On Friday, singer-songwriter Dustin Brown will release his latest record, a self-titled 10-track collection of what he half-jokingly referred to in a recent interview as “sad, almost emo” country. His back catalog includes songs with names like “Misery,” “Ashamed,” and “Degradation,” plus subject matter like the depressing tour of an alcohol problem depicted in “My Little Habit” (from his 2022 EP Pull’n Teeth) and a 2023 single called “The Grave.” I’d say his songs bear a grimness that the words “sad” and “emo” cannot adequately convey.
But from his new album’s first track, “Skins and Shirts,” in which Brown wonders if it hurts worse to grow up in or move away from a small town, he seems to have hammered the melancholic bent of his older material into a wider variety of expressions. Yes, his songs are still pretty sad, and they do still feel pretty personal. In the passage of time, however, he’s honed his songwriting chops with the weight of minor, often-times scathing details — the opening lines of “Falcon 9” cut like a broken beer bottle, so this is prime listening for people who actively appreciate good lyrics — and for that alone, Dustin Brown is Dustin Brown’s best work yet.
But it’s also his best one because the album, as a whole, just sounds a lot more mature. Brown grew up in Moody, a small town of around 1,300 people southwest of Waco, where he learned to play guitar as a kid and fell in love with the Red Dirt scene of the 2000s and 2010s. Getting into the music of Jason Boland, Cody Canada, and Shane Smith inspired him to form a cover band that played dives and biker bars, and his old songs evince those influences — the heavy vocal twang, the hard-luck drankin’ vibes. These days, though, he says he’s been writing with a bigger audience in mind.
“I guess you’d call it ‘Americana,’ whatever that means,” he said. “I think [my newer songs] have a broader appeal, outside of what people think Red Dirt or Texas Country sounds like.”
Indeed, the album’s sonics have more in common with Phosphorescent or the War on Drugs than, say, Stoney LaRue or William Clark Green.
Then there’s his voice. When you listen to the songs on Brown’s first two albums, you hear a singer leaning hard into his small-town Texas upbringing and the yarn-spinning drawl of the songwriters he admired when he learned to play his first covers. You could hear him digging deep, going for big emotions on those old songs, but now Brown sounds a lot more comfortable with his own pipes, the sort of natural, emotional authenticity that comes with years of life-and-songwriting experience, of getting a better understanding of who you are or aspire to be, and then making a decision to pursue that path.
The album’s first single, “Burn,” ponders that moment. In what he calls a come-to-Jesus meeting with yourself, he sings, “And I swear, either way / One day I’ll be gone away / They won’t care about your hair / And all the damn things that you say / You’ll be grown, you’ll be old / Saying, ‘Stay off my lawn’ / Let it burn, both ends / You ain’t ever gonna win / ’Til the wheels fall off, and you stop / And start to really give a damn.”
“Burn,” he said, is about “growing as a person,” but it also reflects the way his approach to his life as a professional musician has shifted. “I got a lot of experience playing a lot of shows at places that might not have been a good fit or where I pretty much made no money for all the time and money I’d have to spend to do them.”
He thinks of himself as a “mid-tier” artist, for which quality of gigs over quantity does more for your bottom line than wearing yourself ragged across endless open-mics, song swaps, and hours-long solo shows at restaurants where conversation and chewing are louder than an acoustic guitar. He is also moving away from the onerous, time-sucking social-media grind expected of artists of all tiers.
“I am pretty much treating my Instagram as a billboard moving forward,” Brown said. “I pretty much am just gonna post when I’m playing and direct people to my website. Having to make videos and constantly post takes up the time I should be working on songs, you know?”
How do you get people to shows without Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, though? Brown thinks one solution is to be super-supportive of the local music scene. Dustin Brown’s official release party is Saturday night at The Cicada with a pair of country-influenced songwriters in the opening slots: Austin’s Rachel Cole and Stephenville’s Billy Hartman, both of whom are friends of Brown’s on- and off-stage. All three have performed at Jam Down by the River, an Americana festival held in New Braunfels every fall since 2020. The festival says it’s “put on and funded by artists, just friends coming together to create.” Fort Worth’s Mollie Daniel, Cut Throat Finches, and Cameron Smith all performed at this thing, and Brown said it’s about artists working in complementary genres to basically “just hang out and play songs together.” In that regard, Brown and his fellow songwriters are organically making their own version of the 2000s Red Dirt scene that captivated him when he was a teenager. While the greater cultural impact of this nascent community of North-and-Central-Texas artists is anyone’s guess, Dustin Brown is a must-have document.
Dustin Brown Album Release Show
8pm Sat w/Rachel Cole and Billy Hartman at The Cicada, 1002 S Main St, Fort Worth. $15.
