Isaac Gibson called 49 Winchester to attention. This was last October, and Gibson was standing in the balcony of the Roundhouse, a historic rock hall in the Camden Town borough of London, which had opened nearly 200 years ago as a railway shed. An hour earlier, 49 Winchester played to a sold-out crowd in the 3,300-capacity room below. Wyatt Flores had kicked off the evening, and every member of 49 agreed this was the biggest night of the group’s decade-plus career.
The show was part of a European run that capped two years of touring behind Leavin’ This Holler, 49 Winchester’s 2024 album. As the last of the fans filed out into a crisp, fall night and the cleaning staff swept cans and bottles off the floor, Gibson raised a glass.
“This is not the end, it’s the beginning,” Gibson said, his voice cracking while his band and crew, and Flores, looked on. “It will grow and grow, here and in the States, because 49 is forever.”
Seven months later, 49 Winchester are poised for the sort of career-altering breakthrough that makes Gibson’s London toast seem prophetic.
On Friday, the six-piece outfit from southwest Virginia will release Change of Plans. The record features 10 tracks, nine of which were written by Gibson, the band’s frontman and lead vocalist. The title is apt for a band that, were it not for the blend of folk, soul, and country that define 49 Winchester, would be unrecognizable from the group that recorded Leavin’ This Holler.
“Each record we’ve made has been a distinct chapter in our life,” Gibson tells Rolling Stone. “I’ve felt it kind of level up, up, and up. I think that this jump is more drastic than it has ever been from album to album. The big, overarching theme of this record is how much our lives have changed since we started this band. We’ve got families. We’re getting married. That’s why ‘Change’ resonated with us so much.”
Gibson made that statement while sitting on a couch in the green room of Webster Hall, another historic rock venue in another major city — New York — before 49 headlined in late April to a crowd estimated of 900. That figure doubled what 49 Winchester drew the last time it headlined in New York, a 2024 set at Gottscheer Hall as part of the Honky Tonkin’ in Queens series.
But Change of Plans is not about 49’s burgeoning fan base. This record came from a pit of uncertainty, angst, and — eventually — hope, within Gibson himself.
“The truest answer that I could give you,” Gibson says, “is that I went through a breakup after a really long relationship. Then, after that, I found the love of my life. It just hit me like a Mack truck out of nowhere, and it changed my entire life, forever. That’s the big one.”
Gibson lays this bare in the album’s second track, “Bluebird,” which is the song that inspired the title of the whole thing. Gibson’s vocals are front-and-center in the mix, all but demanding you give a close listen as he sings, “All that I have ever wanted, it just slipped right through my hands/ God, I know that if you’re out there, you must have had a change of plans.”
It is a song that is deeply rooted in Gibson’s personal upheaval. Taken at face value, 49 Winchester songs are direct extensions of their frontman’s life. That means the person he wished to be back home with in the band’s road-weary signature song, “Russell County Line” from 2022, and the subject of his yearning in 2024’s “Yearning for You” is no longer with him.
That’s a hazard of the trade if you are a songwriter who shares matters of the heart in your songs. But it’s also what led Gibson to “Bluebird.”
“My life was turning upside-down and going in a completely different direction,” he says. “It’s not a breakup song, but that’s definitely where that stemmed from. I was in a spot mentally where I just had to get some stuff off my chest. That’s how most 49 songs come about anyway — be they happy or sad.”
Change of Plans marks the sixth studio album for 49 since its founding in 2013, and the first since signing to MCA’s Lucille Records imprint, which is releasing the LP in partnership with New West Records. Lucille’s founder, the Grammy winner Dave Cobb, produced the project.
Along with Gibson, the band is composed of guitarist Bus Shelton, bassist Chase Chafin, keyboard player Tim Hall, pedal steel player Noah Patrick, and drummer Justin Louthian. They formed in Castlewood, Virginia, and spent a decade playing nearly any gig they could find across the Southeast — particularly in Appalachia — before “Russell County Line” caught on and helped the rest of the world take notice. Now, however, with 49 Winchester in the conversation of the next great band in country music (they’re nominated for Group of the Year at this Sunday’s ACM Awards), the group is making music under a microscope. To record Change of Plans, 49 and Cobb retreated to Thunderbolt Sound in Savannah, Georgia, rather than a Nashville studio. The idea was to get away from the circus atmosphere that can permeate nearly every corner of 49’s camp right now: the constant travel, hourly distractions, and scant time for self-reflection.
“We all knew it had some weight to it,” Chafin says of the recording sessions. “We’re going in with less of a DIY approach and working with a very accomplished producer. We were excited to get away and focus on the songs. Between Dave and Isaac, they were kind of running the session. It was a very open and collaborative effort.”
The lone cover on the record is, in its own way, as soul-baring as the nine that Gibson wrote. Shortly before the band went into the studio in summer 2025, Ozzy Osbourne died at 76. While prior 49 records had been made up exclusively of original songs, Gibson had been mulling the idea of a cover this time around. After Osbourne’s death, he picked Black Sabbath’s “Changes.”
“We grew up listening to, and loving, heavy metal,” Gibson says. “When you’re a kid — and we grew up in the age that had access to the Internet — you go and you do your research. Know what I mean? We were into Sabbath 45 years after the height of their popularity. That’s a testament to great music. Ozzy was a great singer, and we’ve always been fascinated with him.”
There’s one more twist to the record, and to Gibson’s story. For as much as 49 have come to be identified with southwest Virginia and Castlewood, specifically, the band’s songs most associated with their home have been wistful, homesick tunes. This time they recorded one that’s less about missing home and more about reckoning with it.
On “The Window,” Gibson sings frankly and painfully about life in an Appalachian coal town that is half a century past its heyday. He seethes with both frustration and anger over the toll that black lung or railroad tracks “built on lies and dollar signs” took on his friends, family, and the town that gave rise to his band.
If the raw honesty in “The Window” brings to mind the songs that Tyler Childers often writes about his rural Kentucky home, there’s a good reason for that. “We always wanted to be torchbearers for music in southwest Virginia,” Gibson says. “We saw the way Childers was able to do that for eastern Kentucky, and we wanted to be the version of that across the mountains.”
Five of the six members of 49 still make their homes in or around Castlewood. Gibson is the exception. He recently moved to Tennessee — about an hour outside of Nashville — to be closer to the business side of his band and to make it easier to collaborate with like-minded songwriters. It’s one more change he’s had to deal with since Leavin’ This Holler.
In the big picture, though, the story of both Gibson and 49 Winchester will not be written about two years of personal and professional roller-coaster rides. Their tale is now centered on the road. They have a fanbase big enough to see Gibson’s “49 is forever” promise come to fruition and have already shared the stage with some of the biggest names in both country and Americana: Childers, Luke Combs, Shane Smith and the Saints, among them. The band will spend the second half of this year opening for Tim McGraw on his Pawn Shop Guitar Tour.
“Mostly we just want to know the crowd has a good time and all the band guys feel happy,” Chafin says of their approach to the stage. “The biggest thing that could instantly make something a great show to me, is people singing along on the deeper cuts. If they’re screaming those back at you, it’s just like, ‘These people know what’s up.’”
That feeling isn’t exclusive to fans. 49 Winchester have already managed to wield a level of influence over other artists that some bands never see in a five-decade career. Flores, in particular, cites Gibson’s mentorship and a long run opening for 49 as the key to his own meteoric rise.
“We’re just now starting to see it,” Gibson, 32, says. “That has come in the form of us being on tour as a headline act, and we’ve got a support act out that’s a bunch of college-age kids that literally grew up listening to our music. They were listening to us when they were in eighth grade, and now they’re professional musicians. That makes us feel old, but we’re not.
“But we’ve done it long enough to make an impact on a generation of people who saw the same thing that we did,” he continues. “Which is: Something is missing in country music. It has no balls, and it has no grit, and we want to change it. We want to be something else. We want to do shit our way. I think there has been a group of young, like-minded musicians who have admired that.”
After spending the better part of an hour reflecting on 49 Winchester’s climb, Gibson has another concert to play. He leaves the green room and heads up the spiraling wooden staircase that leads to the stage at Webster Hall, where he joins the rest of the band. On the other side of the stage door, the house lights have already dimmed and 49’s walkout music is playing over the PA.
Gibson once again calls 49 Winchester to attention. He has another message for his bandmates. “Love y’all,” he says.
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose book (Almost) Almost Famous is available now via Back Lounge Publishing.
