Quality Americana

A homegrown Texas group reached the top twenty of the Americana Music Association singles chart this week with “The Well.”

Truett Heintzelman and Philip Lupton, known as Briscoe, got their start in the massive network of student housing that sits west of the University of Texas. They built a following through backyard parties while studying and later got the chance to grace some of the most prestigious stages in Austin. 

The video opens with a beautiful Hill Country landscape and the band is gathering for an adventure. Heintzelman and Lupton strum banjos and guitars as they drive along a dirt road. They meet with a group of friends and hike around the trails and waterways with a few craft brews. It’s a feel good summertime video about heading off into adulthood. We spoke with Briscoe about their latest release.

“We wanted the music video for “The Well” to be the song brought to life: a group of friends who we love, in a place that we love enjoying life together,” Briscoe said. “The idea for the video was simply for us to have genuine fun together doing the things we love and let the camera capture it. We had a blast in the Texas hill country swimming, fishing, and enjoying conversation.”

Briscoe meets in Kerrville

Heintzelman and Lupton met in their teens at the Kerrville Folk Festival, a weeks-long camping festival founded by Rod Kennedy and Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary. 

“I walked into camp as a 14 year-old redheaded kid who didn’t know anybody at all, so I just kept my eyes on the ground,” Lupton said. “A couple feet away from me was another person wearing the exact same pair of Chacos as me, and when we both looked up, it felt like we were looking in the mirror.”

When the pair both reunited as students at UT, Briscoe was formed. The group would head out to the Hill Country to work on material and get out in nature, and it’s the setting that fills the camera rolls of their origin story.

Briscoe records West of it All

Briscoe’s debut album West of it All was recorded in North Carolina with a team that included Brad Cook, who produced albums for Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats and Bon Iver. Lupton said that Cook was “very adamant about highlighting the parts of our sound that are different from everything else out there. He’s very forward-thinking. He loves old music, but he wants to help make the next new sound. Truett and I would come into the studio and track something, and we’d think it sounded like a blend of several bands we love, and Brad would say, ‘No, boys, it sounds like Briscoe.’”

The single was inspired by a college project that examined the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the largest in the world that spans from South Dakota to Texas beneath the Great Plains.

“We chose this as our first single because it sets the theme for the rest of the album, both lyrically but also with strong harmonies and instrumentation,” Briscoe said. “The Well” asks the listener to live “in the moment as you wait for the well to run dry, and touches on the “more valuable themes of life while still maintaining strong music and melodies.”

More information on Briscoe can be found here.

Press photo distributed by Briscoe The Band . Com

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