Hometown Sounds

WORLD PREMIERE!

GXB is an emerging band with some veteran talent you may know and an assured, crowd-pleasing roots rock and roll sound. Their debut single “High Roller”, a towering, muscle-bound 70s riff on the player lifestyle, dropped on Bandcamp earlier this month courtesy of Root Nine Records. In advance of their show this Sunday at The Pie Shop, we are pleased as punch to share with you this live video of “Love Ain’t Enough”, shot in a single unbroken take by Luke Roberts for the August 21, 2023 Amplify event.

We got the scoop on this new band and the video from our friend Ben Tufts, widely known percussionist and educator who plays bass for GXB.

A Front Royal, VA native, singer and songwriter Guy Bouchie moved with his family to Kenya, Poland and Maine before settling back in NoVA a couple years ago. By chance, he took a job at a music store last summer where he met… me! Upon hearing Bouchie warming up one of the store guitars with a song, I asked “Is that one yours?” Before long we were working on demos in my project studio.

After we had a half dozen or so tracks together, we realized we needed another member if we wanted to play out. I’ve played drums in dozens of area bands over the years, but in the early 2000s I was actually playing more bass guitar than drums. I’ve kept up my bass chops through teaching, but the itch had been growing for a while. I went through the rolodex in my head of all the bass players I knew, but I started to realize I felt more precious about the basslines I’d played on the demos, than I did the drum parts. So I sent a couple demos to a friend and drummer Ben Melrod, and he loved the songs. And thus, GXB was born!

We could tell you a really clever origin story about how we arrived at the band name… but we don’t have one. We’d rather leave it to your imagination. It’s probably better than ours.

We had originally planned on playing our new single “High Roller” when we were invited by Luke Roberts to participate in his Amplify series. But we were having so much fun playing a brand new song at our rehearsal the night before, on the spur of the moment we decided to play “Love Ain’t Enough” instead–even though the lyrics aren’t quite finished and we might have sorta borrowed the outro riff. Our entire thing is about being genuine, having fun, valuing spontaneity over polish–so this is a snapshot of us still discovering the song in front of your eyes, warts and all.

We love that part at the end where the camera backs off, maybe the song is winding down, but nope it’s roaring back for one more time through the chorus. That’s the magic you get with this raw, no-cuts camerawork that lends the whole presentation authenticity and charm. Chef’s kiss.
Make your plans now to eat pie and see GXB along with Kentucky band Quiet Hollers, dream pop singer Lacey Guthrie, and DC’s own Ammonite at the Pie Shop on Sunday August 27th.