The Lowdown Drifters aren’t living up to their name. The Fort Worth, Texas, band has been surging since the latter half of 2024.
“We’ve had two year’s worth of growth in six months,” John Cannon deadpans.
In October, the Drifters supported Silverada on a run of theaters and large clubs in Western U.S., made their Ryman Auditorium debut as an opener for Shane Smith and the Saints, and dropped the eight-track album In Time, their second full-length record after 2019’s Last Call for Dreamers. The weekend before Thanksgiving, the group played the 150-capacity Mercury Lounge in Tulsa — last week they returned to headline the 1,700-capacity Cain’s Ballroom.
“We’re road dogs, man,” Cannon tells Rolling Stone. “We spend damn near 200 days a year on the road. And we’re just that type that, when we get home and get out of the van, we’re ready to leave again. We’re not much for sitting around.”
Cannon cuts an imposing figure on vocals and guitar, and he wears the nickname “Big John” proudly around his bandmates, even while towering over them. Dylan Welsh plays lead guitar. Raina Wallace is on bass and vocals. Josh Willaert plays drums, and Doug Rehfeldt is the fiddler in the group. The Drifters began in Stanwood, Washington, in 2015, founded by Cannon and Ryan Klein (now the band’s manager). They stayed there until Last Call for Dreamers — with the single “Fire in Her Eyes” and its more than 30 million Spotify streams — drew enough attention to the group that they made the move to Fort Worth in 2021. “It’s the reason we got to keep being a band,” Cannon says of the album.
They released an EP in 2022, Cheating on a Memory, but it is In Time, produced by Wes Sharon (Turnpike Troubadours, American Aquarium), that represents Cannon’s true vision for the Lowdown Drifters. His vocals are deep and baritone and he delivers them with a heavy twang over melodies that are often more rock than country. This is where the band is resonating with fans.
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“This was the record we wanted to do that really sounded like we sound,” Cannon says. “The singles have been out for a while, and we’ve been getting some radio play in Texas, which has been really beneficial for us. People are digging in, and they’re starting to sing along to these new songs.”
The first single and title track set the tone. “In Time” was co-written by Cannon and Drew Harakal — longtime guitar player for Cody Jinks — as a rock-laced lament of a relationship that never quite feels stable, a sentiment the record returns to repeatedly. “Ghost,” which Cannon and Klein co-wrote, is a post-breakup song about feeling like a ghost in the moment. “Awful Truth,” written by Wallace and performed as a duet by Cannon and Wallace, draws upon the same feeling, but from the perspective of an unstable person leaving a relationship, laid bare in its chorus of, “But I’d rather be all by myself, than to hurt someone I love.”
“We actually cut one of the songs from the record we were going to put on there to get ‘Awful Truth’ on,” Cannon says. “Raina played it for us in the studio, and we fell in love with it. It’s nice to have the girl voice on there, to kind of offset the fact that I sound like I’m chewing gravel.”
Cannon’s humor may be self-deprecating, but if he sounds like a former trucker, that’s because he’s in fact a former trucker. His grandfather was a songwriter, though “not prolific” and his mother loved music. Cannon and his father owned a trucking company, and he went straight out of high school to behind the wheel. When he turned 21, he started packing his guitar on road trips and ended up playing music-friendly dives like Magnolia Motor Lounge in Fort Worth and the Old Quarter Acoustic Cafe in Galveston.
Eventually, the rush of music overwhelmed him, and he left the trucking business, starting the Drifters with Klein not too long after. More than 50 million Spotify streams later, he says he made the right decision.
“I gave up a lot of money and security to be intentionally poor to get to do this,” Cannon says. “I didn’t have delusions of grandeur. I just understood that I was going to be a struggling musician, and I was fine with that.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose third book, Red Dirt Unplugged, was released on December 13, 2024, via Back Lounge Publishing.