Over the past year, Wyatt Flores has risen from promising up-and-comer to one of the most in-demand artists in country music, which included being named to Rolling Stone’s 2024 Future of Music. This year in Flores’s life has been detailed in an upcoming book, Red Dirt Unplugged. The book focuses heavily on the Oklahoma songwriter’s life, musical roots, ongoing struggles with mental health, and the crowds he won over along the way. Red Dirt Unplugged — which also chronicles the rise of Red Dirt artists such as Kaitlin Butts, Southall, Josh Meloy, and Lance Roark, as well as artists tangential to Red Dirt like Dylan Gossett and Vincent Neil Emerson — is available for pre-order and set for release on December 13, when Flores headlines the Ryman Auditorium for the first time. It will include a special edition showcasing Flores. A portion of the book, adapted for timeliness, has been excerpted for Rolling Stone.
Every eye inside the Mission Ballroom locked onto Wyatt Flores.
This was late July, and Flores had just walked out to center stage for an encore following a 90-minute set. Leading up to the show, the Oklahoma songwriter spent several days on social media hyping the show at the five-year-old rock room in Denver as the biggest headlining concert of his career. His fans responded by selling out the place, with a paid attendance of 3,261. On a giant video board behind Flores, a death scene had just played out.
In a two-minute animation that began with Flores and his bandmates offstage, a revolver appeared onscreen, firing a lone bullet at a coffin containing the skeleton that had served as Flores’ logo for the past two years — spanning three EP’s, a viral breakout moment, a spot in Rolling Stone’s 2024 Future of Music, and a mental health struggle that threatened to undo it all — and striking the symbol of death in the spot where a heart would be. In the animation, this skeleton had a heart, which exploded upon impact and burst into flames. As Flores returned to the stage over chants of “Wyatt! Wyatt!” to debut “Don’t Wanna Say Goodnight,” the animation panned out to reveal a sunrise over a prairie landscape, with the skeleton burning in the center of it all.
The message Flores sent in the video was twofold: First, death will always be a part of Flores’ music and his life, but it will no longer define him. And second, Welcome to the Plains, his first full-length album, will be released Oct. 18 on Island Records.
“I couldn’t believe I was watching my vision fully play out,” Flores says of the 14-track record. “And I also couldn’t believe the songs that I had written. I finally started writing happier songs. There’s still some heartbreak on there, but I just couldn’t believe that I actually had love songs.”
Welcome to the Plains, with producer Beau Bedford behind the console, is full of enough musical and lyrical range to be the defining album of the 23-year-old Flores’ career, no matter how long it lasts. That such a record could be written and recorded mere months after Flores, in tears, told a Kansas City crowd he was “struggling with the feeling of feeling nothing” — while addressing head-on the reasons he felt that way on the album — can make the entire project feel genuinely shocking on first listen.
From the darkness Flores felt in February, a career-defining album seemed unlikely not just in 2024, but maybe forever. However, Flores insists upon constantly turning the world he’s experiencing into music. Once, via his own introspection and a tight-knit support group, some rays of light broke up that darkness, Flores pulled himself up, killed the skeleton that had haunted his own mind, and made Welcome to the Plains.
“I’ve enjoyed being onstage again,” Flores says. “I don’t feel like I’m faking it. I’m just enjoying my time being onstage, and I’m not worried about what the crowd thinks. I’m just happy that I’m getting to play with my friends onstage. On the writing side, I’m not as hard on myself. I felt a lot of pressure from people telling me I was a good writer, and I was like, ‘I don’t think I am! I look up to my heroes, and I can’t write like them. I’m not good enough.’ It’s a lot of self-sabotage, and I’ve been able to take that weight off of myself.
“I’m still working on it, because the problem’s not with the music. It’s on the personal side.”
Flores told me all of this while sitting next to me in a lawn chair inside a sheet metal building behind his parents’ house just outside of Stillwater, Oklahoma, in June. His father, Noe, is a retired welder who spent three decades working for Oklahoma Gas and Electric, and this building serves as his workshop. Behind it is an acreage where the family runs cattle. The shop is dotted with posters from 2021 and 2022 featuring shows Wyatt played around Oklahoma. In one corner, there’s a metal device his father made that appears to only serve one purpose. “This is our beer-can crusher,” Wyatt explains.
“A lot has changed. I’ve slowed down on drinking,” Flores says before instantly realizing that he’s holding in his hand a future contributor to the beer-can crusher. “And, apparently, right now, as we do this interview, I’m enjoying my time off! But, that’s been a big part of it. I’m trying to deal with problems as they come, right as they do, and then not shy away from them or drink for them.
“Man, my life has just gotten better! I have different outlooks, and I have different goals. Plus, part of the problem was that I didn’t have goals. My dreams were coming true so fast, I didn’t even have time to think about them. I’d just wonder, ‘Why was I even dreaming about that?’ and that’s a bad mindset to have when you’re getting to do something that you’ve wanted to do since you were a kid.”
The youngest Flores — his older sister, Alicia, now works in his crew as merchandise director — is relaxed and smiling as we talk this through. His biggest distraction is that he’s gutting and renovating roughly half of this workshop into living quarters. Long-term, he says it’ll be nice for him and his band to have a place to stay when they visit from the road. But on this day, it’s his next home. He is moving back to the same place he was raised after four years living in Nashville, and he is excited.
Four months earlier, Flores and I stood in this same workshop. This was three days after his onstage breakdown in Kansas City, and two days after he made his debut at Tulsa’s revered Cain’s Ballroom to a sold-out crowd — with the weight of the previous night still on his mind. This was one day before Flores would announce on social media that he was taking a break to seek help for his mental struggles, and that he was canceling a month of shows to do it.
I had spent a year with Flores, in the wings at the shows that marked his rise, in the studio as he and Bedford worked on Welcome to the Plains, and fishing (successfully) for largemouth bass at a farm pond owned by a Flores family friend, to tell his story. At the end of it, the contrast between the person I profiled in February and the person I profiled in June is so stark that it’s overwhelming. Welcome to the Plains, to me, became the bridge between February and present-day, and I suspect Flores’ fans will feel the same.
Saying Flores was raised by a welder (and a public school administrator — the job his mother, Shannon, still holds) leaves out a major detail of his upbringing. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Noe Flores was a drummer in a regional band. Also in this band was Noe’s brother, Bobby, as well as Scotte Lester and Kelley Green.
Wyatt Flores has become a sounding board for his fans, who often approach him with tales of their mental health struggles. Photo: Matt Paskert*
Lester and Green went on to become part of the Great Divide, the first band from the Red Dirt music scene that began in Stillwater to break out on a national scale. The Divide released two albums on Atlantic Records in the late 1990s, had a Top 40 country hit in “Pour Me a Vacation” and forged a loyal fanbase. They also went through a dramatic breakup in 2003, largely rooted in philosophical differences the band members had with front man and primary songwriter Mike McClure. Eventually, the Divide would reconcile in 2011 and re-assert themselves as torchbearers for Red Dirt. But, as Flores grew up, he knew little about the band. Mostly, he knew that Green and Lester were close friends to Noe. Green’s sons and Flores became friends. The elder Green and Lester became mentors.
“I didn’t really know that they were in a big band, I just knew that they played music,” Flores says. “But, when it came to actually learning, we’d go camping. There would be like seven families that would go. That’s what we did every weekend in the summer. And, by the time nightfall would come around and we’d have gotten off the water, until about three or four in the morning, the adults would all be just sitting out there drinking bourbon and playing guitars and telling old stories of road life — or making up stories; Scotte’s really good at that.
“Then, there was me, sitting around watching them and wanting to play music, then starting to learn how to play music. They’d start showing me chords and scales and little things that you could do. Then, about the time I was 14, Scotte tried to get me to start singing, but I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. It was awful. Scotte literally said, ‘Sing like you got a pair.’ He kept telling me that until I finally just said, ‘You know what? Even if I can’t sing, I gotta just full-send all the way.’ That’s what happened. Their impact on me is huge.”
Flores was also drawn to the vivid lyrics that characterize Red Dirt songwriting, particularly those written by Turnpike Troubadours frontman Evan Felker. Referencing Turnpike’s “Good Lord, Lorrie,” he says: “No one writes better stories. It’s that simple. Who knows how to captivate you, and put you somewhere faster? ‘Lorrie lit a cigarette and smiled and waved the smoke out of her face?’ These opening lines are unbelievably great, and the story just captivates you, right then and there. Then you’re stuck with it the entire song. Because you want to know more.
“That’s the part that I feel like I have not accomplished yet. That’s what I am really after, is writing the real stories. A lot of times, I leave a lot of things out and don’t tell full stories. I love that Turnpike has characters. That makes everyone lose their mind. You feel like you know Lorrie. You’ve seen Lorrie. There’s plenty of Lorries that you’ve seen.”
The first song Flores wrote was “Travelin’ Kid,” and he still plays the wistful number in his concerts often. But it was a song he wrote about a relationship he was in, and his significant other’s mental health struggles, that changed his life.
“Please Don’t Go” is, straightforwardly, a song pleading with another person not to take their life. And, in 2022, Flores was living in Nashville. He moved to Music City, he says, to improve as a musician and songwriter. “I didn’t come to Nashville to be Nashville. I came here to get an education on my own,” he says. There, he recorded and released his first EP, The Hutson Sessions, in 2022. “Please Don’t Go” was the fourth of four songs. In spring 2023, Flores uploaded a version of “Please Don’t Go” to TikTok. It went viral.
“That blowup was insane, and I didn’t realize how big of a blowup it was, either,” Flores recalls.
By summer 2023, Flores found himself on the road supporting 49 Winchester. From the start, he was struck by 49 Winchester’s sound and the vocal range of their frontman, Isaac Gibson.
“I still don’t know how to fully talk about their sound,” Flores says. “Everyone sees it as honky-tonk, but truly, when you dig into it, you realize this is a new sound that nobody’s done before. I asked Isaac what he listens to, and he said soul, which makes sense with his vocal range.
“And, those guys taught us how to be out on the road. They’ve helped us with so much.”
For his part, Gibson valued the short time that Flores opened for 49. By now, the two artists consider each other peers and friends.
“He’s one of those few artists that are truly, authentically themselves,” Gibson says of Flores. “There’s no persona. He just writes really great, honest songs, and musically he leans into his influences and lets it all be a part of the sound. I hear tinges of so many different things in Wyatt’s sound.
“I think he is a big breath of fresh air in the country scene. I love his approach to the music world and to his ever growing success, which is to just go be Wyatt Flores. He’s one of the humblest and kindest musicians I’ve ever been around, and I think he’s poised to do some really great things for a long time to come.”
After the 49 tour and another run opening for Charles Wesley Godwin, Flores landed his Island Record deal and set off on his own nationwide headlining tour of clubs in late summer 2023. In fact, Dylan Gossett’s first-ever live performance came on that tour when he opened for Flores at the Blue Light in Lubbock, Texas.
The tour sold well, and set Flores up well to release Life Lessons, a seven-song EP, in fall 2023. But his momentum ground to a halt. Some expected growing pains such as a sudden change in management likely could have been shaken off in a vacuum. But, in August 2023, while on tour, Flores learned his maternal grandfather had committed suicide. The pace of his sudden rise had already been wearing on Flores when he got the news.
“I already needed a wake-up call when I found out about my grandpa,” Flores says. “I’d lost a lot of people in my life.
“The thing that fucks me up is when you have their name in your phone, and you can’t call them.”
Flores returned to the road soon after his grandfather’s funeral, but feelings of hopelessness, and memories of a childhood friend who took her own life, filled his mind.
“It fucks with you,” he says. “You can’t do nothing about it. They’re gone, and all that you have is these leftover conversations. So, you go diggin’ through them, and it kills you that you can’t say goodbye.”
While Flores’ tour rolled along, his mind became clouded with grief. He had written “Please Don’t Go,” but it did not save his grandfather. Barely a month later, a young teenager from Alabama named Aubreigh Wyatt posted a TikTok video of herself with “Please Don’t Go” playing in the background. Days later, she died by suicide. Flores sent condolences to her family on social media. Flores spiraled.
“I’ve struggled with mental health for a really long time,” Flores says. “I remember the first time I brought it up to my parents. I was one of those kids who got bullied a lot. I’m not gonna lie, I was a weird fucking kid. I look at photos now like, ‘I’d punch the shit out of me too!’
“I remember coming home, right about the same time a kid had killed himself at the junior high in Stillwater. There were a lot of conversations. I remember going up to my parents later that night and saying, ‘Guys, I hear voices in my head. They’re telling me to do things, and I do not know why I hear these things.’ Your mind plays tricks on you for some weird reason. I was lucky enough to have a youth minister to talk me through it. And I had a lot of good people supporting me through it. But, that’s when I first learned that I struggled with it.”
Sold-out shows at major club venues like the Bowery Ballroom in New York and the Factory in Dallas impressed everybody but Flores. He wanted his music to make a difference. He wanted to be the song that was playing on the radio when someone may have been having dark thoughts about their own life. To be clear, this did happen often. To this day, fans reach out to Flores and tell him that “Please Don’t Go” pulled them from the depths of despair. But, he dwelled on the people he did not save. In February, he recounted a story of his manager taking an Uber ride and the driver learning of his ties to Flores. The driver said that “Please Don’t Go” had kept his wife from killing herself. A few minutes later, the driver got a phone call. His wife had been found dead of suicide.
No amount of sold-out shows, no amount of drinks, and no amount of songs he wrote were making any difference, Flores felt. That was what was on his mind when he broke down in Kansas City in February.
Fortunately for Flores, his two day-to-day managers — William Dyer and Braden Milford — saw the breakdown coming. Within a day, they decided to pull Flores off the road for a month.
They sent him to a therapist in Nashville. They sent him home to Oklahoma, where, with the support of his parents and sister, he found time to grieve the passing of his grandfather. He played with his dogs. He went fishing. He picked up a pop-up concert at a bar in Stillwater called the Salty Bronc. He re-discovered an appreciation for himself, and for his music.
“From the low of really struggling with my self-worth and the choices I was making at the time, to come out of it and start writing again, being easier on myself, it’s all been great,” he says. “But, at the same time, the more that I work on myself, the more problems I notice. So, I have to have grace on myself to realize that I’m just noticing other things I need to work on, rather than being harsh on myself.”
Flores returned to the road in March with a sold-out show at Wooly’s, a mid-sized rock room in Des Moines. And he wasted little time putting pen to paper. Most of the 14 songs on Welcome to the Plains were written or co-written between the end of his break and a two-week studio trip to Los Angeles with Bedford in May.
His Half Life EP dropped in April, an eight-song record featuring seven originals plus a cover of the Fray’s “How to Save a Life,” and heavy on the theme of facing one’s mortality while making the most of one’s time on Earth.
But by the time the EP was released, Flores’ mind was already on his bellwether project. One song, in particular, illustrates the progress he made during and after his break.
Wyatt Flores onstage at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl in February. Credit: Matt Paskert*
“Oh, Susannah” was written, by Flores, to his fans. Its refrain of “Why did I believe that I could save you darlin’ without killing me” showcases the epiphany Flores had. Co-written with David DeVaul, the song’s melody picks up where “Please Don’t Go” leaves off, but this time his message is balanced: As much as Flores would like to be, he cannot be everyone’s personal savior.
“‘Oh, Susannah’ is my entire fanbase,” Flores says. “It starts with the same riff as ‘Please Don’t Go’ in the beginning, and I love it. I don’t know if people will understand it, but I won’t do much of a talking point on it during shows, I’ll just let people figure it out.”
Flores shared that sentiment in June. Barely two weeks later, he changed his mind. The aftermath of Aubreigh Wyatt’s death had led to a renewed focus on her passing on social media, including a resurfacing of her post of “Please Don’t Go.”
On July 10, Flores played the Grand Ole Opry for the second time. By this time, his profile had risen to the point he was able to persuade the Opry to invite the Great Divide to play on the same night, marking their debut at the venue 25 years after their last major-label album came out. Flores’ parents were also in attendance. He had a four-song set that night, and “Oh, Susannah” was the third tune.
Before the song’s final chorus, Flores had his band stop playing. He addressed the crowd:
“I had to step away from music earlier this year, because of a lot of different reasons,” he continued. “One of those was feeling the weight of the world from trying to help people but not feeling like I was. As cool as it is that I get to do this…and the music that I portray, it gets to save lives. But, there’s also the dark side of it, where you don’t know if that song just kept them on Earth just a couple of days longer.
“I did not write that song, ‘Please Don’t Go,’ for everybody out there in the world. I wrote it because of the situation that I was in with a girl that I loved. But, this song is for y’all. ‘Oh, Susannah’ is you. I wrote this for you. And I’m sorry.”
The Opry crowd responded with the sort of standing ovation that stands out because it starts at the back of the house and works its way to the front — rather than a few people in the front starting it and the fans behind them following suit. From the side of the stage, Divide frontman Mike McClure was blown away.
“I saw him do that X-factor thing, where he silenced the room and held them in the palm of his hand,” McClure says. “That ain’t easy to do. And he did it with something that came from his heart, clearly. He’s just gonna keep getting bigger and bigger. I don’t see how he couldn’t.”
Seventeen days later at the Mission Ballroom show, after holding another room in the palm of his hand, and as the skeleton burned on the animation above him, Flores sang “Don’t Wanna Say Goodnight,” the first single off of Welcome to the Plains. It’s a powerful, energetic love song about a real good time coming to an end.
“That song, to me, is all gas, no brakes,” Flores says. “I used to beat myself up about the writing. ‘There’s not enough imagery! There’s not enough emotion!’ Not this time. This song drives. When you are hauling ass, and you only have one thing on your mind — and it’s her — you’re not thinking.”
If Flores’ story has not already made it clear, Welcome to the Plains is heavy on Oklahoma. Red Dirt gets name-checked in the title track. In the studio in May, Flores tells Bedford that John Steinbeck was on his mind when he wrote the song. On another, “Stillwater,” Flores laments being the forgotten local boy in a college town and he references the orange and black of Oklahoma State University.
Flores drove the point home during the Mission Ballroom encore, too. Without stopping, his band transitioned from “Don’t Wanna Say Goodnight” to his one-night-stand anthem, “West of Tulsa.” When he did that, the video screen behind him changed too. The burning skeleton faded away, replaced with b-roll footage of a herd of buffalo grazing on a prairie, with the grass surrounding the herd a heavy, summer-burnt tan hue.
The Plains are home to Wyatt Flores. He wants you to know you’re welcome there any time.
Excerpted from RED DIRT UNPLUGGED. ©2024 Josh Crutchmer and reprinted by permission from Back Lounge Publishing.
