San Antonio has Tex-Mex music in its DNA. Now, a group of local alt-rock veterans is adding a little Irish whiskey to the mix.
Boys From the County Bexar — an ensemble featuring members of Coyote Dreams, the Infidels, Los Mescaleros and West of Rome — is releasing an album featuring their takes on seven Irish tunes.
The compositions range from the Pogues favorites “A Pair of Brown Eyes” and “Lorca’s Novena” to “Back Home in Derry,” an Irish rebel song penned by Bobby Sands, the Provisional Irish Republican Army member who died in prison on a hunger strike.
The band features acoustic guitars, mandolin and accordion backed by drums and electric bass, giving the songs a Pogues-like feel — reverent of the source material, but with a contemporary, rough-and-ready energy.
“These songs, some of them have been sung around the pubs, the tables for years,” singer-guitarist Mike Ryan said of the recording. “They’re not meant to be recorded against a metronome. … With the recording, there was a spirit of let’s just do it and have fun.”
The band will celebrate the release of the album with a party Thursday, Nov. 5, at the new Ludivine’s Foxy Saloon in St. Paul Square.
To clear up any potential confusion, the Mike Ryan in Boys From the County Bexar is the former frontman and principal songwriter behind San Antonio ’90s alt-rock staple Coyote Dreams, not the like-named San Antonio country singer. Indeed, the former Coyote Dreams frontman enjoys dealing out good-natured ribbing to those who show up for his singer-songwriter performances expecting to see the other guy.
Boys From the County Bexar also includes two other former Coyote Dreams members — accordionist Michael Galindo and bassist Blake Smithson — along with Michael Martin of the Infidels on mandolin and Jamie Roadman, who’s done time in Buttercup, Los Mescaleros and more, on drums.
The band came together after Ryan, Galindo and Martin performed a series of shows together focused on their interpretations of Irish pub songs. As they prepared to record, they added a rhythm section at the urging of Blue Cat Studios honcho Joe Treviño.
“Jamie and I just did it cold over the course of two days,” Smithson said of their addition. “It wasn’t songs that Jamie or I had ever played on, so it was interesting having to adapt.”
While Ryan’s work in Coyote Dreams tended to draw from a wide range of influences, from Tex-Mex to bluesy jams, he began to lean hard into Irish music after penning a play called Borderland Rogues.
The play, which incorporated both Mexican and Irish songs, documented Saint Patrick’s Battalion, a group of Irish immigrants who fought alongside Mexican troops during the Mexican-American War after experiencing mistreatment in the United States.
“A lot of this music was completely inspired for me from trips to Ireland and Mexico,” Ryan said. “They’re fighting the same struggle, and they always will, and they’ll always express it through their music and their poetry. And that’s what this album’s about — and it’s a big nod to [late Pogues singer] Shane MacGowan.”
Naturally, the Pogues’ influence is front and center in the recording, and the band’s name even draws on the Irish band’s song “Boys From the County Hell.”
However, the Boys From the County Bexar largely keep the album on the mellow and reflective side. The only number that veers toward the Pogues’ marriage of Irish reels with punk tempos is “Paddy Public Enemy No. 1,” a composition MacGowan recorded with his post-Pogues band the Popes.
It’s unclear how frequently the full band will perform in the future since Elon Musk’s DOGE assault on federal workers forced Galindo, a remote employee, to relocate from San Antonio to D.C.
Ryan said he doesn’t see the members putting down the songs or abandoning their inspiration anytime soon.
“Well, I’m always going to have these songs in my pocket,” he said. “I haven’t ever been able to crack that touring thing where it’s anywhere close to profitable. But what I have been doing though is working with this informal collective of artists, and it’s morphed into something that’s really cool the way we go to different towns singing, doing a reading of my play — an abbreviated reading of my play — mixed with their projects.”
In other words, as long as there’s a pub, a willing audience and a few pints to go around, these songs will find a home.
$5 admission or $10 for admission plus CD, 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 5, Ludivine’s Foxy Saloon, 1160 E. Commerce St., (210) 233-6256, instagram.com/barludivine.
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