This is what Sagebrush was made for. The South Congress honky-tonk is full to the brim. Dancers swirl on the packed dance floor and looky-loos line the border all around, watching the movement as much as the band. I recognize my old boss from an office job, then a TikTok influencer; they’re all twirling.
“It started like that, and our biggest vision of grandeur was like, 'Man, what if we could do a weekly thing at Sam’s?’” says Albrecht. “Now that we’ve done that for a few years, it’s like, 'Aww, I don’t want to have any other goals.’ I’m trying to find some.” “They said, 'I think this music feels really useful.’ You don’t need everyone to stop what they’re doing and listen to you. They can engage, or it can be something in the background. I think that’s really cool.”
A residency in the front dining room at the Spoke hosted the band’s first country creations, never announced as such, in the set list mix of Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies not-quite-standards. “I’ve been guilty of every single one of those conversations about Austin changing for the worse, but I don’t ever want to have them again,” adds Albrecht. “There’s a way to be proud that you’re from Austin, and not let it jade you as you watch the city change.”
“There are psychological studies with combinations of certain notes and chord progressions, basically just trying to say, like, the sad songs hurt so good,” says Lewis. “And a lot of lyrics talk about social anxiety or alienation, because a lot of the songs are influenced by us hanging out and playing all these honky-tonks. Everybody has that experience of going out and sometimes feeling like you’re surrounded by friends, and sometimes feeling like you’re a stranger to everybody.
Instead of opening, country evangelist Albrecht gave Palm’s Kasra Kurt his first George Jones record. Still being an all-genre die-hard who wrote his college thesis on Krautrock, he also recorded a bootleg of the concert. Pre-country, Sentimental Family Band’s résumés as hired guns carve out a nice corner in the last decade of Austin-connected indie pop and folk rock.
Lewis typically plays drums in other projects, including a recent set at Luck Reunion in rising French country crooner Theo Lawrence’s band. Another devotee drawn into Austin roots music, Lawrence’s label Tomika Records, which has released like-minded LPs by Texas acts the Mellows and Phil Hollie, supports vinyl pressings of. After many immersive visits, and being put up on the property at Sam’s, Lawrence got a work visa and relocated from Bordeaux to Austin last fall.
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