To this point, Austin Meade’s career has been the sort of old-school grind that Texas artists once accepted as just the way things work in independent music. He’s steadily growing and has been since he released his debut album in 2014, but that doesn’t make the slow nights any easier. “We’ll go play big festivals, and then the next night, we’ll be playing a smoky bar to 200 people,” he says.
Meade is sitting on his tour bus on a sweltering August day in the Texas Hill Country, waiting to open a sold-out Treaty Oak Revival concert at the 5,700-capacity Whitewater Amphitheater. Meade has been a favorite opener for both Treaty Oak and Koe Wetzel in the post-pandemic era, and that’s the point of Almost Famous, Meade’s sixth studio album, which he released in early November.
“There’s been a lot of change in my life over the last four or five years. I got married. Two kids. Trying to deal with buses and more and more touring. We made somewhat of a switch into the rock world. These songs on Almost Famous are how I feel,” he says. “Some of them are about just banging my head against the wall. Some days things are great and some days I feel like I should just quit. Everybody that I’ve talked to that’s ever been successful feels like that at some point or another.”
Now 31, the Central Texas-born Meade spent his life being heavily influenced by the Texas country scene. He was especially drawn to the rock-edged sound of Cross Canadian Ragweed and frontman Cody Canada. That influence, plus long stretches playing with Treaty Oak Revival and Wetzel — and major arena acts like ZZ Top and Godsmack — led Meade to adopt a sound that rocks more than twangs. Almost Famous finds Meade leaning into those vibes over the course of 10 tracks, recorded largely in a spare bedroom at his New Braunfels home. He says the rest was recorded in “a garage in Nashville.”
The release cycle for the album started in early summer, when Meade dropped a pair of singles. “Honey Do Ya” turned the notion of a to-do list into a love song to his wife, while the title track finds him lamenting how close he has come to his own breakout moment over the years.
“We’ll go to a grocery store or be in the airport, sometimes people will freak out if they do recognize me — which is not all the time,” Meade says. “If there’s a fan, it would be funny if I’m with my friends and people would come up and be like, ‘Holy shit! It’s Austin Meade!’ while nobody else in the airport knows. But to my friends group, especially the ones I was in high school or college with, it would be like, ‘Oh my God, this guy’s doing well!’ It was that mixed with going on tours all the time and being worn out, and then you come home to two kids and a wife, and you have a lot of shit to do. There’s this never-ending to-do list, especially as you acquire more stuff in life.”
That’s not to say Meade only exists in the world of opening artists. He’s got a headlining tour of his own highlighted by a Jan. 3 stop at Texas’s venerable Gruene Hall on the books, plus an annual holiday tour with Treaty Oak Revival frontman Sam Canty that showcases Meade and Treaty Oak co-billed as the “Mead-E-Oak-r Christmas Vacation Tour.” This year, it’ll hit Ardmore, Oklahoma, and two nights in Lubbock, Texas, in early December.
Meade’s relationship with Treaty Oak — and Canty, in particular — goes beyond music. He and Canty hang out when they’re not on the road. Their families celebrate holidays and birthdays together. Meade says Treaty Oak’s recent surge in popularity and streaming numbers as an independent band gives him hope that Almost Famous could finally lead to his own similar breakthrough.
“I became friends with Sam a couple of years ago,” Meade says of Canty. “We come from the Texas life, you know? Sam actually went to some of our shows before [Treaty Oak] were touring the way they are now. He sent me a video of them covering one of my songs, ‘Lyin’ to Myself’ in this little bar gig. It’s insane how much they’ve grown. My relationship with them now is, anything they can do to help.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose book (Almost) Almost Famous will be released April 1 via Back Lounge Publishing.
