The ghost town of Goodnight, Texas sits halfway between the homes of San Francisco's Avi Vinocur and Chapel Hill, North Carolina's Patrick Dyer Wolf, whose transcontinental collaboration has taken on the name of its geographic midpoint.

After meeting in San Francisco and learning each other's melodies, the pair of songwriters found their stylistic midpoint amidst old wooden instruments and a vision of late nineteenth century blue collar America - a grittier, simpler, more mysterious world full of raw pain and beauty.

A Long Life of Living, due out on October 2, 2012 breathes fascination with the fading memory of generations in our country's patchwork of opportunity, immigration, and tragedy, and muses on our own era's place in the story.

Vinocur's deep ancestral roots in the Appalachian hills of western Maryland are alive in the mandolin driven elegy of a doomed fiance' "Jesse Got Trapped In A Coal Mine."

"I grew up hearing stories more or less like 'Jesse Got Trapped in a Coal Mine' about distant relatives of mine," says Vinocur. "As a kid I would pore over our collections of 19th century tintype photographs of relatives and friends of our family, and I became fascinated with life that long ago. It seemed so dark and beautiful, but unknown: the clothes, the weathered faces. That fascination became a theme for this new record of ours. To me, 'Jesse' is like one of those family stories - you'll never know if it really happened that way, but you choose to pass it down anyway."

While they are clearly different writers, the Wolf/Vinocur venn diagram is consistently compelling. Together with bassist Jonathan Kirchner, drummer Andrew Laubacher and sometimes others, Goodnight, Texas has the dynamic range of a ragged orchestra and a story that will stand the test of time.

The group will be on tour in support of "A Long Life of Living" this fall.

For music and more, please go to:

Goodnight, Texas Official Website