But they’re playing the same type of music now they were back in the mid-2010s — red dirt country that slips into moments of rock as quickly as it might become an acoustic, piano-backed ballad. Seemingly out of nowhere, though, the opportunities have started getting better and better, says the band’s husky-voiced lead singer, Smith. As demand for more music, more shows, bigger venues and longer tours drums louder and louder, Smith is realizing the times of playing five shows a year in North Texas, where he was born and raised, may be ending.
Austin is the home base for the five-piece country outfit, but Smith and bassist Chase Satterwhite’s North Texas roots have made our region a common stopping point for the band over the years. This weekend, Shane Smith & the Saints will tackle two nights at Fort Worth’s Billy Bob’s in a show that Smith expects will be packed with friends, family and some of the band’s most longtime, loyal fans.
He warns it may be their last time in the neighborhood for a while.
“A lot of the folks that [Satterwhite] and I grew up around will make it out to these DFW shows, and it's always fun getting to reconnect with some of our old friends and family when we play out there again,” Smith told the Observer. “There's a lot of history [at Billy Bob’s], and at the end of the day, we're proud to be going, and it's a very large room to fill.”
It’s a venue that, while familiar to the band, never loses its luster. Robert Gallagher, the entertainment director who has been booking acts at Billy Bob’s since the honky tonk’s inception, is a “living legend,” says Smith. And evidence of the big names that have passed through the venue are literally cemented into the walls.
They’ve played at Billy Bob’s before, but they’ve never done a pit show at the venue, which Smith generally prefers. That's when the tables on the main floor get pushed aside so that fans can pack in close to the stage. Smith feels the band’s music “is not intended to be listened to while being seated” and that the pulse of a standing, dancing crowd can make a good show great. Which is why when a show at Billy Bob’s for this Friday, April 4, was announced as a seated audience, Smith knew the band needed something more.
“We ended up coming back and just more or less asking if we could do two nights and do one of them as a pit show,” Smith said. “Obviously, now we're doing two nights, so it adds a whole lot of pressure to selling either one of them out.”
A Saturday show, April 5, was added to the venue's calendar. No sitting allowed.
If selling twice as many tickets as initially planned is a pressure point, developing two distinct shows so that fans attending both nights don’t grow bored certainly isn’t. The band has four studio albums under their belts, plus a COVID-era live album recorded in the Terlingua desert that is sprinkled with covers of country classics like “Pancho and Lefty.” There is plenty of material, Smith says, to get creative.
Unlike artists who have a particular song or album take off, shooting them into prominence while older music slips into obscurity, the current rise of Shane Smith & the Saints is built on the foundation of a fanbase that has been here from the beginning. Their most recognizable song, “All I See Is You,” which skyrocketed in popularity after being featured in an eponymous episode of Yellowstone, comes from the band’s second album. On Spotify, songs from their 2013 album Coast top their suggested discography, boasting upwards of 15 or 20 million downloads.
If anything, it’s the band’s fourth album, Norther, which was released last March, that is still gaining momentum after a five-year spell between releases. Like everything else the band does, Norther just took a little longer than usual, Smith says.
“It was obviously longer than ideal, but a lot of the songs on it were ideas from 2015, 2016,” Smith said. “Once we were in the thick of the album it was kind of like going back years and years into notes and finding old poems. And once we found a theme for the record it was really easy to go back and determine what songs were going to fit into that.”
The album is named after Texas’ blue norther weather phenomenon, where fast-moving cold fronts sweep across the state, bringing dark skies, a flurry of winds and a disorienting drop in temperature. Fame, expectations, success — have all come over the band in a similar swell, Smith says.
At this moment, the music industry seems to celebrate saturation. Zach Bryan, an Oklahoma crooner whose 2023 skyrocket to stardom was unparalleled in the country genre, released three unique singles in the first month and a half of this year. Pop stars like Sabrina Carpenter seem to time song releases with TikTok virality.“Once we were in the thick of the album it was kind of like going back years and years into notes and finding old poems. And once we found a theme for the record it was really easy to go back and determine what songs were going to fit into that.” — Shane Smith
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But Smith says that kind of industry pressure is noise the band finds easy to ignore.
“We're kind of just doing what we've always done,” he says.
He is making an effort to re-record some of the band’s early hits, though. Years on the road have left Smith with scar tissue on his vocal cords, and the band’s earliest recordings sound like a baby-faced imitation of their current raw, weathered sound.
“When you tour for 15 years or something like that, it definitely ages on your voice. And I think in our case, it's worked to our advantage,” Smith said. “But it's also kind of odd because now we have these old recordings that don't necessarily sound the way that we do today as a band.”
All the more reason to make the effort to see them live.
