Koe Wetzel is calling from Nashville, two nights into a recent visit to “a two-night town,” as this lifelong Texan describes country music’s capital.
“It’s like my new Vegas, bro,” says the singer and songwriter, last night’s festivities still audible in the weary scrape of his voice over the phone. “I’ve been here since Tuesday, and I’m ready to get the f— out.”
Wetzel, 32, made his name on social media as a larger-than-life purveyor of rowdy post-grunge country songs like “Drunk Driving,” “Something to Talk About” — “I could rob a bank in an old Mustang,” he sings, “I could fight the cops with my two bare hands” — and “February 28, 2016,” which proudly recounts the time he was arrested for public intoxication and spent a few days behind bars in Stephenville, Texas. (Fans now celebrate Feb. 28 as Koe Wetzel Day.)
Yet his stirring new album, “9 Lives,” reveals an older, slightly wiser hell-raiser: In “High Road” he’s a guy in a broken relationship opting not to buy “a ticket to your s— show,” while “Damn Near Normal” takes a hard look at the numbing excess of life on the road.
Produced primarily by Gabe Simon, known for his work on Noah Kahan’s double-platinum “Stick Season,” “9 Lives” is more polished than Wetzel’s five previous LPs, with nods to R&B and ’70s soft rock amid the echoes of Waylon Jennings and Puddle of Mudd; the tunecraft is sturdier too, thanks in part to Wetzel’s recruitment of such industry pros as Laura Veltz and Amy Allen, the latter of whom co-wrote Sabrina Carpenter’s 2024 pop smashes “Espresso” and “Please Please Please.”
As a vocalist, though, Wetzel finds new emotional depths in songs like “Sweet Dreams,” about his tendency to ruin a good thing, and a yearning rendition of “Reconsider” by the country songwriter Keith Gattis, who died last year. Another highlight is Wetzel’s bare-bones take on “Depression & Obsession” by the late emo-rap star XXXTentacion.
“I’m poisoned, and I don’t feel well,” he murmurs against a strummed acoustic guitar, the quiet confessions of one tough talker bringing a bleak kind of comfort to another.
“I just got a little tired of people thinking they know me based on stories they’d heard or from what they saw on Instagram,” Wetzel says from Nashville, where’s he touched down to promote his album between tour dates. “I wanted to show them exactly who I am — like, ‘Hey, this is me, take it or leave it.’”
So far, listeners are taking it. “Sweet Dreams” and “Damn Near Normal” have both racked up tens of millions of streams on Spotify and YouTube; “High Road,” a duet with the 19-year-old pop-country singer Jessie Murph, even cracked Billboard’s Country Airplay chart — a first for Wetzel, who until now seemed to operate at arm’s length from the mainstream country industry, establishing his fanbase on the road rather than pumping out a steady stream of would-be radio hits.
The way he sees it, country music has grown and diversified so much in the past few years — “You got rock, alternative, bluegrass, indie…,” he says — that “there’s no longer a stereotype of what the machine wants somebody to be.” (The ascent of Jelly Roll, a face-tattooed former rapper, suggests he’s right.) “The music being put out right now, it’s all over the place,” says Wetzel, who’s set to open for Nashville’s biggest star, Morgan Wallen, on Friday night at AT&T Stadium near Dallas. “I don’t even know if you can call country a genre anymore.”
Yet “9 Lives” reflects certain trends in the style, not least the embrace of the aggro rock of the late ’90s and early 2000s — behold the Shinedown revival — as heard in the work of Hardy and Warren Zeiders and Bailey Zimmerman. Wetzel in these songs also shares something with Zach Bryan, a fellow Nashville outsider who’s built a massive audience (and begun making inroads at country radio) by writing about his most intimate vulnerabilities.
Says Wetzel of making “9 Lives”: “It was like a therapy session.” Has he been to real therapy? “Not as much I should,” he replies with a laugh. “I grew up in a hard-working family in East Texas — kind of a men-are-men environment where you just take it on the chin and keep going. But getting older, you step back and realize it’s all right to talk about this s—.”
Koe Wetzel
(Hunter Hart / For The Times)
Born in tiny Pittsburg, Texas — and named in honor of the outlaw country fixture David Allan Coe — Wetzel played football in college but turned his focus to music following a series of injuries. His success as a live act eventually drew the interest of Columbia Records, which released his first major-label LP in 2020. (He called it “Sellout.”)
Ben Maddahi, the singer’s A&R rep at Columbia, says the label’s chairman, Ron Perry, knew Wetzel was primed for a breakthrough even if Wetzel himself seemed unsure. “There’s a joke in here that Ron wanted a hit out of the country music star on the label and so he sent the Persian Jew from Beverly Hills to go down there and do it with him,” says Maddahi, who’s also worked with Wiz Khalifa and Pitbull.
Maddahi connected Wetzel and Simon for a songwriting retreat at Sonic Ranch, a studio near El Paso, where the producer “just sat there on the ground with Koe and my journal, and I asked him questions about his life.” The tunes came quickly, Simon says — several over two or three days at Sonic Ranch, then another several over two or three days in Nashville.
Not everything they wrote was as unguarded as “Sweet Dreams” or “High Road”: In the very funny “Leigh,” which plays like a riff on George Strait’s classic “All My Ex’s Live in Texas,” Wetzel considers moving to Memphis to avoid getting mixed up with women whose names end in “-leigh.”
But Simon evokes “Star Wars” to describe Wetzel’s mindset as they worked together. “You know when they’re on the Death Star and they’re like, ‘Use the Force, Luke,’ to shoot those torpedoes down? We had this little window before Koe’s armor was gonna come back up again.”
Some fans of Wetzel’s earlier, harder-edged material have responded with suspicion to the softer emotional terrain he explores on “9 Lives.” This month, Murph said on TikTok that she’d been called “a rat” for joining Wetzel on “High Road” and noted cheerfully that he’d dropped a version of the song without her vocals.
“His solo version is out now go get ur duis!!!” she wrote. (Murph’s representative said she was unavailable to comment.)
Yet Wetzel seems generally unbothered by the prospect of having turned anyone against him. Asked about his current attitude toward police, years after his last arrest, he laughs. “I’ve got a lot of friends that are on the police force — state troopers and stuff,” he says. “Whenever they’re not putting me in the back of a cop car, I back the blue.”
