Justin Pickard

In the course of Justin Pickard’s musical pilgrimage, his songwriting has covered a gamut of subjects: smoking and drinking, the ins and outs of grave-robbery, love and loss, and UFOs that resemble bananas. His subjects fall somewhere in between old cult movies from the turn of the century to vintage Americana — between John Wayne and Ed Wood. These subjects in any other writer’s care may not coalesce as seamlessly as they do in the hands of Pickard, who ties them together with wit, passion and heart, most recently on display in the Thunderbird Winos’ third record, Heavy on the Heart.

Pickard has been playing in the Dallas music community since the days when live music abounded on Lower Greenville, when people could flock to outdoor graffiti galleries such as the trestle bridge by Flagpole Hill or the Good-Latimer tunnel in Deep Ellum. (Look it up, it was magnificent!) In a way, you could say that Pickard grew with the city, or grew as the city changed. In one of the album's slower tracks, "Light Rail," he laments over soaring pedal steel guitar the city's drive toward the future and its proclivity to occasionally barrel through its past, and past art, in the process: “The map’s always changing / The roads aren’t the same / tunnels full of dirt / buried in the name of a light rail train.”

-Jamie Vahala, Dallas Observer