Texas has long been known for its singer-songwriters and country acts, but there’s plenty of music within the Lone Star State that navigates outside those boundaries as well. A few recent examples include Spoon, Gary Clark Jr., Khruangbin, White Denim, and Shakey Graves, the latter of which has become a cult hero of sorts in the folk and roots music space.
Born Alejandro Rose-Garcia, Graves’ career in music didn’t begin to take hold until the mid-2000s following acting roles with the Spy Kids franchise and television series Friday Night Lights, but once it did momentum hasn’t slowed since. Each step along the way the singer has reinvented himself. From the solo one-man band setup on his independent 2011 debut, Roll the Bones, to 2014’s And The War Came – which featured the indelible Esmé Patterson on songs like “Dearly Departed” and “Big Time Nashville Star” and eventually culminated in Graves winning Emerging Artist Of The Year at the 2015 Americana Honors & Awards – to the trippy, extended jams of 2023’s Deadstock anthology.
That constant transformation leaves listeners in perpetual awe. Among those caught in the cycle of captivation has been BGS executive director and co-founder Amy Reitnouer Jacobs, who first encountered Graves at Pickathon in Happy Valley, Oregon.
“I remember hearing him start his set and watching the crowd grow,” recalls Reitnouer Jacobs of that maiden experience. “There’s certain festival sets where you can feel a palpable energy and buzz, and this was one of them. It was just him, a guitar, a harmonica, and a suitcase holding a kick drum. It was a truly magical moment where you knew the person you’re watching is really gonna hit.”
In the 18 months that followed, Reitnouer Jacobs began booking Graves on several BGS-related gigs and sponsored stages at places like Bonnaroo, the Newport Folk Festival, and the LA Bluegrass Situation Festival. Around the same time, Graves was starting to pop off with his first big hit, the aforementioned “Dearly Departed,” which to this day remains his second-most streamed song ever with over 133 million listens on Spotify at the time of this story’s publication.
According to Reitnouer Jacobs, being around to witness Graves then was like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that is still in the process of playing out: “There’s a few key moments in anyone’s career where, if they’re lucky, they get to witness and be adjacent to somebody’s incredible talent,” she explains. “Getting to know Alejandro feels exactly like that.”
“He is always beholden to himself first and foremost,” she continues. “He’s not an artist that will crank out material just for the sake of doing so. When he comes up with something it’s going to be really considerate and developed. He’s also not afraid to try new things. I’ve seen him with a full band and solo, acoustic and plugged in. It really speaks to his multifaceted nature and how no one artist exists within a vacuum. Sometimes roots music can get a bit caught up in that, but Alejandro does a good job of having these different sides of him coexist and come through in his music.”
Speaking of trying new things, Graves does just that on his latest record, Fondness, Etc. Out May 15, the album of home recordings takes on an ambient and lo-fi approach that most closely compares to his simplified 2017 project, Shakey Graves And The Horse He Rode In On. Accompanying the minimalist methodology on these songs are the sound of bird calls and wind gusts on “On My Own” and various tropical noises on “I Once Was An Ocean” that give the compilation a very lived-in feel, something that’s not often the case for an artist who’s constantly reimagining his own work.
Per Reitnouer Jacobs, she thinks a lot of that intimacy and experimentation goes back to Graves’ roots in Austin, a Texas town known for embracing its weird side. “There’s a lot of really cool stuff happening in that part of Texas, so it doesn’t surprise me that something like ambient music is sneaking into what he does,” she observes. “My favorite artist, personally, is Kate Bush, with my top lyric of hers being ‘let the weirdness in’ on her song ‘Leave It Open.’ I go back to that a lot, because I think artists fearless enough to let the weirdness in are the ones who actually move their genres forward, which is exactly what Alejandro is doing.”
In celebration of Shakey Graves’ fifth studio record Fondness, Etc., we’ve named the singer our Artist of the Month for May 2026. Throughout the next few weeks, we’ll celebrate Graves by going back into our archives for all-things-Shakey, plus you can read our brand-new exclusive interview with Alejandro himself, watch our Sagebrush SXSW Session featuring exclusive Shakey clips, and of course, don’t miss our Essential Shakey Graves Playlist, below.
Photo Credit: Jonathan Terrell
