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The 21st installment of Saddle Creek’s Document series features Whitmer Thomas, a multi-hyphenate whose unique vision has percolated across a range of mediums including TV, film, podcasts, and music. Tilt was recorded in Los Angeles with Jay Som and features contributions from Ian Farmer (Slaughter Beach Dog, Modern Baseball).
"In the spring of 2023 I opened for Hovvdy on a southeastern tour. My friend and guitar player, Jeramy joined me, and we slogged through the Florida portion of the tour. Being from Gulf Shores, Alabama, I knew these cities well and was excited to play them as I used to play them in my high school hardcore band. One night while driving to our hotel after a killer show in Tampa at Crowbar, we saw a Hard Rock casino off of the interstate. Me and Jeramy dropped our drummer Rollie off, and headed to Hard Rock. What started off as an innocent night of gambling quickly became dark. After losing all of our merch money, we discovered credit card cash advances. We lost big time that night and vowed to never do it again, not knowing that we’d pretty much drive by a casino after every show. We stopped at all of them, and lost and lost and lost until we were on the way to our hotel post our second to last show in St. Louis, we saw a riverboat casino. After going full tilt on roulette, and in an act of desperation, I hit a big jackpot on an old triple sevens slot machine and won all of the money I’d lost on the trip plus a few bucks back. It was a fantastic end to the tour.
An idea began to form that maybe I could tour like this forever, and now that I had collected points at casinos using players cards, I’d be able to stay at all the hotels for free. So we booked another tour for the end of the Summer and I called it The Casino Boys tour. It was a cross country tour, where we only played cities with casinos in them. The plan was to gamble every cent I made at the show in each city. I was convinced I couldn’t fail. After each show me and my band would rush to the casino and stay up all night gambling. It was immediately a terrible idea. My band was winning like crazy on everything they played, meanwhile I couldn’t hit anything once. Not a slot, not a hand of baccarat, nothing. It got bleak fast. To make matters worse, we were staying in these nice hotel suites at the casinos for free and we weren’t spending any time in them. None of us slept. I swear I aged ten years in three weeks.
Our last stop on tour was fittingly Las Vegas. We stayed at the Flamingo Hotel, and in another desperate attempt to win my tour money back, and after all my bandmates went to bed, I took out (another) credit card cash advance and went to the triple 7s slot machine. I lost it all FAST. On the way to the elevator I clocked all of the men alone at the slots and tables and pondered where they might be coming from. Maybe some of them are on tour too? Are they lying to their wives and ruining their lives? Some of them were probably one hit away from all of their financial problems being solved. There’s something hopeful about the casino. Everyone in a casino is an optimist. It’s kind of a beautiful thing. Maybe that’s why I love it.
As soon as I got back to LA, I wrote the songs on Tilt. I approached the songs from the point of view of myself if I kept the Casino Boys tour going forever. Maybe there’s a detour at a rodeo or at a cousin’s birthday, but it’s all the same thing. I try to stay away from casinos nowadays, but in a lot of ways, I’ll always be on tilt. And I mean that in the least cynical way possible. I’m just tilting out on more innocent things like having a nice Summer. Also I haven’t been on tour since the Casino Boys tour, so we will see how long this lasts."
With Trying Not to Have a Thought, Algernon Cadwallader juggle intrinsic musical connection and shrewd lyrical intention with remarkable poise. The album’s title perfectly captures that dual approach: the effort to resist being mentally bogged down by the bottomless list of daily atrocities, and the band’s decision to let their unspoken connection guide this rejuvenated take on their classic sound. “This is just what comes out of us when these four people get in a room,” Helmis says. And this record is exactly that: an Algernon Cadwallader album that's leisurely, intensely, tremendously their own.
With I Hope We Can Still Be Friends, his debut for Saddle Creek, Dean Johnson makes a pact with the listener: He will sing you his truth in the most heartfelt and charming way possible, if you promise to keep an open mind.
The third LP from Ada Lea, when i paint my masterpiece, is an epic, 16-track opus from Montreal renaissance woman Alexandra Levy. It’s a kaleidoscopic exploration of the transformations art can bring: the vision of an uncompromising artist dancing bravely and freely between registers and across mediums.
