drummer, and Caleb Boese playing pedal steel.
Your debut EP, JIMMY & JESUS, from 2019, was a blend of country and power pop, before you went full country with your full album, INDRODUCING…THE PINK STONES in 2021.
At that point in my life, around 2019, I was more into power pop than I am now. I still like it, but don’t listen to it as much. I love Big Star and Teenage Fanclub, and in 2018, when JIMMY & JESUS was recorded, I was still trying to figure out what direction I wanted the band to take. The debut album steered away from rock and roll and more into cosmic country.
The new album, THANK THE LORD…IT’S THE PINK STONES, travels in a more classic country direction.
Yes, I wanted to lean more on the acoustic guitar and less on the electric guitar. Caleb Boese’s playing of the steel guitar also changed our sound and made us go further back in time. His style of playing leans more towards a 1960s sound, and when we started making the record, I thought that maybe we should go a bit more traditional this time. And I think it worked; there are still some weird moments on the record, like many of the '60s country records had. When you listen to some of Porter Wagoner’s records, there is a lot of weird stuff going on.
That’s interesting because the track on the album, Hometown Hotel, struck me as a typical Wagoner-style song of small-town infidelity.
I love all his stuff; I’ve studied him from the beginning to the end and find him super interesting. The people playing on his records are incredible; they’re so cool. He tried some weird stuff; the first one that comes to mind is Rubber Room, what a bizarre song. We played this club outside Detroit the other night, and they had a jukebox in the green room, and that song was on it.
And to think that Porter Wagoner was ‘pop music’ in the 60s, despite writing and recording a lot of very dark material.
Sure, but everything has started to regress in the modern world. Even back in the old days in Nashville, you had professional songwriters, but it was totally different from today. There was much more attention to writing good songs back then. These days, if you force something in people’s ears for long enough, they’re going to believe it, and that’s true of modern country music, too.
Returning to the new album, the cover graphic features you poised in front of a church, casting a shadow that displays a pair of devil horns. The image recalls the religious expression depicted on the album cover from The Louvin Brothers' 1959 SATAN IS REAL.
That wasn’t intentional. I’m a huge fan of the Louvin Brothers; Gram Parsons sent me down that path when I was about twenty-one. When we shot the cover with our photographer, we visited a church outside town to take the photos. We had this other vision that was going to be me in the archway of the church, and the letters of the album were going to wrap around the archway. We ended up losing light, which cast my shadow, which looked cool. So, it was a case of scratching the first idea, and Taylor Rushing, the guy who does our artwork, sent the image back to us with the devil's shadow.
The artwork on your three full albums provides a hint at what the listener can expect before listening to the records. Is that important for you?
Yes, I’m a massive Grateful Dead fan, and they are the big one for me when it comes to cool artwork. Their album MARS HOTEL, my favourite of their records, is a great example. It’s crazy and weird, and this is how that record sounds. I want to walk into a record store and be struck by the album covers, and I will often buy the album if the artwork is interesting. I try to match the records with the artwork. It’s a different world these days with streaming, but Taylor Rushing, who does our covers, has done beautiful and striking covers. His artwork on Sierra Ferrell’s album TRAIL OF FLOWERS is amazing.
East Nashville rising bluegrass star, Wyatt Ellis, plays mandolin and adds backing vocals on the title track. How did that connection come about?
Well, we live in the digital age now, where everybody seems to know everybody. Because I’m a huge bluegrass listener and lover, I have been a fan of Wyatt for a while. Taylor (Rushing) had been doing some work for Wyatt and suggested that I try to meet him sometime. I cold messaged him and told him we were making a record and would love him to be part of it, and he immediately got on board. It worked out well for both of us because he is getting into The Byrds and Clarence White, which is where my band started, and we are now trying to do more traditional country stuff. So, it was a weird meeting of minds.
Much of the material on the album is dark, with infidelity and regret at the core of many of the songs. It’s not quite a Saturday night listen, like your earlier work.
It’s funny, we play live so much, and that comes with having to play fast to keep people dancing and excited. I was pretty laid-back while working on this record, but I wasn’t intentionally making it a slow record. With the songs I was writing, that’s just the way it ended up. I have enough material out there that rocks and is fast to mix with the slower ones.
I particularly like the track Summer’s Love (Winter’s Pain). It’s a classic heartbreak song.
We have been playing that song live for a while, and it was one of the earliest songs written for the album. It took me back to summer love, with acoustic guitar and 60s pedal steel. It was going to be one of the first singles, but when I had written, Real Sad Movie, Big Jet Planes and we had finished recording, we ran with that song instead.
Where did you record the album?
We made it at the same studio as the other two albums. Henry Barbie, who produced all the records, has a home studio in Athens called Chase Park. We trust him, he’s a great engineer, and I love the way his studio sounds.
Interview by Declan Culliton