The country music superstar is keeping the spirit of Montgomery Gentry alive in his first solo album, Ain’t No Closing Me Down.
Eddie Montgomery still feels the loss of Troy Gentry, his long-time friend, fellow hearty-partier, and partner in the multi-platinum-selling Montgomery Gentry country music duo. But as he recorded his first solo album — Ain’t No Closing Me Down, due for release Friday, Oct. 29 — and now as he performs songs old and new while on tour — he’s been determined to keep his late buddy’s spirit alive.
“Ain’t a day goes by that I don’t think of him,” Montgomery says of Gentry, who died in a 2017 helicopter crash. “We made a promise, a deal, way back when. It was over Jim Beam. It was: If one of us goes down, we want Montgomery Gentry to go on. Keep the music going. We were a honky-tonk band, and he’s with me, and he’s always going to be.
“We were together so much, we finished each other’s sentences and everything.” That brotherhood, he notes with a smile, is sustained in his solo billing: “It’s always going to be ‘Eddie Montgomery of Montgomery Gentry.’”
Even though he was fulfilling a promise to Gentry, Montgomery took a year off after the accident to ponder if and how he’d carry on. The COVID pandemic gave him an extra year-and-a-half to devise a game plan: With the help of some of Nashville’s best honky-tonk-flavored writers, he fashioned Ain’t No Closing Me Down, an album that is both a tribute to the past and a rowdy reach into the future. “I wanted to comfort my soul,” he says, “and have the greatest writers help me put it together.”
Montgomery is especially proud of “Alive and Well,” his first single from the album.
“It’s pretty much my life,” he says of the song that salutes his best friend — and his two sons who are no longer with us. “One died quite a few years ago. I lost my other son a year before, the same month as Troy. September is not my favorite month.” “Alive and Well” is a farewell, of course. At the same time, though, it’s also a promise to keep going, the promise he fulfills in the rest of the album. “When I wrote that song, it helped my heart. It helped me a little bit, I reckon, to heal the wounds. But the scar is always there.”
“My Son,” another outstanding cut on the album, is a cautionary tale Montgomery co-wrote with producer Noah Gordon for the soundtrack of Old Henry, the acclaimed western starring Tim Blake Nelson that has received several nominations for this year’s C&I Movie Awards. He acknowledges it as partly another tribute to his late sons. “A lot of it is going back into my soul. I taught them how to live. Taught them that some of the stuff I chased, I probably shouldn’t have. Like my old man said ‘Son, do as I say, don’t do as I do.’”
We recently Zoomed with Eddie Montgomery to talk about, among other things, the upcoming release of Ain’t No Closing Me Down, the pleasure and privilege of recording a duet with Tanya Tucker, the joy of returning to live performing — and why the Montgomery Gentry classic “Gone” may be the best break-up song in country music history.
