Bill Baird
Country Catalyst
When Garrett T. Capps sings about loving San Antone, best believe he means it BY BILL BAIRD
H Reminder:
Although live events have returned, the COVID-19 pandemic is still with us. Check with venues to make sure scheduled events are still happening, and please follow all health and safety guidelines.
uman culture accrues in a sedimentary fashion, each generation adding its own layer to the earlier ones. San Antonio is no exception to that rule. Our history and cultural legacy can seem so monolithic at times that, almost as a coping mechanism, we forget what a rich history we have. Sometimes, though, a person arrives to wake us up to that history while adding a layer of their own. Right now — at least when it comes to our music scene — that person is Garrett T. Capps. While Capps is perhaps the city’s most-visible Americana performer right now, he’s more than that: a songwriter, a bandleader, a community builder. But, more than anything, he wants to party. He’s a born entertainer. On that note, he’s also on the verge of releasing a new album, I Love San Antone, which he’ll celebrate Friday, August 20 with
a performance at the Lonesome Rose, a St. Mary’s Strip music venue he partially owns. But more on the album and the bar later. Capps’ growing appeal lies in his ability to deconstruct the familiar Texas singer-songwriter genre. His work is rooted in the Lone Star State’s musical traditions while providing ample space for his talented backing band to fill in spaces with color, texture, jazz, drone, you name it. The end result is catchy and danceable to boot — pun intended. That willingness to reconfigure traditions stems from Capps’ origin as a genre outsider. He arrived in Singer-Songwriter Land through a long, loud journey. “I started off as a drummer for doom metal bands, punk bands, stuff like that,” he said with a laugh over lunch at a downtown-area taqueria. “First, I drummed in a psychedelic sludge band called Old & Ill, then a progressive doom band called Antero Sleeps.”
Garrett T. Capps (right) and Santiago Jimenez Jr. get ready to listen to a test pressing of the conjunto legend’s latest album.
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The gulf between doom and Americana may not be as wide as some imagine. Other alt-country performers followed a similar trajectory from the rock underground. To be sure, the do-it-yourself spirit of punk is all about musicians building the world they want to inhabit. “Me doing what I do, in the alt-country realm, everyone seems to come from a punk background,” he said. “It’s more unusual to meet someone who doesn’t come from punk.”
‘It just snowballed’ While the new album’s first single, “I Like Austin, But I Love San Antonio,” extols the laid-back virtue of his hometown, Texas’ capital city also played a role in his musical story. He lived in Austin for two years and cut his teeth playing the White Horse Saloon, where he became known as “the San Antonio guy.” “Folks started contacting me about booking shows down here, and it just snowballed,” he said.
