On the brick wall facing the Pittsburg Hot Links parking lot, a mural memorializes the small East Texas town’s most famous citizens, including Mean Gene the Hot Link King and Homer Jones, the New York Giants receiver who invented spiking the football after a touchdown.
Soon enough, Pittsburg native Koe Wetzel could be right up there with them. “Maybe [after] a couple more No. 1s,” Wetzel muses as he looks up at those faces. He sounds dubious that he has earned his spot quite yet, but the 32-year-old singer-songwriter is well on his way. His breakthrough hit about a volatile relationship, “High Road” with Jessie Murph, spent five weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart in December and January. “I know the folks who own the place,” he adds with a laugh. “I might go buy some watercolors and paint it myself.”
Koe Wetzel performs at Billboard Presents THE STAGE at SXSW at Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park in Austin on March 13. Get your tickets here.
Wetzel may not believe he’s a local legend yet, but it’s clear that here in his hometown, his star status is confirmed. As he strides across the crosswalk Abbey Road-style in historic Downtown Pittsburg at 8:30 a.m., a fan sticks his head out of a store door and yells “My hero!” his way. Wetzel left Pittsburg (population: 4,335) when he was 18 to attend Tarleton State University in Stephensville, Texas, on a football scholarship as a linebacker. He now lives outside Fort Worth, but his roots run through his gritty brand of country rock, which he delivers in a powerful twang that draws on the long tradition of Texas outlaw country and confessional storytellers like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark.
“Koe is the epitome of an artist that is writing his own narrative,” Jelly Roll tells Billboard of Wetzel, whom he toured with in 2022 on the wryly titled Role Models outing. “He’s not writing what everyone else writes. He’s not trying to write another person’s narrative; he’s writing the way he naturally feels. I’ve been a fan of his for a long time — since his first project.”
Whatever he’s singing about — turbulent romances, getting busted for drunk driving or popping pills to get to sleep after a show — in song and conversation, Wetzel is unashamedly himself, with no apologies and no regrets, just like his namesake, country rabble-rouser David Allan Coe. “I was probably conceived to a David Allan Coe song,” he speculates. (His full name is Ropyr Madison Koe Wetzel; “My mom was pretty indecisive,” he says with a playful shake of his head at the multiple names.)
By the time he got kicked out of college his sophomore year for “having too good a time,” Wetzel was already playing shows and focused more on music than books. “Being a Texas artist, you can tour year-round here in Texas. A lot of people do and make a damn good living at it,” he says. “Coming up, that was kind of my main goal and pretty much my only goal.”
Jeb Hurt, who has managed Wetzel since 2019, recalls seeing him at a 300-capacity venue in San Marcos, Texas, in 2016. “If there were 200 there, 125 of them were college girls, and they were crammed against the stage screaming every word back to the band,” he says. Hurt, then a booking agent, quickly signed Wetzel, whose audiences grew exponentially through word-of-mouth. “If it was 200 people, the next time there were 400, then 800,” Hurt says. “Next thing you know, we’re in 5,000-cap venues in 24 months.”
Now, Wetzel — who signed with Columbia Records in 2020 — is building his audience around the rest of the country and the world. He toured in Europe last year and will play Australia in March. “It used to be about having a good time, making rent, making gas money to get to the next show,” Wetzel reflects. “And now it’s completely different. It’s wild to see where it’s come from and where we’re at.”
While his act is still built around raising hell onstage, Wetzel has realized that by sharing his own often unsettling stories, he’s helping others feel less alone. “Whenever I see those people sing the songs back or I’m meeting them and [they’re] telling me that what I told them saved their life — they were going to off themselves — that is really special,” Wetzel says, his voice growing thick with emotion. “I didn’t know that it was going to be that way, but now that it is, it’s opened up my mind and my eyes … This isn’t about just taking care of the family anymore and setting everybody up. It’s more about helping these folks live life. But they’re helping me as well. Without them, I’d be out pouring concrete.”
When Wetzel began working on his current album, 2024’s 9 Lives, with Columbia senior vp of A&R Ben Maddahi, his relationship with the label was bruised. “We’d had a bumpy road in our first few album cycles with Columbia,” Hurt says. “Some people left pretty consistently, and so by the time we got to Ben, there was kind of a sense of exhaustion on our [part] of just another A&R person being thrown our way.”
That’s not to say he hadn’t achieved some level of success. After releasing three albums independently, Wetzel had put out two more through the label, including his cheekily titled Columbia debut, Sellout. That and his second album, 2022’s Hell Paso, had together registered eight songs in the top 40 of Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart, and the latter set reached No. 3 on Top Country Albums.
Columbia Records chairman/CEO Ron Perry asked Maddahi, who had worked with pop forces like Sia, Flo Rida and Charlie Puth, to meet with Wetzel. “Ron said something to the effect of, ‘He sells tons of tickets and has a die-hard fan base … We have really high hopes for him, but for some reason this hasn’t worked so far,’ ” Maddahi says.
In June 2023, Maddahi flew to Fort Worth to see Wetzel perform a sold-out show at the 14,000-capacity Dickies Arena. “He had an entire arena of people shouting out every word from the nosebleeds to the front row,” Maddahi recalls. “I came back [to the office] saying, ‘This guy’s a superstar.’ ”
Maddahi next flew to a show in Modesto, Calif., after which he and Wetzel had a heart-to-heart about the next album. “I wanted to slow things down,” says Wetzel, who was listening to acts like ambient pop band Cigarettes After Sex. “I didn’t want the super-edgy guitars, really loud drums.”
Maddahi paired him with Gabe Simon, best known for co-producing Noah Kahan’s Stick Season, and brought in several new co-writers, including Amy Allen, who won the 2024 Grammy Award for songwriter of the year and has written hits for Sabrina Carpenter and Harry Styles. It was during a writers camp with Allen and several other songwriters that the midtempo “High Road,” about a tempestuous, dysfunctional relationship, was born.
He and Maddahi immediately thought of Jessie Murph, whom Wetzel had co-written with before, to join him on “High Road,” and when she sent over a verse, “she killed it,” Wetzel recalls. Columbia partnered with RECORDS Nashville to work the song to country radio, and its ascent began.
“He’s very true to himself, and the songs he writes are exactly how he is, which is something I respect a lot,” Murph says of Wetzel. “When I first heard ‘High Road,’ it felt very nostalgic to me. It felt like a song I could’ve heard when I was a kid, which I loved.” To thank Murph, Wetzel bought her a pistol engraved with their names and the song’s title that took three months to make. “I felt it was really Texas of me,” he says proudly.
9 Lives’ cover is a photograph of the double-wide trailer Wetzel lived in with his parents until he was 12. It’s abandoned now and has fallen into disrepair, with broken slats on the wood steps and prickly bushes growing over the front porch. But inside, it’s still full of books, video tapes, pots and pans, photos of his maternal and paternal great-grandparents and a CD of Miranda Lambert’s 2007 album, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Long gone are the posters that hung on Wetzel’s bedroom walls of his first crush, teen pop star JoJo, and legendary slugger Mark McGwire. The last inhabitant he remembers was his uncle, who died several years ago. He’s not sure who’s living there now, if anyone. Standing inside, he surmises, “I think it’s just a big ol’ family of raccoons.”
His father was a truck driver who shifted into construction when Wetzel was around 11, enabling the family to build a house on the land and move out of the trailer. His mother was a bank teller and a singer who often took Wetzel along to her gigs. He remembers, at age 5, grabbing his dad’s old Hummingbird guitar that was down to two or three strings, “being in my Spider-Man underwear and feeling like I was playing to a million people. Looking back now, it’s like a dream come true.”
As a teen, he loved ’90s country, especially acts like the rough-hewn Kentucky Headhunters. But he also loved Nirvana, so much so that at 12 he asked for tickets to see the band for Christmas — and his parents had to break the news that not only was the band not together, but Kurt Cobain had been dead for a decade. “Nirvana had a huge impact,” he says. “I think that resonates with the way I play music — the big guitars, the catchy melodic hooks.”
The trailer sits on 100 acres of land that his great-grandfather bought in the 1930s. Wetzel’s family had gotten behind on the taxes and risked losing it until he bought and paid off the property in 2021. “This land means so much to me and my family. I never wanted anyone else to have it,” he says. While he doesn’t see living on it again himself, he plans to add some cows and, “hopefully, raising a family and having them come out here.”
That family is expanding soon: Wetzel and his girlfriend, Bailey Fisher, are expecting a baby girl in June, news they would announce on social media a few weeks after our interview. “We dated in college, and the last two years resparked everything,” Wetzel explains, then adds with typical candor, “It’s not some random chick I knocked up. I mean, we’re excited as hell. I’m scared as f–k … I’m getting older, I’m growing out of the college party lifestyle I’ve been on the last 10 years … They say there’s always a time to grow up and get your s–t together, and my stuff is not together by no means at all, [but] it’s a lot different than what it was.”
In a corner of Koe Wetzel’s Riot Room stands Dirty Sancho. The nonworking mechanical bull, named for the first Professional Bull Riders bull Wetzel bought (he now owns eight) is just one piece of his personal memorabilia decorating the 7,000-square-foot bar and nightclub Wetzel opened in Fort Worth’s Cultural District in 2023. “We’ve had to sew his head back on a couple of times,” he says of Dirty Sancho. “He’s seen some s–t.”
Wetzel opened the Fort Worth bar, in part, so he would have a place to “drink and party and not worry about people putting me in jail at night,” he says, sitting on a stool in the Riot Room sipping tequila over ice. (A second Riot Room will open in Houston later this year, with hopes of more locations to follow.)
He’s not kidding around. His boisterous “February 28, 2016” from 2016’s Noise Complaint chronicles the night he was arrested for drunk driving, describing how in his inebriated state he just wants to find someone “sober enough to take me to Taco Bell.” The song has become an anthem for his fans, so much so that they’ve made Feb. 28 unofficial Koe Wetzel Day. On that day this year, he released a live album culled from 2024’s Damn Near Normal tour to thank his fans and dropped by the bar to play a few songs live, but he winces a little when he talks about the tune.
“Whenever we play it, I’m very grateful for what it’s done for us, but I’m kind of like, ‘F–k,’ ” he says. He doesn’t hate the song, exactly — it’s just that he’s in a very different place at 32 than he was when he wrote it at 24. “I’m not that person as an artist anymore,” he says. “I’m not that person just having a good time.”
He has different regrets about “Drunk Driving” from 2020’s Sellout. In a catalog of dark songs, it’s one of Wetzel’s darkest: The narrator is driving drunk and trying to outrun his sins as he sings, “Everybody’s got to die somehow/Why not me right now.” It was Wetzel’s attempt to put himself in the mindset of some friends who had died in drunk driving accidents, and, looking back, he wishes he had named it something else. “The song’s not about condoning drunk driving or anything like that,” he says. “It’s a very emotional song.”
Then there’s Hell Paso track “Cabo,” which he swears is a true story about spending money on hookers and blow in the Mexican resort town. The crowd goes crazy when he plays it, he says, but he admits, “Me and Mama haven’t really talked about that one. I know it’s not her favorite by far.” (His mother and father do have plenty of other favorites and frequently come to his gigs: “I think they cry every damn show, her and my pops,” he says. “They’re crying, singing all the words. They’re proud of their baby boy.”)
The connection his fans have to some of Wetzel’s older, often brutally honest lyrics can lead to the misperception that he’s “some f–king hellion,” says Wetzel, who quit counting his number of tattoos at 36. “I feel like most of my music came from whenever I was going balls to the wall, and it’s just kind of not who I am anymore. I can still run it with the best of them, but I feel like they make their opinion of me before they get to meet me, and sometimes that sucks.”
Still, he admits that 1 p.m. Koe and 4 a.m. Koe are two different people. “That’s rock star Koe. He’s kind of a d–k,” he says of the late-night version. “He’s a lot of fun, but he can get out of hand really f–king fast.”
He has somewhat curbed his drinking, including switching from whiskey to tequila. On his Damn Near Normal tour last year, he and some of his bandmates had a ritual: “An hour before the show, we’ll drink a bottle of tequila. If I start earlier, then the show will be s–t, but if I start just after 5 p.m. and kind of drink a couple beers, bottle of tequila, then it’s like the right amount. You get onstage, everything’s smooth sailing, and it feels good.”
He has also changed his after-show routine, hopping straight on the bus as soon as the concert is over. “They took the after-parties away from me. I go shower on the bus, put my comfy clothes on, drink a couple beers, watch a movie, and I was in bed by midnight, 1 o’clock,” he says before admitting: “Honestly, I kind of enjoyed it. I sounded better than I ever had because I was taking care of myself a little bit more.”
Koe Wetzel’s lake house is haunted by a ghost his two younger sisters have named Irene. There’s an underwater cemetery about 100 yards away in the lake, but no one knows if there’s any connection. Irene causes all kinds of mischief, Wetzel says, including throwing bottles off the bar and turning on the TV. “You’ll see her walking the balcony up here every now and then,” he says, describing an opaque apparition. “She kind of f–ks with new people who stay here.” As if on cue, the closed front door suddenly swings wide open on its own.
Irene’s presence notwithstanding, “it’s a safe haven for me,” Wetzel says of this place on Pittsburg’s outskirts. With its spotty cell service, he can unplug, write and relax. “I bought it for us to make more memories,” he says of his friends and family, who come to grill and hang out on his five boats.
The walls on one side are lined with RIAA plaques — 12 of his songs have been certified gold or platinum — while the rest are covered with fish, bird and deer mounts, including deer killed by three generations of Wetzel men. But pride of place goes to an alligator skull on a sideboard; Wetzel killed the reptile with a buck knife during COVID-19 isolation in Matagorda Bay, Texas. “I got in the water, Steve Irwin’d him a little bit,” he says, sipping a Busch Light and pointing to a photo of him sitting astride the alligator. “Cool story to tell but my mom hates that story. She don’t like it when I do dumb s–t. She worries about her baby way too much.”
There’s also a photo of him with a giant catfish he caught with his bare hands — known as noodling — in the lake. His biggest catch has been 62 pounds, which he and his buddies tagged and tossed back. Asked whether killing a bear with a bow and arrow or having a five-week No. 1 is more satisfying, Wetzel pauses to give the question considerable thought, then decides: “Adrenaline-wise, killing a bear with a bow. Accomplishment-wise, a five-week No. 1.”
For all his love of hunting and fishing, those subjects haven’t found their way into Wetzel’s music. “I feel like I was put here to write about relationships gone bad or going good. Real-world stuff, I guess,” he says. “Not saying that hunting is not. It’s a huge part of my life and I love it to death, but I just guess I haven’t figured out what I wanted to say about it yet.”
Yet as he begins working on new music, Wetzel, who will tour this year with HARDY and Morgan Wallen, as well as play Stagecoach and other festivals, says he’s increasingly finding that all his passions are intertwined.
“I feel like every time I’m [writing], it peels back a layer of who I am. I find something that I didn’t know was there,” he says. “Whenever you get the song completed, there’s no more holes in it. There’s nothing else you could do for that song. It’s like, ‘Man, this is insane. This is really cool.’ It’s almost like the noodling and the hunting for me: It’s something that I feel like I’ll never master, but it’s what keeps me coming back and back. It’s a cool deal.”
This story appears in the March 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.
