Treaty Oak Revival on Making Music for ‘People Who Love to Get a Little Rowdy’ With New Album ‘West Texas Degenerate’

“People from West Texas don’t have a filter as much as other people,” says Treaty Oak Revival’s lead singer and primary songwriter Sam Canty. “They’ll tell you straight up how it is, and they’re not afraid to tell it to you in a nasty way if they have to.”

That same can be said of Treaty Oak Revival’s music, which is driving, raw and brutally real, especially on new, self-released album, West Texas Degenerate, which came out Nov. 28. The quintet, which also includes electric guitarists Lance Vanley and his uncle Jeremiah Vanley, drummer Cody Holloway and bassist Dakota Hernandez (who recently replaced original bassist Andrew Carey), formed in Odessa, Texas and their country/rock hybrid reflects the often liquor-and -drug-soaked desperation from the tough circumstances of growing up in harsh oil-drilling country.  

“I mean, if you look around the place, it’s pretty clear to see it’s not the easiest living. It’s a hard place to live. The climate isn’t very forgiving,” Canty says of West Texas and its blue-collar denizens. “There’s a lot of lot of good, hard-working people out there, and they love to cut loose on the weekends and after work, and get a little rowdy.”

The album title comes from a writer who wrote that all of TOR’s fans are “just a bunch of degenerate alcoholics or something like that,” Canty says. Instead of taking umbrage, Canty realized he and friends were already using the term to affectionately refer to buddies. “I already had a song that I was wanting to write called ‘West Texas Degenerate’ and was like, ‘Hey, actually, I have a song I’m writing that kid of backs up your point there, buddy.’”

Recorded over four days, the album captures the rambunctiousness of the quintet’s revered live shows but also shows a new depth and maturity. With song titles like the title track, “Sh-t Hill,” “Withdrawals,” and “Dosin,” there is a generous array of tunes about squalor, overindulging and paying the price, and destitution, but also songs about love, both good (“Sunflowers”) and bad (“Misery,” a pop-tinged, catchy collaboration with Muscadine Bloodline).

Canty wrote “Sunflowers” as a wedding present to his wife. “I was very hesitant about putting that out, because I wrote that song just for her. I wasn’t sure about sharing that with the rest of the world, because then it becomes everyone’s song,” he says, but his wife convinced him that releasing it wouldn’t diminish the specialness of the song.

Plus, he says, TOR’s band members are in their 30s now and most have families, including Canty who has a 20-month-old son, so it felt appropriate to expand their material. “I think it would be dumb if we never wrote a song about love,” Canty says. “I think [‘Sunflower’] will probably resonate with a lot more people because it’s not a song about perfect love. It’s a song about loving somebody for everything that they are, even if those things can be bad sometimes.”

That description could apply to Canty before he got sober three years ago. “It’s just made my life — and everybody else’s life, I’m sure — a hell of a lot easier,” he says of abstinence. “It makes for a better show. It makes me a better person, and I know my wife and my family and my friends all appreciate it. I’m very thankful that I’m not in that same place that I used to be.”

Like many artists before they get sober, Canty worried about how not drinking would affect his songwriting, but “here I am two albums deep being sober and for the most part, I think we’re doing just fine. I think it’s clear that no matter if I’m sober, drunk, have a kid or don’t have a kid, I’m always just gonna write how I write.”

TOR’s songs, no matter how personal they often start out, have resonated with fans in a way that touches the band deeply, including platinum single “Ode to Bourbon,” from the group’s debut album, 2021’s No Vacancy.

“It was originally kind of a song about liking drinking, and then a buddy of ours passed away and I made it into something different,” Canty says. “A lot of people quit drinking because of that song and a lot of people, [it] prevented them from taking their own lives, in some cases. That’s a pretty meaningful thing to hear as a songwriter. It’s a hell of a thing to live with.”

The goal of the band “is to make people feel something of that magnitude” with its music, Canty says. “I think that should probably be really everyone’s goal who tries to do music or art in any form. I love that [our fans] are healing through the music. It means a lot.”

Treaty Oak Revival, which officially formed in 2019, has been on a steep rise, steadily building their audience both for streaming (more than 2.24 billion on-demand streams in the U.S. alone, according to Luminate) and live shows, rising to arena headliners. Today (Dec. 5), the band announced a 25-city arena and amphitheater tour that starts Feb. 5 at DCU Center in Worcester, Mass., and includes its own headlining show at Red Rocks Amphitheater outside of Denver.

Fans have also discovered the band from placement of its music on Landman, Taylor Sheridan’s gritty Paramount + series starring Billy Bob Thornton about oil drilling in West Texas. It’s a natural fit and now the band is hoping for a guest slot. “I think it’d be awesome if they showed us playing at some crappy bar, some dive bar,” Canty says. “We would love to be a part of that. I know we pitched the idea to them, and they said they would get back to us.”

Along the way, they have drawn the attention of major labels eager to expand on their large fan base and roughhewn sound.

That excitement led to a brief alignment with Interscope Records for several months before returning to independence. After meeting with a number of record companies, TOR began working with the label by having it distribute acoustic album The Talco Tapes, which came out in May, and new single, “Bad State of Mind” — which became the band’s highest charting song, reaching No. 10 on Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs and No. 19 on Hot Country Songs.

“We liked what they had to offer. We liked the team,” Canty says of Interscope. “So we gave them a project to distribute… ‘Bad State of Mine’ did really well. The Talco Tapes did not really do as well as we thought they would, and that was kind of the main thing that we were going to gauge whether or not we wanted to move any further working with them.”

Ultimately, the band decided it would remain on its own, but Canty stresses of Interscope, “They’re great people. I know they’re good at what they do. They wouldn’t be where they’re at if they weren’t. But I think just the way we operate, it made more sense to be on our own… No hard feelings.” (Interscope did not respond to a request for comment.)

Among the band’s goals are to expand its international audience, which started with a jaunt to Australia earlier this fall, playing down under before it had even toured as far southeast as Florida in the U.S. — a state the band hit for the first time in November.

“We’re just some boys from West Texas. We didn’t think we ever had any right to be over there in Australia, but we were,” Canty says. “We were super-stoked when we got the opportunity to do so. We were able to go to a place on the other side of the world and sell over 10,000 tickets. It’s insane. We’re really proud that we’ve come this far.”