Philip Lupton and Truett Heintzelman from the Austin Americana band Briscoe was in the WYEP studios for a Live & Direct session to talk with Joey Spehar and play some songs from their debut album, "West of It All."
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity:
Joey Spehar: It's Briscoe, Live and Direct here on WYEP. That song is called The Well. It's from their latest album “West of It All.” We played that song a lot on the radio and it's one of those earworms, where, you know, I would be in the shower the next morning and I could hear you and I often fantasize, like, ‘What would I say to those guys about it?’ And, and now that we're in the moment, all I can say is thanks. Because it really is a great song.
Philip Lupton: Well, thank you all for playing it. It's so cool to be so far from home here in the yard playing our songs on the radio. So that's awesome.
Spehar: Yeah, it's an enjoyable record, a very nice listen. And you guys are out on tour now. Is this your first headlining tour?
Truett Heintzelman: So this is our kind of second official headline tour. We toured the record for the first time last fall. And then this is kind of our second go around, and we're right smack in the middle of it.
Spehar: Going pretty well?
Heintzelman: Going great. Yeah. It's been so much fun. A lot of new cities. And then, the last few stops have been cities that we've played once before. So Pittsburgh, for example, we got to play back in October, and it's real good to be back. And, we're excited for the show tonight.
Spehar: And the show's got the full band. We're getting a special little treat with just you guys here singing these songs today, but, I got to say, I like when you're alone — I like when you're with the full band. You got a real good thing going here.
Heintzelman: Thank you very much.
Spehar: So the story that I read was that you guys started performing together while in college in Austin, but you met much earlier than that. There's a little story on your website about this moment when you realized that you were wearing the same pair of sandals in camp as kids. Now, I'll be honest. I mean, it's one of the most magical feelings, right? When you meet someone who has the same exact fashion sense.
Heintzelman: Oh, yeah. It was pretty crazy. And I went into that session not knowing anybody. And that was like the first person I saw, you know, and it was just instantly like, ‘boom.’ So yeah. So we met and have been good friends since then. That was about 10 years ago. And we didn't really start playing shows until like, late high school, early college, like you said. And, you know, now we're getting to really do it, but it's already such a treat to get to be good friends and play in a band with somebody. But it's, you know, it's like dessert. It's like strawberry shortcake when that person is also one of your, I mean, longest friend and best friend.
Spehar: Was that a music camp or just, like, just a regular camp? Did you just happen to realize, like, hey, I like to do this too?
Lupton: It was not a music camp. It was a Christian summer camp out in the hill country of Texas. Kind of like pretty far away from any major city that we both grew up going to.
Spehar: Well, I think it's great for the world that you all found each other. And then you ended up going to school together in Austin. Was that planned? Like, ‘Hey, friend from camp, like we should do college together?’ Or did it just happen that way?
Lupton: That's a great question. So I was a year ahead of it in school, so I ended up at the University of Texas, in Austin. Truett was coming up the year after me and was looking at a few different schools, and I was really hoping and pushing him to choose UT. He's a smart fella. So he had a bunch of good schools on the horizon, UT being one of them. And, lo and behold, he ended up there. And that's when the band really started gigging. That's when the Briscoe full band hurricane began and we started running all over the place and playing all kinds of shows on the weekends and everywhere we could.
Spehar: Well, one of you studied business. One of you studied geology, right? I can see how having business knowledge could help anyone doing anything artistically like you. It's good to have that background, but the science stuff also pops up in your music as well. Like only a guy who's studied hydrogeology, and is a musician, I think could write a song like ‘The Well,’ it's perfect.
Lupton: Yeah, that's exactly where it came from — from one of my classes about an aquifer. So it worked out well.
Spehar: Yeah. Inspiration comes. You just got to be ready for it. We're talking with Philip and Truett from the band Briscoe. They have a show at Club Cafe tonight with the full band. But we got a special little treat this afternoon with some live music. You want to play us another couple?
Heintzelman: Yeah. This, this one is one of our favorites on the record. It's called ‘High on You.’
Spehar: We're Live and Direct this afternoon with Philip and Truett from the band Briscoe. They have a show tonight at Club Cafe with the rest of their band. So really great album out now called ‘West of It All.’ So, I think it was smart to do the East of Eden roots because, like, you're playing that song and I'm thinking, yeah, like, redemption is awesome. But then like a Grapes of Wrath song would also be frighteningly poignant, you know, in 2024.
Heintzelman: Yeah. It's pretty insane. I think you could take every Steinbeck novel and write just this song. It kind of cuts a little bit, you know.
Spehar: Well, your newest album is called West of It All. You describe it as a coming of age soundtrack set against the backdrop of the Texas Hill Country, which really sounds like a great trailer for a movie that I'd really like to see. So can you expand on that a bit more or like, what can we get out of listening to this record?
Heintzelman: So I think that that's a pretty dang good description right there. So we were raised in Texas. I was born in San Antonio. Philip was born in a town called San Angelo. And one of the most beautiful parts of Texas is what's called the Texas Hill Country, as we've talked about. And, it's just this beautiful part of this pocket where there's these hills in, and it's really lush and green, and there's a bunch of rivers that run through.
I mean, it's some of the greenest parts of Texas — beautiful trees, cypress trees that just kind of line these rivers and all that good stuff. And like we said, we met at a summer camp out there in high school. And just growing up, we spent a lot of good time out in the Hill Country, whether it was at camper, at friends; ranches, or lakes or rivers out there. I mean, to sound a little cheesy, it's an inspirational part of the state. It's hard to not want to write a song when you're out there. And so yeah, it was kind of a combination of our time spent there and then our time spent with loved ones and kind of how those two things intersect.
Spehar: I'm there in my mind right now, the way you describe it, I've only been to like, Houston, Galveston, Dallas, but never to the Hill Country. I know music from there, like North Mississippi All Stars. It's all great music. So I got to think that natural beauty plays a part in it. Now, you also said recently that you can tell that Briscoe is a Texan band. What does that mean to you? What makes a Texan band?
Lupton: I think kind of just, it goes back to what you were saying. I think that, I think that our music is influenced by, kind of the culture of where we grew up in Texas. And I think that that plays out in a few different ways. And I think lyrically, a lot of these references to the places that we love, bring that out. I think instrumentation wise. You have your kind of Texas country with the pedal steel, but you also have an awesome kind of folk country scene, currently in Texas, and that's been in Texas for a long time. And I think that we dig into that with the songs that we're writing in the way that we record them. And I think that, it's I think that even we're about to play a song with the saxophone. You can kind of trace that back to a lot of this kind of rock and roll, this country rock and roll kind of folk. It's hard to put a genre on what comes out of Texas a lot of times. And I think that we're very much in that kind of circle, if that makes sense.
Spehar: To me, it feels like just timeless music. No matter what is in vogue, no matter what's on the radio like, this music is always going to sound good.
Lupton: Well, thanks. Yeah. I mean, we're influenced a lot by artists that we think are writing songs that are going to last forever and people are going to listen to forever. You know, because it's what they have to say. Not not the way that they present it. So we hope to be similar to that someday.
Spehar: And also some non-Texans helped to make this album possible. I saw Phil Cook did some work with you guys and I think he's just an absolute genius. I had the pleasure of seeing his band often one time. I mean, it's just mind blowing, just absolutely blown away. So when you're writing these songs, when you're working on arrangements, when you're in the studio, are you open to outside influence or is it more of like a Briscoe baby? What's your approach?
Heintzelman: So I think we definitely don't write the songs necessarily with people in mind to play on. I mean, we write the songs like Philip said, to kind of convey something or tell a story or like lyrics forward. But, we recorded the record with Brad Cook, Phil Cook's brother, who's just an incredible producer. I mean, he's done some awesome work, with Bonnie there with Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats, with Waxahatchee — ton, a ton of awesome bands.
And so we recorded with him out in Durham. And he's got this just awesome network of killer musicians, including his brother, including Matt MacLean, the drummer of Bonnie Bare and just a bunch of others. And so when we were out there cutting the record, we tracked a lot of it. And then it's just such an honor and a privilege to have guys like Phil Cook who were willing and excited to play on this, on this record, and they just brought it to life in ways that are, I mean, incredible. So we're super thankful to get to work with guys like that. I mean, like you said, Phil Cook is a genius. I mean, his Megafaun stuff is awesome. His solo stuff is incredible. And it was just super cool to even be associated with him.
Spehar: Bunch of great guys making records, I love it. The new album is ‘West of It All.’ Briscoe are playing at Club Cafe tonight with their whole band. So in a world where it's always like, ‘What's next? What's next?’ Are you able to just kind of sit back and soak all this in and enjoy how far you've gotten so far? Because I hope you can, because I think you're in a really good place.
Lupton: Yeah, it's really cool to see it. I was actually talking to Truett just right before we went on air here about how we've sold almost twice the amount of tickets tonight that we sold when we were in Pittsburgh last time. So just small things like that mean the world to us. And to be able to see growth in different markets, in different cities that are so far from Austin to be able to see, you know, our song being played on the radio or Pittsburgh or California or South Dakota or wherever, you know, just means the world to us. So it's really cool to see. As we put a lot of this work into it that it's, starting to pay dividends and that, you know, we're we're, we're in we're in it for the long haul. So we're just excited to see how it grows.