All Hat: Hedley Wakes Up the Wheel
I’m looking forward to Joshua Hedley’s new album, a Western Swing revival set to drop soon. It’s the first record ever cut at Bismeaux Barn — Ray Benson’s brand-new studio down in Austin. Two Texas-bred souls keeping the dance floor alive.
If you’ve ever two-stepped across a sawdust floor in Texas, chances are you’ve moved to something Ray Benson touched.
The man’s a walking monument to Western Swing — towering in height and history, frontman of Asleep at the Wheel for over fifty years, still grinning behind that old guitar like he just discovered Bob Wills yesterday.
Now Benson’s legacy has a new address: The Bismeaux Barn. Built in Austin as both a studio and a creative haven, it’s a place where steel guitars and fiddles feel at home. Hedley had the honor of breaking it in — the first artist to record there, while cables were still being coiled and the walls learning how to hum back.
That’s fitting, because both men live and breathe this music — not museum pieces, but living, sweating, swinging tradition.
The sessions happened live, musicians facing one another, laughter spilling between takes, mics catching the air of a Texas night.
Ray Benson produced alongside Hedley, bringing in veterans from Asleep at the Wheel — piano, steel, fiddle, upright bass — the whole kit that makes a dance floor shake.
Benson called Hedley “the perfect guinea pig” for the new space, and that’s about right: both know that great music doesn’t need to be sterile. It needs to breathe.
That new record is called All Hat, and it’s set to release October 24, 2025 on New West Records.
It’s eleven tracks deep and proud of it — a ride through honky-tonk swing, waltzes, and Texas stompers, all cut with the kind of swagger only Ray Benson’s crew can summon.
You’ll hear fiddles laughing, steel crying, and Hedley crooning with that old-country sincerity that’s become his signature.
Pancho.