Silverada, a Honky-Tonk Band, Did the Unthinkable: Trading Pedal Steel for Keys. It’s Working

When Silverada released their latest album Living Proof this month, it was as much about cementing the band as Silverada as it was about being time to put out new music. “I feel like there was a lot hinging on it being the second Silverada record,” frontman Mike Harmeier says. “When we released the first one, that was the introduction to this whole thing. This is driving it home.”

The 10-track Living Proof completes an evolution that began long before the group’s 2024 rebrand after 16 years as Mike and the Moonpies . While that moniker established the band as modern-day torchbearers of honky-tonk music, it also, according to Harmeier, pigeonholed them as only honky-tonkers. But the Moonpies have always contained multitudes. They jetted off to London to record with a symphony at Abbey Road Studios for 2019’s Cheap Silver & Solid Country Gold , and ultimately decided to make the name change five years later to showcase a group with a full range of styles and influences.

Then, in early 2025, steel guitar player and founding member Zachary Moulton left the band. Rather than replace him with a new steel player, Silverada turned to Parker Twomey, a 25-year-old singer-songwriter and keyboard player who has previously played with Paul Cauthen and Ben Kweller. The current iteration of Silverada is Harmeier, Twomey, guitarist Catlin Rutherford, drummer Taylor Englert, and bassist Omar Oyoque.

The decision to replace Moulton with Twomey had two immediate impacts: It left Silverada with only two of its founding members — Harmeier and Rutherford — and also meant Twomey had to replace steel guitar with keys while not upsetting the melodies in the band’s catalog. The group previously had a keyboard player until John Carbone left in 2020, but always in tandem with a steel guitarist. “We’ve had keys on every record, but nothing that was in the forefront before,” Harmeier says. Since Twomey’s arrival, Silverada have been turning its pre-show soundchecks into jam sessions, largely driven by Twomey. That, in turn, gave rise to Living Proof . Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

“It was months beforehand of straight-up jamming out during soundchecks,” says Oyoque, surrounded by his bandmates on a patio at Bux’s Place, one of three bars in Challis, Idaho, where the group was peforming. “Since Parker joined, it was, ‘Let’s all get acquainted, musically, together.’ That was really important. This is Silverada, and this is where we are. A lot of the riffs and hits and little nuances of Living Proof are products of those moments in soundchecks in the months before — us jamming out.”

Silverada recorded and self-produced the LP at Sonic Ranch Studios in Tornillo, Texas, just outside of El Paso. They chose Sonic Ranch in hopes of recreating those soundchecks. For their first record without a pedal steel, they embraced the seclusion of the studio.