David Moore‘s path to this album wasn’t a straight line. A soccer injury ended his playing career young, and after decades working in the airline industry, he retired, moved to rural northwest Texas, and converted a spare bedroom into a studio. Three albums followed in under two years. His fourth, A Wink Is As Good As A Nod To A Blind Mule, out August 24th, is a different kind of project entirely, a tribute to James Masters Patterson, Moore’s late writing partner and close friend, who wrote, co-wrote or otherwise inspired every song on the record. Moore has said he knew Patterson would have appreciated the title’s dry sense of humor.
The album took nearly two years to put together. Moore rebuilt drum parts from old recordings measure by measure using MIDI, done by hand rather than with any AI assistance, before handing tracks off to a roster of collaborators spread from Dallas and Pittsburgh to Albuquerque and the UK, including Jay Michael Smith and Brian Patterson of The Speaker Wars and veteran engineer Stuart Epps, whose credits include Led Zeppelin’s Coda and work alongside Jimmy Page and Paul Rodgers. Seven of the album’s tracks had already come out as singles starting in late 2025 before the full record arrived.
An incredible constant high is the rhythm and swing of everybody in the band; it feels very lived-in, and the pocket is delicious. All the way from “Chasing The Mothership,” which, as the title implies, is obviously energetic and hectic, to more relaxed songs like “Land Of Sunshine,” which, by the way, is supremely melodic. One of my favorite tracks on the album is “When Lightning Strikes.” I actually couldn’t stop listening to it; it’s so tight from all angles it has no fat to trim, as they say. The melodies land rhythmically in a very satisfying way, and the rhythm section’s parts complement each other so well.
The album ends on an experimental and instrumental piece called “Time,” which I think nicely ties the album and the band to that psychedelic 70s sound more so than other songs on the album. The song has these cascading melodies that sound like what spirals look like. It’s a song that rewards active listening, which I think everyone would find easy even though it has no vocals on it.
The record’s emotional centerpiece, by Moore’s own account, is “Mysteries Of Life,” where Jay Michael Smith’s guitar work leans so close to Patterson’s own playing style that it sounds like Jim himself is still in the room. That’s the kind of detail that only lands on a project built with this much care, and it’s what separates A Wink Is As Good As A Nod To A Blind Mule from a standard studio record. This one was built to remember somebody, and it shows in every part of how it was made.
