Breaking down the walls of genre, geography

Santa Barbara transplant Ross Flournoy cautiously maneuvers his
way down Wilshire Boulevard’s rush hour traffic in true Los
Angeles fashion: on a cell phone. However, the band he fronts, The
Brokedown, defies many typical L.A. conventions.

The Brokedown concludes its Tuesday night residency at the
Silverlake Lounge tonight. Though the unsigned group has made Los
Angeles a home, it hasn’t always been like this. Flournoy has
lived throughout the country, travelling from California to
Massachusetts before moving to Texas solely to pursue music.

“A friend of mine from high school was moving there so I
figured I’d move too,” Flournoy said. “I’d
been to Austin before and I really liked the town, and since I had
nothing better to do and wanted to play music, I decided to move
down there.”

The Brokedown originally focused on a country-western sound
replete with pedal steel guitar, but over the course of its rather
short existence, the band has already begun a bit of a
transformation.

“We started out a little more alternative country-sounding
than we are now. Not that we were ever playing straight-up country,
but I feel like the newer stuff, for lack of a better term, is more
rock and roll,” Flournoy said.

The Brokedown prominently features the pedal steel, an
instrument long associated with the high, lonesome sound of country
music.

“In my opinion there is not a more beautiful sound than a
pedal steel guitar,” Flournoy said. “It makes my heart
swell.”

The short-lived band got the offer for its current Silverlake
Lounge residency right before heading off to play the annual South
by Southwest Festival.

“Scott Sterling, who runs a booking company called The
Fold, got in touch with us about it a few months ago. I don’t
know what his reasons were for offering it to us, but thankfully he
did,” Flournoy said.

Sterling let The Brokedown choose the other acts on the bills,
which included Matt Hopper and Oliver Future.

“That was really fun, putting it together, picking what
bands we wanted to play with and then booking it,” Flournoy
said.

“The Dutchman’s Gold,” the quartet’s
first EP, features seven country-pop tunes such as
“Sparks” and “Down in the Valley,” which
has been getting some play on local radio station Indie 103.1. The
album gets its name from an Arizona legend Flournoy learned while
on vacation as a child. The story involves a Dutch prospector who
hid his gold deep in the mines outside Phoenix. The band knew it
wanted something similarly evocative for the EP’s
release.

“The cover art on the EP really evokes the west and was
done by Tim Presley of “˜Darker My Love,'”
Flournoy said. “We just told him we wanted something to do
with gold and the desert and that’s what he came up
with.”

The Brokedown just finished recording its first full length,
which at this time is still untitled, at Red Rocket Glare studios.
They hope to have it mixed and mastered by early June. Until then,
The Brokedown is still getting used to being from Los Angeles.

One of the band’s most memorable gigs took place in
Martinsville, Va., where it was booked to play a packed bowling
alley with a Lynryd Skynyrd cover band.

“We pull in and it was the scariest sight I’ve ever
seen in my life,” Flournoy said. “Not to be offensive,
but it was more rednecks than you could possibly imagine in one
place. There were very few people with all their teeth and we were
just a bunch of long haired pansies from Los Angeles. We thought we
were going to get killed.”