When Koe Wetzel plays Billboard’s The Stage at SXSW Thursday night (March 13) at Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park in Austin, fans can expect a typically high-octane, guitar-driven show full of songs about road life and troubled relationships, both often fueled by substances.
For the past 10 years, Wetzel has been entertaining Texans — and in recent years, he’s expanded outside both Texas’ and the United States’ borders — with his rough and rowdy brand of Red Dirt music that draws as much from Nirvana as it does from Willie, Waylon and his namesake, David Allen Coe.
Already a sensation in the Lone Star State — he hails from the tiny East Texas hamlet of Pittsburg, population 4,335 — Wetzel recently saw his popularity reach a new plateau with “High Road,” his jagged duet with Jessie Murph from 2024’s 9 Lives. That song became not only his first song to appear on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart, but his first to reach No.1 on the survey, where it stayed for five weeks in December and January.
Before that milestone, Wetzel was already routinely registering songs on Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart from his first two sets for Columbia Records, 2020’s Sellout and 2022’s Hell Paso.
Below are eight essential Wetzel songs, many of which he’s guaranteed to play Wednesday night. He knows he can’t leave the stage without playing “February 28, 2016” or “Drunk Driving,” and maybe he’ll reach back to his earliest days for the searing “Gravedigger.”
Opening for Wetzel will be Ashley Cooke and George Birge. Tickets are available here.
“High Road” spent five weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart for good reason. Wetzel and Murph play the part of lovers going through a tumultuous time on the well-defined duet, whose co-writers include 2024 Grammy-winning songwriter of the year Amy Allen. While some of Wetzel’s rough edges may have been slightly sanded down, there’s no denying the impact of a vitriolic line like, “I don’t need a ticket to your s–t show.”
From Wetzel’s first release, 2015’s Out on Parole, when he was still part of a band, Koe Wetzel and the Konvicts. The song’s narrator is a gravedigger, who’s been at it for 55 years. Wetzel’s knack for a melody and storytelling is already evident as the gravedigger is closer to the crows and coyotes that accompany him as he digs and the souls that he’s buried than any living human being. Though he’s co-writing more now, this is a solo write that shows Wetzel needs no help to craft a tune.
Like so many of Wetzel’s songs, he’s once again on the road, but this time it’s a figurative one, as well as a literal one, as he laments how different his life is from the wife and two kids most men have at this stage of life. Instead, his companions are the weed and Xanax he gobbles to get to sleep after shows. He’s grown so used to his lifestyle that it feels normal to him, even in those moments when he realizes “I’m always alone with no way home.” The tune, from 2024’s 9 Lives, feels like a sequel to “YellaBush Road” from 2022’s Hell Paso, as he struggles with his lifestyle when he returns home.
One of Wetzel’s darkest and most mesmerizing songs plays out like a blurry fevered dream. Featured on 2020’s Sellout, the tune is from the perspective of a drunk driver who, in his addled, altered state, has decided it’s time to end it. “Everybody’s gotta die somehow/ Why not for me right now?” he asks with a certain inevitability, as he tries to outrun his sins, pleading with whoever finds him, “Tell my mother I lovе her and take care of my friеnds.”
Wetzel’s fans adore this true story about singer-songwriter getting thrown in jail for drunk driving so much that they have declared Feb. 28 Koe Wetzel Day. But close listeners will hear the hint of slurry desperation in the song as he praises the Lord: “We wanna thank you again/ For watchin’ over us when all we do is sin,” he sings, while drunkenly yearning for someone sober enough to take him to a Taco Bell.
“It’s hard to have sweet dreams when I’m such a nightmare,” Wetzel sings in this mid-tempo 9 Lives tune about a ravaged relationship that he takes 100% of the blame for ruining. Singing about the wreckage of a relationship isn’t new for Wetzel, but on this one he has no vitriol, just resignation at his inability to stop his own damaging behavior as his sadness plays out against an almost lilting melody: “When I find a good thing, I burn it down slow/ Only see your face now when my eyes are closed.”
Opening Spanish guitars and whistling that recalls a Spaghetti Western, this track from 2022’s Hell Paso sounds unlike any other Wetzel song, but the topic is familiar, in this tale of a hell of a bender in Mexico where Wetzel is literally spending his money on hookers and blow. There’s no romanticizing the situation here, which is part of its appeal. It’s kind of hard to believe that someone would willingly admit they spent their money that way — he knows the women “lined up down the hallway” don’t love him, they just want his cold, hard cash… and he’s fine with that.
Originally written for Twisters, the song didn’t make the cut for the 2024 action film — which is hard to understand given the twangy, expansive feel — but it did find a home on his 9 Lives album the same year. The song recalls the Midwest’s wide-open spaces until it explodes into cacophony. It’s great for rolling down the windows and racing down that long, winding road, outrunning whatever is chasing you.
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