Dallas musician Ryan Hamilton is a born collaborator. In People On Vacation, his project with Bowling For Soup’s Jaret Reddick, he allowed the latter’s pop nous to mingle with his own enviable storytelling skills. That ended, and he headed to Scotland to put together the Traitors, featuring none other than Ginger Wildheart on guitar. Ginger, of course, has never shied away from a towering pop-rock chorus, and his stamp is all over the mega-fun but, title-wise, grammatically cringeworthy We Should Never Of Moved To LA, and the glammy Strength In Numbers.
It’s a smart move to let the rest of the band’s personalities shine because it enhances Hamilton’s own likeable persona, his sunny take on Americana basking in 50 years of rock’n’roll history (they namecheck Tom Petty on Anywhere, which says it all), and each song has a soft country centre that’s purely Texan.
‘Touched down in Texas with Scottish mud on my boots,’ Hamilton sings on Scottish Mud, but you just know he’s left his heart in the highlands.
