HUNTINGTON -- If there's an award for best all around on the regional music scene, Huntington music man Bud Carroll would have to be a contender.

Just recently, the 20-something engineered and helped produce the Scrapiron Pickers, he's in the studio with such local acts as The Good Fight and Alexis Cunningham, he's got several bands going, and Lord knows where he'll show up next.

Come Saturday, Carroll, a singer/songwriter who plays guitar, keys and pedal steel guitar, puts on the proverbial hat of band leader as he and the Southern Souls (Jimmy Lykens, bass and vocals, Steve Barker, drums and Jon Cavendish, keys, guitar and vocals) have a release party for their full-length CD, "Wasted Words and Best of Intentions."

Doors open at 8 p.m. Showtime is 10 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 21, at Shamrock's Pub, 2050 3rd Ave., Huntington.

Cover is $12 and includes a copy of the CD as well as a live DVD the band taped last year at the Paramount Arts Center in Ashland.

Opening the show is seminal Cleveland-based indie rock singer/songwriter, Bill Fox, the former lead singer of the influential power pop The Mice.

Carroll, who's been busy doing a lot of work in his studio on the engineering side, said it's been a lot of fun to re-assemble the Southern Souls and play the songs they recorded last year with renowned Athens, Ohio-based producer Eddie Ashworth (Sublime, Dio, Great White and Pennywise).

Carroll is a talented guitarist who has shared the stage with such acts as The Allman Brothers, Tom Petty, Los Lobos, Drive-By Truckers, Gov't Mule, Robert Randolph and the Family Band and John Fogerty when he was playing with Jive Records artists American Minor. He said it feels great to get the band back together and to have Cavendish, who now lives in Nashville coming back for the show.

Carroll said there's a new life and energy to the original songs once they've been steeped in time and now that the band is jamming once again.

"It's been a lot of fun, and the sorts of things that were stumbling blocks before are gone because everybody in the band is such good players," Carroll said. "We have a fresh perspective when approaching the songs. When we played them before it was that the band had a tendency to sort of try too hard instead of letting things be what they are. Now it seems more clear how these songs need to be interpreted."

A handful of the songs have racked up more than 35,000 plays on MySpace. For those who haven't heard it, the Southern Souls CD warmly envelopes rock, country, funk and pop and with Carroll's seemingly oak-barrel-aged vocals and guitar front and center, steeped with a tone and musical sensibility that belie his years.

Intelligent, socially conscientious lyrics on such songs as "Big Coal," (written by Lykens) pack a modern-day "What's Going On?" sense of urgency and social justice.

That song is now in rotation on 92.7-FM, The Planet, and there's plenty more radio-fare where that came from.

Delicious, bass-driven, hook-laden fare such as "She Got It From Me" and "I Don't Believe You," make you pine for the days when rock radio sounded so funky, rich and good.

"That's All She Wrote," has suddenly gotten hot on MySpace with 3,000 plays in just a couple days.

Along with the new CD, Saturday will be the unveiling of a DVD that was shot with seven cameras by Huntington's Brainwrap Productions (Ian Nolte, Michael Valentine, Seth Martin and others), over at the Paramount Arts Center during a concert with Genuine Junk Band.

Steve Riley, of Smash Hits Studio in Huntington, mixed the DVD. Carroll, who has been playing guitar in the clubs since he was 12, said it feels great to have these snapshots of his music.

"It definitely has been the most well-documented time of my life in that regard," Carroll said. "When I was a kid I did some recordings and had tape machines that broke or the tapes lost or stuff lost in moves. So it's nice to do something that finally I will have. There is so much stuff that I have done that is just gone."

The Herald-Dispatch

Bud Carroll