Despite being born into a family of Texas songwriting royalty, it took Calder Allen a while to come into his own. He may have been raised in Austin, the grandson of musicians Terry and Jo Harvey Allen, but Calder’s original goal was to simply become a fly fisherman. He even had a chance to work for one of his mentors, J.T. Van Zandt — yes, the son of Townes — as a guide on the Texas coast. But just as Allen was getting his feet wet in the guiding business, his family history grabbed him.
“I knew that I had to give music a fair chance,” Allen says. “To this day, it’s still one of the hardest no’s that I’ve ever had to say.”
But Allen’s decision is proving to be a fruitful one. Last March, he released his latest album, Fault Lines, an eight-song LP reckoning with life choices that helped him grow his fan base outside of his native Texas. On the Fourth of July, Allen will further widen his reach when he performs at Stateside, Rolling Stone’s first-ever music festival, slated for Independence Day in Kingston, New York, with headliner Noah Kahan.
Fault Lines came together after Allen wrote the title track, an ominous, unrelenting rocker about the weighty decision he made to drop out of the University of Montana in pursuit of music. Against a backdrop of electric strings, drums, and accordion, Allen sings, “Mama, please don’t cry too hard/I’m not a falling star, I’m just lost in the dark.”
“For me, the title track explains the whole album,” Allen says. “It’s a song I wrote when I dropped out of school. It was one of those days where I’ll remember, like, the smell of when I left college. My brother picked me up from my dorm, and we started driving, and I said, ‘I feel really weird.’ He goes, ‘Do you feel like you made a mistake?’ I said, ‘No. I feel like a new chapter is starting.’ I wrote this song thinking about the conversation I had with my mom about it.”
Allen recorded the project at Austin’s venerable Arlyn Studios, with renowned guitarist — and mentor to Allen — Charlie Sexton co-producing along with Jacob Sciba. That same duo worked on all three of Allen’s records. “They’re really collaborative and fair and easy and efficient, and by this record, it was like we were talking through telekinesis,” Allen says of the recording process.
Sexton also makes a guest appearance on Fault Lines, along with Texas mainstays Jon Randall and Jack Ingram. One of the album’s early singles, “Howl,” features the Chicks’ Martie Maguire contributing vocals.
Allen’s upbringing — his childhood holidays were spent at Terry Allen’s house while his grandfather hosted his singer-songwriter friends — means he has spent most of his life running in musical circles. He looks to Ryan Bingham as a contemporary influence on his songwriting and approach to touring. Last fall, Bingham invited Allen to join him at a two-night stand in Tulsa at Cain’s Ballroom. The idea had been for Allen to sit in on a song or two, but mostly it was just to give him some hang time with Bingham and Bingham’s band the Texas Gentlemen. At the end of the first night, Bingham upped the invitation, asking Allen to cancel his plans to go home and jump on the bus for a week of shows.
“That was just really him,” Bingham tells Rolling Stone about bringing Allen on tour. “His whole persona, his energy is really honest and good. I’d heard about him years ago, and I met him when he was a little kid and I was running around with Terry. First time I heard his music, Charlie Sexton sent me some songs they’d been working on. Then, I met him again, and heard him sing, and I just thought, this kid’s got some mojo to him.”
There’s more music on the way from Allen this spring, and it’s a true family affair. Terry and Jo Harvey Allen have been working on a multi-generational project called Blood Sucking Maniacs, which features five generations of Allens performing, if you count the then-fetal heartbeat of Calder Allen’s nephew, Lucky Marlo, that makes up the record’s opening and closing tracks. (The project is out now.)
“My grandpa found these old recordings of his mom playing piano, and it kind of spurred this whole thing of, ‘What if we all came together and made this record?’ We did that so we could say it’s a five-generation album,” Allen says. “It’s always been that way in our family, always collaborative.”
Bingham and Sexton are far from the only mainstays in Texas and Americana circles to take note of Allen. He spent long stretches opening for Shane Smith and the Saints, Turnpike Troubadours, and Cody Jinks. And while he’s only been touring earnestly for around five years and considers his live show a work in progress, it’s easy to get the sense that Allen made the right decision back in Montana.
“It’s really just a feeling of, can I get in the song?” he says of his approach to writing and recording. “Are the tempos lining up, and can I feel what’s happening? Then, you can tell by the audience reaction, if they’re enjoying it.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose book (Almost) Almost Famous is available now via Back Lounge Publishing.
