Josh Abbott didn’t begin writing songs until around 2004, when he was still in grad school at Texas Tech in Lubbock. A diehard Texas country fan, he’d picked up guitar a few years earlier, mainly to strum along to his favorite Pat Green songs. He vividly recalls the epiphany he had at a concert one night at Lubbock’s Blue Light when the notion of writing and playing his own music — maybe even for a living — first took root.
“It happened to be the Randy Rogers Band playing that night, but it could have been Pat or Wade Bowen or Cory Morrow, any of those guys that I saw over the years,” Abbott explains. “I always had this fascination with what they were doing. I’d go to their concerts and there’d be hundreds if not thousands of college kids singing along.
That night at the Blue Light, I just remember watching the band and thinking, I want to do this…I think I can do this.”
Together with his banjo-playing fraternity brother, Austin Davis, Abbott began putting that confidence to the test at open mic nights. A year and a half later, fiddle player Preston Wait and drummer Edward Villanueva came on board, and the fledgling Josh Abbott Band was off and running — slowly, at first, but not for long. “We didn’t record a demo until 2007, which was ‘Taste,’ and then we didn’t even get a booking agent and start touring outside of Lubbock until 2008,” says Abbott. “But after that, everything started happening so fast for us that we really weren’t ready for it at first. We’d start showing up at venues and there’d be a lot of people there, and we didn’t even have enough originals to play 90 minutes. And it was kind of a weird deal for us because there were a lot of bands on the scene that were a lot more tenured, and they went from not even knowing who we were to all of a sudden playing these co-bills with us within like a two-year span. I mean, we definitely paid our dues, but it all came together a lot faster than we’d anticipated. For that, we’re so grateful.”
“The main objective now is to make sure that the bell curve stays in our favor,” Abbott says when asked where he wants his band to be in the next five years. “For me, the goal is for us to be able to not just maintain, but consistently get bigger. I feel like Texas has really done well for us, but I’ll never be satisfied. I’ll never be like, ‘we’ve got Texas locked down,’ because that’s our base and we’ve got to keep growing, but I think our biggest objective right now is to get bigger in markets outside of Texas. That’s why you’ll see our emphasis continue to be on touring the West Coast, along with New Mexico, Denver, Kansas, Nebraska, Chicago, and even going East … I think that’s really important to do.”
And yet, even as he expands his horizons beyond the Lone Star State, Abbott’s independent Texas spirit is stronger than ever. Among his goals “from the get-go,” he says, was for his band to distinguish itself as one of the “most successful independent country bands” of its era. And if there’s a difference between that and what most people consider “megastardom,” well, he’s quite OK with that, because “success” in his book isn’t defined by the all-or-nothing fantasy of platinum-selling records and sold-out arena tours.
