Chris Higbee fiddles with country-rock sound

By John Benson

entertainment@vindy.com

Four years removed from the demise of his old band, PovertyNeck Hillbillies, singer-fiddler Chris Higbee feels as though the starting gun finally has gone off on his solo career.

“Just about everything is going on right now,” said Higbee, calling from his Pittsburgh-area home.

“This summer, we’re playing all over the Ohio area. We’ve got the album still relatively new that we’re pushing down in Nashville and just kind of waiting for the right deal to come along.”

That album is a self-titled affair that came out exactly a year ago and features what Higbee calls a Charlie Daniels-meets-Jason Aldean country-music vibe.

Though he co-wrote five of the tracks, other tunes, which range from feel-good fiddling tunes to all-out rockers, were penned by some of Nashville’s top songwriters such as Brett James, Ashley Gorley, Wade Kirby and Paul Overstreet.

“It’s just energetic music,” Higbee said. “I have a song on there about my wife who is a veteran. She’s actually at Fort Knox right now. I wrote the song ‘Write to Me’ for her when she was overseas in the middle of it. Another song is ‘Fiddles Rock.’ That’s the first track I wrote. It just describes why I got into the fiddle. This girl next door played the violin, and she was hot. So I had to learn to play. That pretty much describes where the fiddle has taken me through my life. That’s a rocking track.”

The idea of being a country rocker is something Higbee takes very seriously. As much as he’s influenced by Garth Brooks and other Music City icons, he points to classic-rock artists such as Boston and Van Halen for coloring his musical palette. Speaking of the latter act, Higbee can’t wait until this March when Diamond David Lee Roth and Van Halen come to Pittsburgh.

“Of course, it’s like bittersweet,” Higbee said. “You love to see them get back together, but you just hope it’s as good as it was.”

Speaking of reunions, maybe that’s what they’re saying about the possibility of the PovertyNeck Hillbillies, which in the mid-’00s was one of the hottest country acts in the region, once again sharing a stage.

“There’s been a little bit of reunion talk,” Higbee said. “A couple of guys approached me about it. I own the name and the rights, so at this point, I’m not ready for that. And if anybody really enjoyed the Povertyneck Hillbillies, they’ll really enjoy what I’m doing because this is right along those same lines.”

Fans can reconnect with Higbee when he returns to the Youngstown area for a Saturday show at The Cellar.

His set naturally will include solo-album material, as well as covers from Def Leppard (“Pour Some Sugar on Me”) and Alabama (“Dixieland Delight”).

Higbee feels as long as he keeps his head down and keeps working — he’s averaging more than 150 shows a year around the country — good things will happen in 2012.

“You know there is some obvious transition after a band breaks up like that, and we’re definitely on the upswing,” Higbee said.

“We’re playing just about everywhere we can in the tri-state area. Come summer, it’s going to be crazy. So I’m very happy.”