Texas Democratic Senate Candidate Beto O'Rourke's Old Band (via Twitter)

By now, you’ve probably heard the name Beto O’Rourke. The hunky Democratic Texas congressman is currently leading a campaign to take away the Senate seat from under Ted Cruz’s corrupt fat ass and, well, he actually has a shot in doing exactly that. It’s kind of crazy.

More recently, however, O’Rourke’s musical past came into question, thanks to an incredibly stupid intern running the @TexasGOP Twitter account. The morons over there actually thought his ties to artists like Cedric Bixler-Zavala would be seen as lame.



Needless to say, their hollow attempts at an Internet meme failed, and now O’Rourke has gone ahead and embraced his DIY past by sharing an old track from his time in Foss with Bixler-Zavala, and you know what, it’s pretty good.

The track’s called “Rise” and originally appeared on The El Paso Pussycats EP, which O’Rourke recorded at Columbia University. It’s a chalky slice of alternative rock that wouldn’t be out of place on a compilation album alongside Sunny Day Real Estate. Stream it over at Rolling Stone.

In an interview with the publication, O’Rourke shared how he first met Bixler-Zavala covering the Misfits in El Paso’s burgeoning DIY scene. “I’m a junior in high school,” he recalls, “and this guy is like a freshman, and he’s singing in this amazing band. He had long black hair and everybody wore the black wristbands.”

He also remembered crossing paths with Leslie Feist while on tour with Foss: “My memory is [she] didn’t have any money to get in and so she traded, I believe, her brother’s lock-picking set and a T-shirt or a tape and then we traded her a ticket to get in, and then when we came through next year, she had a band called Placebo that we played with.”

As Pitchfork points out, O’Rourke also played drums with the Swedes, whose album can be streamed on Bandcamp. It includes a cover of Galaxie 500’s cover of Jonathan Richman’s “Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste”. Galaxie 500’s Damon Krukowski made the discovery today. How meta…

Last month, O’Rourke joined Willie Nelson and Margo Price on stage for Nelson’s annual Fourth of July Picnic in Austin, Texas. Together, the group performed Nelson’s weed-loving tracks “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die” and “It’s All Going to Pot”. This guy cool enough yet?