Bandleader Jesse Ebaugh cut his teeth in Northern Kentucky with the modern blues rock boogie of Pearlene (Dim Mak, Sympathy for the Record Industry) and the bluegrass band The Kenton County Regulators. His friendship with Erika Wennerstrom led to a decade long stint in Heartless Bastards (Fat Possum, Partisan), and he now exits that project to pursue his own endeavor in The Tender Things.

The Tender Things release How You Make a Fool, a dark, inward look at the flawed lives of modern characters refracted through the prism of country music. The music is propulsive, like the Swampers’ of Muscle Shoals, and easy associations are drawn to the Bakersfield and Los Angeles sounds of the 60’s and 70’s, but the band’s music is born in the folk forms of Appalachia and mixed in the honkey tonks and dancehalls of central Texas.