Oh, there are the shades of Dylan and Howe Gelb/Giant Sand hanging around this new song from Alex Dupree who got his musical start in Austin, Texas, and his voice has some Heartworn Highways-era colour to it. In the mid ’00s, he founded The Trapdoor Band, an improvisatory folk group and vehicle for his lyric-driven songwriting, before switching to the Idyl moniker in 2009. Dupree moved to California to focus on poetry, studying and teaching at UC Irvine, with song writing never far from his mind. He continued to hone his craft writing country songs for both the LA band Mister Paradise and a duet project called Dawn & Dupree (with Iva Dawn of They/Live).
‘Fortunado‘ is a gritty tale of crime and police intersecting – of bullets flying and of running away, of trying to escape. Talking of the song Dupree explained “Tim and I met the real Patrick and Fortunado one night at a bar in downtown LA. They were stumbling through a game of pool with the slow movements of longtime drunks. Tim wore his dad’s old Luskey’s hat at the time, and this caught the eye of Patrick as we walked in. He wanted to gamble us for the hat. We laughed him off, but he was insistent. There was a flash of menace in his face, a sudden sobriety. He pushed into Tim’s chest, but that was as far as it went. We left after a drink. We returned to the bar later that night to find Patrick pacing back and forth along the curb outside. He’d clearly been kicked out and felt this to be a great injustice. Fortunado was sitting alone at a table, so we joined him and struck up a conversation. He drifted in and out of coherence. He gave us a hallucinatory treatise on time travel, college football…I can’t say I remember details. What I remember is feeling that he and Patrick were joined in some mysterious way. They felt eternal in the way of all late-night characters, bending the room into their timeless reality. They stayed in my mind as characters until I found a song that needed them.”
