Flatland Cavalry celebrates New Year’s Eve with a show at Fort Worth’s Dickies Arena
Flatland Cavalry will be celebrating much more than New Year’s Eve during its Tuesday show at Dickies Arena.
It’s the Lubbock sextet’s first headlining arena show in Fort Worth, and the show is something of a culmination of a life-changing decade for the band.
Flatland Cavalry, led by singer/guitarist and chief songwriter Cleto Cordero, will be honoring their past while also celebrating their future. In November, they released “Flatland Forever,” a compilation record that includes some of the band’s signature tunes along with some new, unreleased tracks.
The party at Dickies Arena was hatched a year ago when the band sold out two nights at Billy Bob’s Texas for the second consecutive year.
“Our booking agent said, ‘Hey, man, the next time you play in Fort Worth it’ll be Dickies Arena,’” Cordero said. “I thought that was pretty neat. We’ve just been taking it in stride all the while, and it didn’t even cross my mind at that time that we had sold Billy Bob’s out two nights in a row for two years. And I guess there’s a lot of love in Fort Worth for Flatland. So we’re excited to be able to take it to the arena and bring in even more people.”
Flatland Cavalry, which formed in 2012, features Cordero on vocals and acoustic guitar, Jason Albers on drums, Jonathan Saenz on bass, Reid Dillon on electric guitar, Wesley Hall on fiddle, and multi-instrumentalist Adam Gallegos on keys, piano, mandolin, banjo and guitar. They released their first EP “Come May” in 2015, and their first full-length record “Humble Folks” in April 2016.
The coming year could be huge for the group, with a tour planned with festival dates already set at the Two-Step Festival in Georgetown on April 5-6 and the Stagecoach Festival in Indio, California, two weeks later. After a decade on the road, including their first shows in the United Kingdom this year, the band has seen its name rise on the festival marquees.
Cordero, who grew up in Midland, spoke with the Star-Telegram last month. Here’s an edited version of the conversation.
So this is kind of like a celebration of the first decade of the band? Yeah, I think so. That’s a great way of looking at it. We played our first show on June 4, 2014, at the Blue Light Live (in Lubbock) and that was really like us taking that leap of faith of playing cover songs and stuff, being a cover band and playing three-hour gigs to transitioning towards 90-minute shows and playing original music. So it is truly amazing to consider that if you would have told us 10 years ago you’re going to play Dickies Arena and tickets seem to be selling really well. So, yeah, it’s awesome.
Will you guys play until midnight or will the show just be beginning, or be in the middle? How does that work? It’s a good question. We’ll probably work backwards, to be around the 75-minute mark or something, to ring in the new year, maybe play a couple of songs afterwards, and then let whatever happens.
How would you characterize the band’s sound? Americana? We do a lot of different types of styles. I know we have country roots in our veins, but I do think we always just tried to treat the song with whatever (sound) it’s asking for. If it’s more rocking, give it some more rock. I think Americana would kind of encompass all of it. But we kind of say and it’s kind of become like a little tagline for us: ‘“That it’s easy on the ears, heavy on the heart.” To me, as long as the song is emotive and kind of about real-life stuff. I mean, whatever the song is asking for, we try to just give it that treatment.
Do you get that question a lot? Is that an annoying question? I don’t find it annoying at all. Variety is the spice of life. So my approach has always been to just write the best song I can in the moment, and not the best, like it’s a competition. I just want to be moved by it and I want to feel it. If it’s doing that to me, then I would hope that — as I learned through going out and playing it for people — it’ll perhaps do the same for others. So that’s really all I’m ever searching for. Like Willie Nelson says, “Three chords and the truth.” And see how many I can put up on the shelf. For the most part, I don’t even theme the albums, or go into the writing process (thinking) I’m going to write a country album or this or that. It’s just like, write all the songs as they come to me, and then I have them all in a list.
Who are some of your songwriting inspirations growing up? I was totally unaware that songwriting was even a skill or anything. I guess I just took it all for granted. I would listen to country radio and whatever was playing on mainstream country radio in the ‘90s, I was absorbing it like a sponge, like Brooks and Dunn, George Strait, all the songwriters behind those great songs. Alan Jackson is another one. But whenever I started writing songs when I was 17, then I started to pay attention. And then guys like Randy Rogers came up and I started paying way more attention. So I would emulate or emote the way that they would sing, or what their songs were about. The Turnpike Troubadours would be another one.
How about Pat Green? He’s a Lubbock/Texas Tech guy. He lives in Fort Worth now. Yeah, Pat Green, as well. He was one of the reasons I wanted to go to Lubbock versus Austin or something, because, as a kid, he would play Christensen Stadium, the minor league ballpark where the Midland Rockhounds baseball team played. And I’d hear it on the radio, and there was this thing called Texas country. And I was like, what is that? They would be like, “Live at Christensen stadium, Pat Green!” and they would play little snippets of his songs. I just thought that was so cool that there were these homegrown guys that were taking big swings. So I’m a huge fan of his.
How old were you when you wrote your first song? I got a guitar when I was 14. My parents raised us Catholic, so at the time, they had turned the TVs off for the lent season. So I got a guitar for Christmas and from February to Easter I had 40 days of nothing else to do, but I learned how to play the guitar. I did that for three years. I’m a guitar player first, and I was so excited to learn all these songs that I loved. And then I went to my first concert when I was 17, and that was Randy Rogers, and just got struck in the soul by a song. I realized in that moment, that is exactly what I want to do.
Which song was it that hit you? That’s the ironic thing, I can’t even remember the song because I didn’t even know any of his songs. My friend bought me a ticket and dragged me to the concert. I remember looking around and like everything was in slow motion, and people were dancing, having a good time. It was just so lively. And I just felt like I was alive, like I thought I was awake before, but now I was really awake. And I was like, “Yep, I’ve got to follow this, to see where it’s going to take me.”
Did you have moments early on when you got a burst of confidence that this could work? After I had that experience at the Randy Rogers Band concert, I started writing. I wrote a song that I played at Rebel League Court. I was hired to sing it for all my (Midland Lee High School) peers our senior year. I was the hired entertainment and I sang two songs, one of which was a John Mayer song. That was the first song. And the second one was one that I wrote called “Slow Down.” I remember playing it for that whole auditorium and then afterwards, in the little banquet where they were eating sugar cookies and drinking fruit punch, this older woman comes up to me in her 60s or 70s, and said “You moved me to tears, like I went back to being 17 years old again. So thank you for that song, and keep doing it.”
It was so affirming. I hadn’t experienced that in any other extracurricular activity in my life, never in sports or anything. Before I played that event, I played that song for my dad and he asked “Who wrote that?” I said, “I did.” He said, “That’s really good. Keep doing that.”
Flatland Cavalry is moving up higher in these festival billings. How does that feel? We’re becoming big. The font size is going from 12 to 24. When we were just bubbling under the surface for a small band from Texas starting to do the thing, it was always those big festivals that it was like, man, no, when you get to that level, that’s when you’re doing it, that’s when you’re making it. And then you get there and you realize there are just more mountains to climb. But I’m grateful that we are getting the opportunity.
To me, the work is loving the audience and creating community through the music and the songs. So anytime we get to play on these big stages where someone’s like, who’s Flatland Cavalry? I prefer that, because it’s a chance to go from being strangers to familiar and to earn a new fan, right then and there.
What was the spark behind your latest release, “Flatland Forever”? We’ve been doing this for 10 years. Got four full length albums and a couple of EPs under our belt. We started working with Interscope Records last September, and our guy from over there kind of brought the idea to my door that we have a lot of great songs and a lot of people don’t know where to start or where to jump in. So how about we put them all into this one project? Pick your favorite songs, ones that tell the story of how you guys got here. So that ended up becoming “Flatland Forever.”
It’s kind of an intro or crash course of what Flatlands has been doing.
What was it like to play in the United Kingdom for the first time? We started at the bottom, we played 500-cap rooms, some of them were 1,000, but it was really small. The people were rabid. At times, they were like, they were there for it. Honestly, they’re great listeners over there. They’re so polite and respectful, but then at the same time, too, with our blend of music we bring a little bit of that Texas twang here and there and that kind of rowdiness, so they would toggle between being polite and totally respectful, listening to every word to having a good time, too. So I just feel like they were all in. Sometimes American crowds can be a bit inattentive, being on their phones. It’s just a different kind of culture.