For those of us who remember Cortez Garza’s turn as one of Athens’ most accomplished singer-songwriters, the shift into the swaggering hip-hop persona of Niño Brown came as a bit of a shock. For over a decade, Garza was a devotee of the Steve Earle school of songwriting crafting stark, cathartic songs with an outlaw country flair. Although he dabbled in other genres, his music could most often be described as plaintive and moody. As Niño Brown, he seemed to have undergone a dramatic creative transformation, exchanging lonesome acoustic guitars and pedal steel for jubilant beats and Latin riddims.

Over time, however, the curtain separating the two personas has begun to dissolve. Listen to tracks like “Little Sister” and “Valenciaga” and you’ll find a songwriter whose music has become glossier and more emphatic to be sure, but no less empathetic and meaningful. So it’s really no surprise that his latest single, the Americana-infused “Jailhouse Ramble,” has him retreading some old familiar ground.

Written in 2018, the track earned Garza top honors at an international songwriting contest. The prize was a full scholarship to Steve Earle’s songwriting school at Camp Copperhed, which, for Garza, was a dream come true. Still, he decided to shelve the song as his musical interests began to shift predominantly towards hip-hop.

“I was getting to the point where I felt like I had done what I came to do,” Garza says. “I always wrote various other types of genres and had gotten to the point where I was exclusively listening to hip-hop. I felt like it was time to incorporate that into what I did but felt it was necessary to start a brand new project to release the new music under. It was never my intention to just do rap and I really tried to establish Niño Brown as an anything-goes, genre-bending type of project. So after releasing nonstop for the last year I thought it was time to come full circle and drop ‘Jailhouse Ramble,’ which I’d been sitting on for a year or more.”

With its reflective roots-rock groove and poignant vocals, “Jailhouse Ramble” marks a heady return to Garza’s rich storytelling approach. The song follows the spiraling travails of a wayward, down-on-his-luck soul seeking any exit—love, alcohol, riches—from the carousel of pain that makes up their hellish existence. Although it’s a familiar refrain within country and Americana music, Garza treats the subject matter with a solemn reverence that shines a fresh light on his work as Niño Brown.

Filmed by Brasher Media, the video elevates the track’s brooding sense of desolation and hurt without distracting from the immediacy of the performance. In it, Garza plays a Mexican outlaw who secretly marries a Native American woman. What follows is a tale of violence, betrayal, and revenge that traces a line from America’s bloody Wild West past and straight into its modern cinematic culture.

“To some extent, all my videos are typically based on my real life and I’m usually very hands-on about the concepts for all my videos,” Garza explains. “The concept of the video was inspired by a sort of forbidden love scenario. A Mexican outlaw getting hitched with a Native American girl. We actually found a model of Cherokee descent who had a bunch of traditional garments including the headdress used in the shoot. It’s sort of implied that the preacher is the one who collects on the outlaw’s bounty. Clearly, we went in a Kill Bill direction where the female lead is the hero who exacts revenge. Initially, we thought we’d go black and white and use subtitles but Brasher thought we’d leave it to the audience to interpret and keep it all a little more vague and dream-like. It all comes off a bit more like David Lynch that way. All in all, this is the most meaningful and artistic video we’ve made yet.”

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