There’s little to no stage banter when the Droptines play a show, with the Austin, Texas-based band sometimes cramming 30 songs into a 90-minute set. However, as their new album, Drought Flower proves, they still have plenty to say. Their original songs touch on broken relationships (“Old Tricks”), family grief (“Mamaw,” featuring Sarah Jarosz), and losing loved ones to addiction (“What Ate My Friend”). As a nod to classic country, there’s often a little bit of clever wordplay to offset the drama, too.
Named for the downturned deer antlers that are prized by hunters, the Droptines (rhymes with “stop signs”) first took shape with an EP release in 2019. Lead singer-songwriter Conner Arthur has since guided the group through indie albums, relentless touring, and now their debut set on Big Loud Texas, the label founded by Miranda Lambert and Jon Randall. The five-piece band hasn’t yet moved into a tour bus, though. Instead, they travel in a retrofitted school bus with upgrades that would impress any road musician. (It sleeps 10 people and has a bathroom, two air conditioners, and a built-in trailer space.)
Growing up in the Texas Hill Country town of Concan, Arthur watched countless musicians play at his family’s venue, House Pasture Cattle Company, during the summer season of city folks floating the Frio River. But the rest of the year, when nothing was really going in town, influenced him just as much.
“I learned how to be alone in Concan,” Arthur says. “I learned how to clear my mind and ignore my hunger pangs. But I would always watch and study people. Especially because if you’re driving through Concan in, say, January, and you see a car that you don’t recognize or someone you don’t recognize, you’re shocked and you want to go talk to them. You’re just caught in your own little village for so long. Having an outside perspective from my little narrow worldview was very, very important to me.”
A few days ahead of a full slate of tour dates (and just before stocking the school bus), Arthur called into Good Country to talk about what inspired the new music.
For people who haven’t been to the Texas Hill Country, how would you describe it?
Conner Arthur: The drama of the limestone bluffs, the crystal clear waters of the Frio River – man, it’s hard not to have a religious experience every other day. Especially when it rains and the floodwaters start moving. Everything there is so dramatic and explosive and chaotic. From the summer to the off-season, you have three months of complete and utter chaos, then the rest of the year is just silent. There are some days where I’d walk out and just sit there looking at River Road waiting for a car to drive by. And I was starting to freak out, thinking that I was the last person on Earth.
More than likely I think that made its way into my personal life. It’s just a large juxtaposition, and a dichotomy of high highs and low lows. But I learned how to handle it, growing up there. We didn’t get internet or cell phone service until 2012, and that’s a great way to grow up. My backyard was 200,000 acres. I could ride horses without hitting a fence line for miles. I wish that more people had that upbringing. I wish that I could provide that for my kids.
If you didn’t get the internet until 2012, then you got to experience live music at your family’s venue before the cell phones in the air and people documenting every show.
Oh yeah. The funny thing about House Pasture is [that] it’s changed hands but it stayed in the family. My biological father and my uncle started it. They failed, so my grandpa bought it from them. And then it was kind of a “break even” type of venue. It was just an addendum for someone who’s gonna go down to Concan and float the Frio anyway. Like, “Oh, we can go see so-and-so.” I mean, I’ve got scars all from being this tall and women ashing cigarettes out on my collarbone. Not on purpose!
I learned more about what I didn’t want to be, seeing the evolution of the Texas country scene come through there. I saw that evolution get commercialized in the mid-2000s, like 2005 and 2006. But when I was a little guy, I got to see the Great Divide. I got to see Gary P. Nunn. I got to see John Conlee. I got to see Earl Thomas Conley. I got to see all these really high-class acts. Reckless Kelly is still one of my favorites from that era. Robert Earl Keen, the list goes on. Even if I didn’t like it, the song’s going to be in my head. It is still red dirt Texas country. I still know every word to all these other musicians’ stuff that I’m not a fan of, because it’s just ingrained in you. You can’t avoid it in that environment.
What were you doing before you jumped into music?
I was in construction throughout high school and I’ve gone back and forth over the years when I needed money. But when I was 18 years old, my mom pretty much gave me an ultimatum. She said, “If you don’t go to college, you’re cut off.” And I was like, “Well, I don’t really care. I don’t like ultimatums.” So I grabbed my banjo and I hitchhiked the country for about a year and a half.
I got back home, and that was like going 90 miles an hour into a brick wall. The fantasies in my head were dashed out by my mom’s disappointment. She said, “You’re gonna have to get a job.” So I went back to construction for a little bit, then I joined up in the oil field. I was an oil field mechanic for about two years, and I said, “I’m not going to die out here in the Eagle Ford Shale.” So I made a decision. Just to give me some more confidence, I went to the bluegrass program in Levelland, Texas, at the [South Plains] College. I did that for two years and went home and knocked out our first EP with David Beck.
I knew you played the banjo, but I didn’t know that you had studied bluegrass.
Dillon [Sampson], our bass player, and I both went to South Plains and he’s way more of a bluegrass cat than I, but my story about how I got into playing banjo is just kind of happenstance. My older brother came into some money when we were young, and I won’t go into the details on how he got it, but it was burning a hole in his pocket. He bought this Deering Goodtime open-back banjo and it was sitting in the back of his truck. I was about 14 and I had plenty of guitars floating around the house. And I had a piano, but I never really broke through on it because it was just an instrument for me to get a song out.
I don’t know if it was the open tuning or just the fact that it’s hard to not have a good time playing banjo, but I broke through on it. I could start developing an understanding of music theory and scales. I don’t know why it made sense in my mind that it was less intimidating than 72 keys or six strings. You go down that road, and then are you a gimmick banjo player or are you good? That’s what led me to South Plains. I’m not going to disrespect the institution of bluegrass or the instrument of banjo. I’m going to do my best to play it. But I need to play more. I need to stay on it, because that is not a bike. Your agility and endurance of playing the banjo collapses if you’re not tickling it once or twice a day.
Is that the same for writing with you? Do you need to consistently write, or can you put that away for a while and come back to writing?
I’m always kind of writing in my head and building concepts, then I’ll scribble it down. I’ll more than likely lose the piece of paper I scribbled it down on, but I’ve always said if it’s worth remembering, then I’ll remember it. But I probably lost a thousand songs that way. It’s like a floodgate. I sit around and I’ll have an idea, and I’ll get a quarter way through it, blah, blah… But it’s not until the band all sits down in a room and we all have the intention to write, and these things just… “Boom!” There goes the dam.
In several of your songs, there are references to pills or addiction. On this record, you have “What Ate My Friend.” That’s a reality for a lot of people. When you’re tackling a heavy topic like that, how do you get into that headspace, knowing you’re going to jump into something serious?
A lot of that, it’s lived in for sure. I’ve had men that came before me that did it so I didn’t have to. Back to, I know what not to do now. And my brother Landry being one of them. I lost him to all that shit a couple years ago. He and I were Irish twins. The same thing happened to my biological dad’s brother. At the same age, the same exact circumstance, and they both died on their birthday.
“What Ate My Friend,” I can’t even remember writing that one, but I know that I showed up with all of it, and that’s rare. I have this band to lean on, but I showed up with every bit of that. This was all here. It’s not just about my brother, but a couple friends I have. Just like, “I know you’re on meth, dude, but why is it making you a liar?” Like, you can be honest with me, just tell me. It’s getting in the way of our friendship if you’re going to turn into a liar.
I thought there was a nuance, kind of, what I refer to as the days of country gold, the wordplay of like, “She’s Acting Single (I’m Drinking Doubles).” That’s so important in country and bluegrass music – that play on words – and that one is like, “Hey man, what’s eating at you?” All right, what’s the extreme of that? “What ate my friend?” I thought it was pretty decent, but yeah, that’s a rough one, you know, but it’s real, unfortunately. It’s real for a lot of people. And I hate that. I hate that anybody has to suffer.
You’ve been around music from the time you’re a kid, and now you’re doing this full time. What has surprised you the most about this career path that you’re on?
The main one is that there’s viability. I said this in an interview before, but I just thought playing music was a good excuse to be a loser. And then to see it all pan out! It starts to feel like work, but work is good, especially if it bears fruit, which it is, and it’s starting to even more so. But to be able to build a foundation for my future family off of the back of these songs, that right there is top tier, number one, the most important thing. I can’t be more grateful for that and the blessings that God’s given us. Just having people come religiously to your shows, and singing words, it gives you faith in live music, for sure. It is a little shocking to me, at the end of the day that I didn’t make all this up.
Want more Good Country? Sign up to receive our monthly email newsletter – and much more music! – direct to your inbox.
Photo Credit: Jessie Addleman
