AUSTIN MEADE Talks Making the “Varsity Type” Music Video and His Upcoming Tour with GODSMACK

April 27, 2023 – Austin, Texas

Austin Meade and his band made their stop in Austin, Texas last week to kick off their summer tour.

Early in the day before the doors were open to the public, Meade and his crew were hard at work getting ready for the evening. Between setting up the stage, preparing the merch stand, and completing the sound check there was plenty to do in a short period of time.

Thankfully, Meade set aside some time to sit down and chat with me before the show. I was invited to the green room where he sat with his arm propped up so he could begin his tattoo during the interview.

“Sorry, sometimes it’s just easier to do two things at once”, he apologized. However, the apology was unnecessary. After all, nothing says Rock N Roll like getting a barbed wire tattoo during your interview.

Max: “We’re here at 3Ten Austin City Limits Live on Willie Nelson Boulevard with Austin Meade. Austin, I see you’ve been on the road now for over a month and just added more dates to the tour recently.”

Austin: “Yeah we just finished almost two months of a tour and then we’re going to hit the summer pretty hard. We were home for three days and now we’re back on the road, so I guess this is technically the beginning of our summer tour.”

M: “It looks like you have a real big year lined up. I saw you added dates with Godsmack and I Prevail in May. Then you have Aftershock Festival, Louder than Life, and Lollapalooza lined up this summer. Am I missing anything else?”

A: “Yeah, it’s going to be huge! I think the next festival we have lined up is Welcome to Rockville which is in Daytona Beach. It’s actually at the Daytona 500 race track which is fucking insane. I think we’re on the Rob Zombie stage so that will be a big one”

M: “And you tour with Godsmack starts next week?”

A: “Yeah we have a couple headlines this week and then meet up with them next week in Albuquerque, New Mexico. So we’ll be a long ways from home, but not as far as where we just came from.”

M: “Stylistically you seem to be a little different than Godsmack and I Prevail. They’re on the heavy side and you have more country influence. When you were approached with the Godsmack tour what were feelings on it?”

A: “Oh I was just like “fuck yeah!”. I mean absolutely. I love rock music. I love any opportunity that comes our way to play in front of new crowds and bigger crowds. I would be a fool to not jump at an opportunity like that. We’ve got I think almost a month lined up with those guys and I’m just thankful for the opportunity really.”

M: “Is this one of the bigger tours that you have been on?”

A: “Yeah it’s pretty large for us. We’ve been able to play some cool big festivals and stuff. Last year we got lucky and got to do the 50th anniversary ZZ Top tour. That was pretty fucking rad, but I think as far as venue capacity this will be a larger step. We’re going to try to keep enough T-shirts in stock to be able to handle the crowds.”

M: “You have about ten stops with Godsmack before you go back on your headlining tour, right?”

A: “We have a few stops in the middle [of the Godsmack tour] that are also headlines, so we kind of weave in and out of it.”

M: “One of my favorite songs off of your newest album “Abstract Art of an Unstable mind”, that came out last October, is “Varsity Type”. When I saw the music video for that track, I thought to myself “that looks like it was a lot of fun to record”. Then I saw you had a six part video on your YouTube channel that shows the making of that music video. So you covered a little bit of what it was like to make that video. Do you want to expand on that at all?”

A: “The making of any music video is a months long process. It was the same with that. I wanted to make like a three-part music video. So “Varsity Type” along with “Rosé Romance” and “Red Roof Estates”, we did all of those in one week. I had a lot of the same main characters pop up throughout there. I wrote that whole record with just a couple of characters in my head. You know you had the jock guy. You had the loser guy. “Loser Mentality”. You had the hot cheerleader chick. A couple others. I wanted to bring those characters to life in the way that they were living in my head whenever I was just writing. So we spent a couple days doing that, actually filming, but it probably took us three months to actually plan it all out. And as you’re filming a music video nothing ever goes as planned. The more people that you get there, extras and things [the more things go wrong]. It’s kind of like today you know? You just fly by the seat of your pants.

M: “So you were starting and finishing a music video every couple of days that week? I bet that was a tiring process, but a lot of fun at the same time.”

A: “Yeah you can either bitch about it, or fix it and make it happen. That’s the only thing you can do in life.”

M: “All three of those music videos turned out fantastic. I was curious about the “Varsity Type” video. You had a lot of equipment in the pool and underwater. Did you end up destroying a lot of equipment making that video?”

A: “We had older stuff just sitting at home and we were just like “Yeah, fuck it, let’s throw it in the pool.” We were more worried about the bottom of the pool honestly because it was my buddies spot. But, dude, we have so many guitars and old drum sets I was just dying to get them out of the shed to be honest. We definitely had a lot of fun jumping in the pool with them and just making a scene.”

M: “Another video you did, that was probably your most popular so far, was “Happier Alone” with Koe Wetzel. How did that collaboration come about?”

A: “We’ve been friends for a long time. We’ve worked with the same producer on my last 2 records, a guy named Taylor Kimball. He actually is also producing Mitchell Ferguson who is sound checking right now. I was just hitting up Koe about random shit like golfing and whatnot, and he had heard “Happier Alone” and he just said, “Let me get on that shit.” I think I have the screenshots of him somewhere saying, “Let me get on that shit”. I was like “Alright. Fuck yeah.” But we’ve been friends for a while and that just came from respecting each others music and enjoying that both of us are doing something different. Whenever you surround yourself with other musicians who’s writing and playing style you really enjoy, then why not collaborate on some shit?”

M: “If there was one other artist that you would love to collaborate with, who would it be?”

A: “I don’t know. I could go either way. I could go towards the super country side of things. I mean obviously like a Willie Nelson thing would be sick. But ever since we did the ZZ Top tour I was like “Man we have to get Billy [Gibbons] on a song” that would be sick. But I guess, something kind of out of left field, I’m a big fan of Fred Durst. Something with Limb Bizkit would be pretty cool.”

M: “Do you have any other influences that may surprise people”

A: “Surprised? I don’t know. The people that know me know that I have a fucking insane brain, so it just goes left and right all the time. But I grew up listening to a lot of John Mayer and Tom Petty and stuff like that. I always bring it up in interviews, but Artic Monkeys is one of my favorites. And White Snake. This whole left leg of mine is covered in tattoos of different influences. I’m trying to think of something out of left field. It depends on what you think I am. If you think I’m country then it might be shocking to know I listen to a lot of heavy metal and shit, but if you think we’re rock n’ roll than it might be interesting to say I’m influenced by Waylon Jennings and Willie and those guys. I don’t know. What do you think I am?”

M: “I have a hard time pinning your genre down. It definitely changes album-to-album and even song-to-song. If I show someone “Happier Alone” versus some of your older stuff off of your first album they could say it was two entirely different genres. That seems to be common in the Texas music scene. You, Koe, Pecos and the Rooftops, and many others seem to have a blend of rock and country that you don’t hear as commonly coming out of Nashville.”

A: “Yeah for sure, but there’s a lot of great rock writers in Nashville too. People always talk shit on Nashville, but I’ve made some of my fucking heaviest songs writing in Nashville. I have a record that is about to come out that I’ve been working on, and it’s fucking heavy. Ninety percent of that is from going and writing in Nashville with rock writers.”

*Shows tattoo trace to the camera*

“A little barbed wire for you. He’s about to tattoo it free handed.”

M: “I’ll leave you with one more question and let you get to your tattoo. I think you’re on the up-an-coming. You’ve had a couple great years already. What would you say has been your peak moment at this point in your career?”

A: “Man, there’s like fifty from this last year. Selling out Gruene Hall a couple times was a pretty big step for us. It’s right by the house. That’s why I moved here was to try to play Gruene Hall and to sell it out was a pretty big step. And all the festivals we’re doing this year, it’s just kind of crazy. Just to be on the same stage as bands like Rob Zombie and Limp Bizkit, it ends up just being a crazy whirlwind of life.”