This year marks two decades since Cory Watson, Blake McWhorter and Brian McCorquodale formed the band in Fort Worth.
It scarcely seems possible to those who lived through that initial, heady burst of fame in the mid-aughts, the mainstream bristling with angular dance anthems and the band’s vaguely British-via-the-Trinity-River sensibility, that Black Tie Dynasty was on the cusp of catapulting into stardom. But, even after drifting apart in 2009, sporadically reuniting, pursuing other interests and starting families, Black Tie Dynasty is on the verge of releasing a new record for the first time in 16 years.
It is both that simple, and yet not. Time apart made everyone’s hearts grow fonder. The pull of brotherhood between Watson, McCorquodale, McWhorter and drummer Eddie Thomas was too strong.
But love will break your heart: The quartet got back together in earnest just before Christmas 2019, following a horribly cruel diagnosis of stage four cancer for Thomas
“I haven’t stopped playing,” Thomas told me in March 2020, surrounded by his bandmates. “When I found out Black Tie was going to get back together, I was like, ‘Wow, this is incredible.’ I just couldn’t wait ... It just gives me more — makes me give more effort to fight. I love all these guys and playing music with them.”
Nine months after that conversation, Thomas would be gone, taken at age of 49, leaving behind a widow, grieving bandmates and a musical community mourning his loss. It was a particular, additional insult that the COVID-19 pandemic had robbed Black Tie Dynasty of any opportunity to play more shows than a lone Double Wide event in December 2019.
Chasing a Dream
It wasn’t clear that Black Tie Dynasty would continue, particularly having lost what it considered the foundation of its sound.“Everything is so raw right now,” Watson told me in early 2021. “When I squint into the future, it’s really hard to imagine us working together under the BTD moniker without him.”
But, to hear Watson talk about it now, the external turbulence of the past five years has allowed Black Tie Dynasty to become particularly sanguine about accepting what life throws at the group, and they aren't planning too terribly far ahead.
A band once renowned for its grueling touring schedules, seeming ubiquity on local stages and relentless pursuit of bigger, better, brighter, more is now chasing something else.
There’s always been the stock question — “What’s next?” — as a refrain in my last several exchanges with Watson, stretching back to the mid-2010s. This time, however, my query was a little different: Why was it important for Black Tie Dynasty to keep moving forward, instead of calling it a day?
“I was just taking it one step at a time,” Watson told me recently. “It wasn’t clearly apparent that we needed to do another record, until about a week after we did a tribute show for Eddie in February 2022. About a week after, I had a dream where I saw Eddie, and spoke to Eddie in a dream.”
It’s here Watson pauses to clarify, rather emphatically: “Like, I don’t have premonitions. It’s not like me to have anything like this. I don’t see people. That’s not something I really feel tapped into. But a week after we played that show, and he was, of course, very much on our minds ... I interacted with him, and I spoke to him.”
Watson said he told Thomas he missed him.
“He goes, ‘I left?!’ And he just had this look on his face,” Watson continued. “Like he was still here. At least that’s how I interpreted it. ... There was something that was very palpable in that moment, and very real.”
Watson awoke, scribbled down what he could remember from the dream, and the following day, shared his experience with his bandmates.
“Within that conversation, Blake was like, ‘OK, we need to do another record, and we need to call it Steady,’” Watson said. “I was like, ‘That’s perfect.’ So, we had a title for the record before we wrote a note of it.”
The songwriting came quickly for Watson and McCorquodale, even as it plumbed depths only hinted at by Black Tie Dynasty’s catalog.
“We weren’t aiming to do a concept record,” Watson said. “But I think in that moment of reflecting on who Eddie was ... and just reflecting on [the] things that mattered to him ... and what can we learn from that? Then, how we are now juxtaposing our own lives, as we reflect on who we are, and how we got here. There’s a story within [that], too, because we had this long break.
“Those years of not being in a band, not having that safety blanket, being on our own. There’s a lot of discovery and self-actualization with that ... so lyrically, I drew from that quite a bit.”
You can hear that turmoil just moments into the sleek, sumptuous Steady — “Paralyzed/Still here/Tied to a chair,” Watson howls on album opener “Beginner” — but the sentiments are tucked into the familiar, glittering, danceable alt-rock that has been the band’s hallmark. (Black Tie Dynasty enlisted producer Alex Bhore to help bring Steady to fruition.)
There is, of course, the question of how to mitigate the loss of the man for whom the record is named.
The band initially settled on Mark Baker as its new drummer — it’s his work you hear on Steady’s 10 tracks — but moving forward, Watson said Black Tie Dynasty will be primarily a trio (he, McCorquodale and McWhorter) supplemented by drummers on a show-by-show basis.
“[Mark] is a friend of ours. Blake has known him for many years before,” Watson said. “He’s got a real bombastic style, very technically precise. ... I think we initially jumped in and we were like ‘OK, you’re gonna just be our drummer and we’re gonna go forward like that, in perpetuity.”
What the writing process revealed to Watson, McCorquodale and McWhorter, however, was that they were unintentionally treating Baker as a hired hand, not a collaborator: “We were writing everything on our own, and we would kind of pass along the demo,” Watson said. “So, we created a situation where we still held onto everything creatively really, really tightly.”
In light of that and the realization Black Tie Dynasty would functionally always be a trio, at least as far as songwriting was concerned, there was a conversation and a parting of ways with Baker once recording was completed.
For the band’s surprise opening gig for Echo and the Bunnymen at Dallas’ House of Blues on May 9, and the May 11 album release party at Tulips in Fort Worth, drumming duties fell to beloved North Texas timekeeper Jeff Ryan.
“It’s really an honor, on multiple levels, to be asked to sit in on drums for this release show and the foreseeable future with the guys in BTD,” Ryan said via email. “The album is fantastic, and the backstory on a lot of these songs really hit home with me, and are pretty emotional at times. ... That’s really what drew me to them, because they mean it, and I just can’t wait to get up and play those songs with these guys.”
So, seriously, what’s next for Black Tie Dynasty? Is Steady truly the swan song? Or will the band carry on, working, as Watson describes it, to “honor [Eddie’s] memory and do what makes us happy”?
“We were always going to have a need to write,” Watson said. “So, I think we will continue to write [but] in terms of goals, when I think about what’s the next goal for the band, we’re just not putting any of those expectations on ourselves. I think one thing we’ve realized through this whole process is how important it is to be true to yourself and have fun.
“Let’s express ourselves as artists and humans and see where it goes. I think it’s very easy to get caught up on ‘What is next?’ ... Those things are great, but for us, we don’t understand the gravity of this moment, and the fact that we put out this new record, and we’re really enjoying that. Like, take a beat and just be proud of the Steady."
In other words, the road to this point may have been exceptionally difficult, but what waits around the bend need not be. Pausing to gratefully absorb the accomplishment is a remarkably self-possessed notion, and one can’t help but think the eternally even-keeled, rhythmically gifted Eddie Thomas would wholeheartedly endorse it.
