Jimmie Dale Gilmore is a Texan who spent a few formative years in California. Dave Alvin is a Californian who has spent alot of time in Texas. So of course, when the Blaster and the Flatlander began performing together after nearly thirty years of friendship, they leaned into the overlap. The duo’s first album, 2018’s Downey to Lubbock, was named for their respective childhood homes. Now they’re back with Texicali, out June 21 from Yep Roc Records.

Texas and California may be rivals in the realms of business, politics, and tacos, but when it comes to music, the two states share kind of a psychic border. “We come from different places, but we come from the same place musically in a lot of ways,” says Alvin, who came up in the L.A. punk scene but is at heart a barroom blues guitarist. For his part, Gilmore is a West Texas country singer who was equally into New York City folk, Houston blues, and Zen.

If you called them a modern-day Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson they’d probably blanch at the high praise, but it’s aesthetically and geographically on point. In the end it’s all rock and roll, or, as Alvin likes to say: “There are two types of folk music: quiet folk music and loud folk music. I play both.”

Kicking off with the Terlingua-inspired, noirish twang of Gilmore’s “Borderland” (another thing the two states have in common), Texicali is proof of its own concept, erasing lines both between the states and musical genres. Gilmore contributes a swoony original, “Trying To Be Free,” which dates back to his very early years in Lubbock. There are also covers of Blind Willie McTell and Stonewall Jackson, a song by Gilmore’s lifelong running buddy Butch Hancock (“Roll Around”), and the duo’s take on “Death of the Last Stripper,” which Alvin wrote with Terry and Jo Harvey Allen (it first appeared on Terry Allen’s 2020 album Just Like Moby Dick, and has also been covered by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy). While the two men switch off as lead vocalists, the voices and guitars are in a constant conversation.

Alvin and Gilmore first met way back in 1990, on a tour that also included Hancock, Lucinda Williams, and the late Steve Young. They’ve been good friends ever since, but didn’t formally repeat the experience until 2017, when Gilmore’s booking agent suggested they go out together, starting with a show at Dan’s Silverleaf in Denton. Alvin says that by the second gig, if not the first, he thought, “Hey, we should make a record together.”

The  chemistry and common language couldn’t be denied. The tour wasn’t supposed to be collaborative—more of a “you play one, I play one” format —but when Gilmore would break out one of the folk or blues songs he’d been playing all his life, “all of a sudden, Dave would just be playing along with me, knowing it.”

“We know a lot of the same old songs,” says Alvin. “We might know ’em by different people. Originally, maybe Jimmie heard a Lightnin’ Hopkins version and I heard the Blind Will McTell version. Or he heard the Dave Van Ronk version, and I heard the Memphis Jug Band version.”

A similar bit of kismet happened when Gilmore covered Steve Young’s “Silverlake” at one of those early shows. It’s a song that Young, a revered outlaw country figure who’d lived in both Los Angeles and Austin, thought Gilmore should cover. But it turned out Young originally wrote the song for Alvin, when they both lived in that L.A. neighborhood. Once again, Gilmore started singing it, and was stunned that Alvin started playing along (when they cut it for the first album, Jimmie took the vocal).

The duo made Downey To Lubbock in L.A., with an ad hoc band of studio musicians. Then they went out on the road with Alvin’s usual (and mostly-Texan) group the Guilty Ones, and it became its own thing. “When Jimmie Dale’s not there, it’s me and my band,” says Alvin. “But when Jimmie Dale’s there, it’s our band.”

There’s plenty of history on both sides. Bassist Brad Fordham previously played with Gilmore during his early nineties moment in the spotlight on Elektra Records, while drummer Lisa Pankratz passed up a chance to play with him in her teen prodigy years because—this is a joke that Jimmie likes to tell that also happens to be true—she got a better paying gig. (Better than zero, that is.) The band also includes guitarist Chris Miller and now—keeping it in the Lubbock family tree—keyboard player Bukka Allen. “It wasn’t something that I expected,” says Gilmore, who turned 79 in May. (Alvin is 68.) “I thought I was retired, and here all of a sudden I’m in a new young band!”

But before recording could start, everything stopped. Not only did music and the world in general go into retreat during the COVID-19 pandemic, but Alvin was also diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, in multiple organs. It was not certain he’d survive, and it was not certain that the music would, generally speaking. “There was that sort of fear of, well . . . when, we get through COVID, when I get through cancer, the world that I’ve lived in for forty years, is that still gonna even exist?” he says.

Texicali and an imminent summer tour (which hits Texas in August) say that it does, but not in exactly the same way. Alvin couldn’t even play guitar for more than six months due to neuropathy from cancer treatments; even touching a guitar string was like touching razor blades. And Gilmore missed two different live swings (including the 2022 Outlaw Country Cruise) thanks to two different bouts of COVID-19. Texicali’s final song, the sweetly defiant and rollicking “We’re Still Here,” is half “wow, it’s amazing we’re still making music” and half “it’s amazing we’re alive at all.”

“Anybody playing any kind of music that can survive as long as a couple of guys like me and Jimmie Dale can, it’s pretty remarkable,” says Alvin. “Especially for a couple of oddballs that don’t fit neatly into a genre-specific definition.”

The song’s video is also both a lament and celebration of Austin. It opens with an image of a sign that reads “Texicalli” (yes, with an extra “l”) a logo that any old South Austin head will recognize from the Texicalli Grille, which closed in 2007. The video finds the two men wandering South Congress, where you still have the Continental Club on the one hand and a Hermes on the other, and then to Dan’s Hamburgers and Radio Coffee.

Alvin reckons Texas is more of a music state than California, with deeper, more diverse regional music scenes. The first time he came to Texas, it didn’t feel like “it was a sin to say you were a musician,” he remembers. You would tell someone you’re a singer-songwriter and they might offer you a meal. “You go anywhere else it’s, ‘bum, go get a job!’ ”

“The geographical thing is kind of mysterious,” says Gilmore. “It’s kind of like . . . well, everything’s mysterious.” (This is an extremely Jimmie Dale Gilmore thing to say.) “There’s just a whole lot of connection, and then also enough difference to make it really interesting.”

But Alvin also knows that Texicali won’t change what he learned playing an acoustic show at the Mucky Duck in Houston some years ago. “I forget what song I was gonna play,” he says with a laugh. “But I said something like, well, you know: California and Texas. They’re not that different. Boy, did that not get a good response.”