By any measure, Shane Smith and the Saints are in the midst of the sort of career-altering breakthrough that launches Texas bar bands into amphitheaters, music halls, and the top lines of festival posters.
Start with the tour. This spring, the Saints will play the Grand Ole Opry, headline Red Rocks Amphitheatre for the second time in a year — with 49 Winchester and Hayes Carll on the bill — and spend a week touring Europe with Tanner Usrey opening.
There’s also the record. Norther hits stores and streaming on March 1. It’s the band’s first studio album in five years and fourth overall. Written and recorded in fits and starts over the past two years during breaks in those increasingly high-profile tour dates, the album is Smith at his most introspective and the Saints at their musical peak. The first single, “The Greys Between,” which came out in November, puts one foot in a modern, twisting tale of love and the other onstage with a band that never really had a genre to call its own.
The bigger crowds and next-level music come on the heels of a series of musical appearances in Yellowstone — starting in late 2021 in an episode titled “All I See Is You” after the Saints’ song of the same name — and a prime slot opening for Whiskey Myers on that band’s 2022 Tornillo tour.
“It’s all very exciting,” Smith tells Rolling Stone. “But I honestly feel more pressure right now than I ever did. We have all these opportunities that the vast majority of people never get. We have to show up. We’ve got to deliver on this new record. It’s our first studio album in five years, and that’s insane to say, because all this stuff that is happening for us has happened without new music.”
Whether real or simply in Smith’s head, the pressure is well-founded.
Founded in 2011 by Smith and fiddle player Bennett Brown, the five-piece started playing clubs around Sixth Street in Austin, eventually opening for rising stars like Turnpike Troubadours and Texas icons like ZZ Top. Their first two albums, Coast and Geronimo, established them as Lone Star State barnstormers, reliably finding crowds in local bars and making progress outside of the state. Along with Smith and Brown, guitarist Dustin Schaefer, bassist Chase Satterwhite, and drummer Zach Stover filled out the Saints and together they followed the independent path of growing their fan base.
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But a series of increasingly concerning brushes with perils as varied as the IRS, venomous snakes, and even death brought the Saints to what could have — and possibly should have — been the end of the road.
“We were doing our thing, building up an organic fan base around the country. Unlike a lot of our peers in Texas, we would actually get out of the state and try to tour the country,” Smith says. “We’ve played almost every state except for Hawaii and one or two others. We would get out there and really put the work in.”
In 2017, Satterwhite broke his leg in a motorcycle accident. He toured and played for roughly six months in a wheelchair. The Saints traveled in an RV at the time, with a broken step. At every concert, rest stop, or hotel, band or crew would lift Satterwhite in or out of the RV.
In the wake of Satterwhite’s recovery, Stover was bitten by a rattlesnake and narrowly avoided losing a hand. Not long after that, Smith and the band were hit with an IRS audit, saddling a back tax bill onto a struggling band.
“I just didn’t have any of my stuff together,” Smith says. “No receipts or anything, and this was when we were hemorrhaging money. We were not profitable by any means. We weren’t close to anything at that point.”
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Somehow, the Saints still scraped together the money to buy their first tour bus. The quarters were tight, but it still felt like leveling up. That respite lasted “a few months” according to Smith, before the situation once again worsened.
On Nov. 21, 2019, en route to a show in Lubbock, the bus caught fire. That every band and crew member survived is astonishing, because little else did.
“It happened while we were going down the road,” Smith says. “We had an engine fire, and it burned up the entire bus. We were outside of this little bitty town. The keys to the trailer were in the bus that was on fire, and we couldn’t get back in to get them. We couldn’t break the locks off to get our gear out. We had to sit there and watch it all burn up.”
By pre-pandemic 2020, the idea of selling all the band’s remaining merchandise and moving on had gained enough momentum for Smith to seriously consider it. In the wake of the fire, Koe Wetzel — who at the time had suddenly gone from club headliner to arena headliner — had an extra bus he let the Saints use. They rode it to Denver’s Mission Ballroom, where Smith found a crowd and a friend. He broke down.
“We sold like 900 tickets on a very bad-weather night,” Smith says. “There was snow everywhere. I had a buddy — Danny Sax, who works for AEG and promotion for Red Rocks — come up to the bus and asked how I was doing. I said, ‘Not good.’
“Rather than just lying, I finally just kind of broke down and said, ‘I’m about to quit music. There’s no way I can keep doing this,’” Smith continues. “And he let me talk through it.”
In Smith’s mind, what his band needed most was leadership away from the stage and studio. Sax had a local friend: Brian Schwartz from 7S Management who managed Dawes and Lucero but hadn’t handled any Texas folk or country artists. A few weeks later, the Saints found themselves as a surprise addition to the fledgling Mile 0 Festival in Key West.
“That year, Charley Crockett canceled, and we got onto the lineup at the last minute,” Smith says. “That was our first break. We had managed — by chance, by fate, by luck — to get on that lineup. Mile 0 went incredible, and they raised nearly $10,000 for us.”
On the road to Florida, Schwartz called and said he wanted to meet the band. After catching a show at Smith’s Olde Bar in Atlanta, he came aboard to manage them.
The Saints’ luck had turned. Despite the live-music stoppage during the pandemic, the band continued to make music and recorded Live from the Desert — a live album without an audience — at several spots around Terlingua, Texas, and released it in 2021. Shortly after, they got the Yellowstone call and the Whiskey Myers tour slot.
Norther puts a cap on that journey.
“I’m very slow with my writing. I’m not some fast-paced guy. I’d be terrible as a Nashville writer or someone who is meant to turn out songs quickly,” Smith says. “I just had a catalog of about 20 songs that were half-finished when it became clear that it was crunch time and we needed to get an album out, like, last year.”
They booked time at Modern Electric Studio in Dallas and signed on with Beau Bedford, Paul Cauthen’s producer. They recorded in one-and-two-day stretches before flying back to shows. The only part of the process that never felt disjointed was the music itself. The track “Navajo Norther” lends the record its title. Unlike the other 12 songs, it came quickly to Smith. Its refrain — “Were you the earthquake that set us free?” — is hauntingly appropriate.
“I put pen to paper, and I drew a blank when I was trying to come up with lyrics,” Smith says. “Then, I just started writing about a storm. And it just went, and it never stopped.”
Onstage, the Saints project a commanding presence. Smith’s voice is heavily baritone, and he describes his musical influences as “all over the map.” Stover’s drums and Brown’s fiddle play to a tempo that matches the depth of Smith’s voice. It’s slower and swampier than most of their contemporaries. If a genre could somehow combine Celtic folk and Texas country, there might be a single word to describe the Saints’ sound. It may not seem intuitive, but it is undoubtedly — finally — catching on.
“For so long, we were such a DIY band,” Brown tells Rolling Stone. “That’s great when you’re in your 20s and single with no kids. But now that we’re in our 30s, it’s been nice to actually get a paycheck, fly in and out to see our kids. I’ve got two daughters and my wife. It’s been a huge blessing, having the flexibility that comes with newfound success.”
Having played alongside Smith from the start, Brown still sees the same drive in Smith that he saw when they started out in Austin.
“In a really good way, he’s the same guy that he was on Sixth Street,” Brown says. “That’s why we’re still buddies, because we haven’t changed our mentality.”
In January, Shane Smith and the Saints were once again at the Mile 0 festival. This time, there was no luck involved. They were headliners, set to play immediately after Silverada (formerly known as Mike and the Moonpies) made their debut under the new name and had the Friday-night crowd in a frenzy.
In a tent behind the Coffee Butler Amphitheater, Smith gathered his band for a pre-show prayer, followed by a “Saints on three! One! Two! Three!” huddle break.
Smith and Brown practiced Jimmy Buffett’s “A Pirate Looks at Forty” while waiting for their cue. It was the band’s first Key West show since Buffett’s death and Smith wanted to cover the tune. When Schaefer told the band he was going to sit out the song because he didn’t learn it, Brown cannot help himself: “Bro, you were on a boat in Key West all day, and you didn’t listen to Jimmy Buffett?” Then the band raised a toast and took the stage.
Smith and Brown nailed the “Pirate” cover. The Saints swayed and rocked out for 90 minutes, closing with a three-song encore and their original Yellowstone contribution, “All I See Is You.” The crowd ate it up and called for more.
That scene is becoming the norm now, for a band that, despite snakebites and audits, is somehow still standing.
But Smith is holding off on a victory lap until Norther is out in the world.
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“I’m nervous and excited at the same time,” Smith says. “I want to show up and deliver, and I want to stake our ground.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author of the 2020 book Red Dirt: Roots Music Born in Oklahoma, Raised in Texas, at Home Anywhere and the 2023 book The Motel Cowboy Show: On the Trail of Mountain Music from Idaho to Texas, and the Side Roads in Between.