Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors Are “Strangers No More”
Photo credit: Ashtin Paige
Drew Holcomb is a true Tennessean. Two bona fides prove it.
He’s lived in each Grand Division. He was born in Memphis, graduated from University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and now lives in Nashville with his family. For two, Holcomb’s song “Tennessee” is the modern Tennessee anthem (more on that below). There’s more, way more. But this is all I need to make the call.
When we spoke in early September, Holcomb’s new record “Strangers No More Vol. 2” was on the cusp of release. Support for that record put Holcomb and his band The Neighbors on the road for a tour stretching from Bridgeport, Connecticut to Dallas, Texas.
The first volume of “Strangers” was wildly successful. The single “Find Your People” hit No. 1 on Americana radio, a chart home to artists like Sturgill Simpson, Billy Strings, The Avett Brothers, Gillian Welch, and more. The song was the eighth most played song on the Americana chart last year and hit No. 2 on the TikTok popular chart. The album sold more than 400,000 LPs, was No. 1 on the iTunes singer/songwriter chart and was Amazon’s No. 1 folk album.
All of this earned Holcomb and The Neighbors a ride on a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float, and appearances on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” '“CBS Saturday Morning,” “Live with Kelly and Mark,” “PBS Font and Center,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” “Bluegrass Underground,” “Beale Street Caravan,” and more.
Photo credit: Charles Reagan for Blue Moon
If you missed all that somehow, maybe you saw the band’s soaring cover of Adele’s “When We Were Young” from the Ryman Auditorium on social media this summer. It was all over my feed — proof, I guess, that the algorithm gets it right sometimes.
State & Beale: Tell me about these records and the response you’ve had to the first volume.
Drew Holcomb: It's been a really fruitful, and busy, and exhausting — good couple of years of touring and making music.
“Strangers” Vol. 1 reached No. 1 on the Americana chart last year.
Basically coming out of the out of the pandemic, I wrote just a pile of songs. So, in the summer of 2022, I went to Asheville with my band, The Neighbors. We recorded almost 30 songs. By the middle of winter, the beginning of 2023, I realized we had more than one record. We just decided build out two records from that pile of songs.
The first one, Volume 1, has been really well received. We had our first No. 1 song on Americana radio. We played the Macy's parade. We got to do Jimmy Kimmel — just all sorts of fun stuff that makes it feel like the work was worth doing. We did a lot of touring on that record as well.
This era of my life has been most creatively busy, fruitful. I can't stop writing songs. So, we just keep recording them and keep putting them out as long as people keep listening and that's what we'll do.
SB: How did you separate the songs out between the two records?
DH: It felt like a natural progression of what songs sort of went well together. I think we knew that “Find Your People” and “Dance With Everybody” were sort of songs we couldn't wait on at all. They're just too sort of big and felt like they needed to be out for the big tour that we did for the record.
“This era of my life has been most creatively busy, fruitful. I can’t stop writing songs. ”
The second volume is a little bit more of what I would call like a bigger sandbox. You got a song like “Easy Together” on there, which has sort of the classic 70s soul R& B vibes. Then you've got “Soul’s A Camera,” which has got this sort of big kind of indie rock sort of vibe.
I would say [the second album has] a little bit less rules. It just kind of felt like these songs needed to wait and be put together on a second volume. Honestly, it's like part of the mental gymnastics in today's era of trying to figure out how to release music.
I mean you have some artists that'll put out a 25-song record like Morgan Wallen or Taylor Swift, these big stars. All of a sudden — unannounced — they'll just drop 20 songs into the universe. Then, you have other artists that don't put out a record for five years. Then, you have other artists that put out a song a month. When you have this many songs, you're just trying new things. Like, how do we get these songs out there?
Vince Gill appears on The Neighbors’ new record on “Green Light.”
One of the reasons we waited on this one as well is that I had talked to a guy I know pretty well, and most people know pretty well, named Vince Gill who agreed to play on a song. But getting the schedules lined up took some stars aligning. So, he's featured on this on this song called “Green Light.”
SB: I can’t wait to hear that. So, you’ve been around Tennessee a lot, clearly have state pride. Do you think there’s a lot of state pride out there?
DH: There’s definitely a lot of places with state pride. I think Tennessee is definitely high up on the list, though.
In Texas, there's a fine line between pride and hubris. [Laughs] Tennesseans I think have sort of the appropriate amount of pride. I mean, the South Carolina folks are pretty proud of their state.
The interesting thing about Tennessee, is that it's got such a sort of diversity of culture. You've got part of that's is the geography, differences between a place like Memphis and a place like Knoxville. There’s also just a lot of history here, especially with music and with food.
There's a lot to be proud of. I think a lot of great people have come from Tennessee.
“I’m obviously a homer. I grew up on one side of the state, went to school in the other and settled in the middle. So I have pride and all through all sort of three parts of the state.”
I'm obviously a homer. I grew up on one side of the state, went to school in the other and settled in the middle. So I have pride and all through all sort of three parts of the state.
One of the things we did during Covid was we took this Airstream trip to all those various state parks in Tennessee that we'd never been to before. I realized that even though I've been all over the world and I've been all over
Tennessee, there's still a lot of places here at home that I've never been. I was pretty humbled by that experience.
SB: Your song “Tennessee” is an anthem to the state. Can you talk about the writing of that song?
DH: I wrote that song in some of the early years. I probably wrote it around 2011 or [2012]. It was a song about being homesick. At that point in my career, I was gone probably more than 50 percent of the year out of state. My wife was on the road with me at that point and we didn't have any kids yet.
Photo provided by Stunt Company Media Inc.
But every once in a while, the road can really beat you up. You have a show where the crowd doesn't care, or you have a long drive, or a car breakdown or...just life on the road can wear you down. So, I wrote that song just about this dream that I've had of being a sort of you know career songwriter and artist and the ups and downs of that and how grateful I am that when I come back here.
It doesn't matter where I go. It doesn't matter how far away I find myself, I still carry that Tennessee is my home. Not just like physically, but kind of, you know, in my soul. So, it's just a song about that, an ode to this place that I love.
I found two things to be true about that song. One, is that everywhere I go, I meet people from Tennessee who love it when I play that song and it makes them feel kind of like they're back home. The other thing that I found is that the people who are not from Tennessee love the song because they sort of can put their own place [in it].
You can tell...you look out across the crowd and you play that song that people...it still resonates as a song about home and just happens to be it's a song about my home. But the idea of having a home is pretty universal. [The song] — for whatever reason — translates outside of the state.
SB: Drew, thank you so much for your time. Is there anything I left out or that you’d like to add?
DH: One thing I will say that we have found....I always make this joke, especially back home in Memphis They say that a prophet is not welcome in his hometown or in his home.
“They say that a prophet is not welcome in his hometown or in his home.
I’ve said, well, I guess that means I’m not a prophet because Tennessee’s been very good to me. ”
I've said, well, I guess that means I'm not a prophet because Tennessee's been very good to me. We sell more tickets in Tennessee than any other state. So, I’m grateful for it I appreciate what you do as well.
(Editor’s note)
I’m a news guy. I talk to policy nerds, mostly. So, I was nervous.
The most famous person I’d ever interviewed was bluegrass icon Del McCoury. And that was way early in my journalism career, about 19 years old. Del was super nice about it, but he let me know (in the most Southern way possible) that he needed to go, to get off the phone...with me. I never forgot that.
So, when Drew Holcomb’s amazing publicist Sue Marcus agreed to hook us up for this story, I heard Del’s kind (but still frustrated) sighs in my ears once more. I vowed I wouldn’t do that to Drew. I didn’t.
I kept my 10-minute interview tight and to the point. He was a busy guy after all, a fact I think I nervously repeated a dozen times in those 10 minutes. Drew was super nice about it. Of course he was. He’s Drew Holcomb.
Anyhow. Thanks, Sue, Drew, and Anna! Y’all made it great. Good luck. — Toby Sells
