Rex Hobart & the Misery Boys are back — and not a moment too soon

Aside from the intricately patterned boots, Scott Hobart, in his corduroy pants and tucked-in oxford, does not particularly look like a honky-tonk singer. He can sure drink like one, though, and before he slides into a bar seat at Coda Bar & Grill during a weekday happy hour, he orders a shot of whiskey and a draft. It has been 10 years since he and his band toured as Rex Hobart & the Misery Boys, but there are some habits you don’t break.

Last month, the band released Long Shot of Hard Stuff on Little Class Records, its first album since 2005’s Empty House. Hobart confesses that he’s almost as surprised as his fans might be.

“It is so absurd that 10 years later, just when you thought we were out, we’re back. Watch out!” Hobart says, laughing. “This was just sort of a whim of a record. We definitely wouldn’t have done it if Jody [Hendrix] and the rest of the guys over at Little Class hadn’t said, ‘Hey, if you guys ever want to do a record, we’re happy to help.'”

So it was last September that the band — guitarist and lead singer Hobart (stage name Rex), bassist Tilden “Blackjack” Snow, guitarist Brendan “J.B. Morris” Moreland, pedal-steel player Nate “Solomon” Hofer and drummer Mike “T.C. Dobbs” Dolembo — began thinking about new material.

The band and Little Class Records agreed on a December deadline. But Hobart hadn’t written a song with lyrics since Empty House, and everyone in the band had gone through a decade’s worth of changes. Hobart had moved several times before returning to Kansas City with his wife, and most of his bandmates had started families and found new paths.

“By now, all bets are off,” Hobart says. “We’ve shifted gears after pushing for a lot of years on the road and making albums back to back and all that. We did four albums, we were on Bloodshot [Records], but we could never really make anything pop. It was like, ‘Well, we’ve done all we can. We were in the right places and the right moments and we tried, and we’re just not over the top. We’ve got to get back to real life.'”

At 43, Hobart is living a fairly standard-issue “real life.” He has a job (as a theater tech), and he’s a dad, with a 2-year-old son and another kid on the way. He also happens to play in a country band, one that is universally admired and could have been one of Kansas City’s wildest success stories with just this much more luck.

Hobart acknowledges this last part with a smile and a shrug and not a shred of bitterness.

“I feel like one of the reasons that we never really popped was because people would hear us and compare us to Merle Haggard, George Jones and those guys,” Hobart says, “and it’s like, ‘Hey, you know what? Those guys are really good! I’m gonna go listen to a George Jones record!’ Why buy our record at that point? I can’t blame anyone for that. And I’m proud of what we did on Bloodshot and everything we’ve done.”

Still, Hobart wasn’t looking to repeat himself on Long Shot. He was done writing what he calls the “heartbreak songs” of his earlier albums, what he now thinks of as “absurdly sad tunes, up to the point of tragic comedy.” And he wasn’t interested in putting too much pressure on the band and risk sapping the enjoyment out of it. The goals of this year’s Rex Hobart & the Misery Boys, he says, are substantially different from what they once were.

“I feel like the band is more of an escape than it ever was before,” Hobart tells me. “It’s our card game. It’s where we go to have fun, and I think that comes through on the new record. I wanted to write some fun songs and get some new subject matter and open things up a little bit within the genre of honky-tonk and country.”

So there are plenty of classic country elements on Long Shot — including Hobart’s robust tenor, which seems designed to curve around the wailing notes of a slide guitar. But there are also surprises, such as the jangly, new-fashioned “Get’n My Honky Tonk Back On.” And though the love-spurned tales that Hobart once favored are indeed MIA, it doesn’t mean that he’s any more cheerful. On “Jones’n for Merle Haggard (to Bring Me Back Home),” he assumes the character of an artist who has fallen short of his dreams: Followin’ in the footsteps of my honky-tonk heroes, wonderin’ what went wrong, he sings, Could you put mama on the phone so I can tell her she tried?

Hobart delivers those lines with a cowboy’s confidence, all twang and tranquility. He’s not the character in the song, he says. And though he didn’t really figure on the rebirth of his band, he is pleased to discover that there’s still room to grow for Rex Hobart & the Misery Boys.

“I feel like, at least on our first three rec­ords, we were really trying to emulate that old, classic sound,” Hobart says. “There were some original ideas in the music, but we were still really studying the form. It wasn’t until Empty House that we kind of started realizing the craft of the style. And for that record, we were recording in this cold warehouse back here with Chad Meise [sound engineer at Davey’s Uptown], and we were just doing it, and I remember it being a more ‘us’ kind of record. And this record is another step in that direction.”

Coda has gotten livelier as we’ve talked, and tonight’s entertainment — the Phantoms of the Opry, which Hofner also plays in — has filed in. Hobart has a way of turning a serious statement into a joke, and he rolls his eyes as he finishes his thoughts on the band’s future.

“I guess we’re finally finding ourselves after all these years,” he says, laughing and reaching for his beer.

Nothing wrong with that.