“This is probably the most excited I’ve been about a body of work in my entire career,” he says.
It’s one of Texas’ few 20-degree days as Beckmann talks over the phone from San Antonio, but you’d never be able to tell from his warm, friendly demeanor. He laments the current climate, then cracks a joke about how much worse it was rolling through Minnesota two weeks earlier.
“It was like negative 20 when we got there,” he says. “I called my agent and asked, ‘Whose grand idea was it to tour in Minnesota in the middle of February?’ We made it out alive, barely, but it was fun.”
His charm and candor are qualities that carry over splendidly to his music. Beckmann’s latest single, “Starting Over Again,” is a raw look at dealing with the emotional aftermath of a failed relationship. He ropes the listener in with a bright plucked acoustic riff and his buttery vocals before his lyrics bash them over the head with the weight of lost love.
“I’ve been smokin’ / The pack you left behind from I don’t know when / I wonder if this pain will get to goin’ / I can’t keep losing this waiting game,” he sings. “But if I never fall in our kind of love again / And the happiest I’ll be is where I’ve already been / And when it feels like I’m not ready for the end, it’s just me / Scared of starting over again.”
The 29-year-old country singer brandishes a deep baritone voice ripped from the George Jones era that’s betrayed by Beckmann’s babyface. It's like stumbling across the cover of Randy Travis’ Always and Forever (in which the man in his 30s resembles a high school senior) then hearing Travis' powerful but reserved voice on “Good Intentions” or “The Truth Is Lyin’ Next to You” — it takes a second to adjust to. Beckmann’s bag of tricks doesn’t end there; he can also sing with a big, booming voice like Marty Robbins or belt out in Spanish.
“It’s never been hard for me to skip around like that,” he says. “I’ve always thought of my voice as an instrument itself, and my biggest goal when I’m writing or recording is to be able to manipulate it or change it to fit the song. Whatever the song is calling for, that’s the way you need to deliver it. The same way you wouldn’t play two songs on the guitar the same way.”
Other singles by Beckmann, such as “Borderline Crazy” and “Not That Strong,” would feel right at home on 99.5 The Wolf back in the 2000s. “Borderline Crazy” is an upbeat song about getting wasted in Mexico to forget a girl (a country classic) and “Not That Strong” is a more solemn track about a man’s inability to get over his ex-lover.
“I’ve always been a big fan of vulnerable songs like that. I think it’s cool when a dude can just be kind of sad,” he says with a laugh. “I wrote that with Harper O’Neal, she’s a Dallas girl that lives in Nashville. That one hits home for me; I was dating this girl for two years, and we’re not dating anymore. I wrote that song when we were still together and it was almost kind of prophetic. I love when a song can come back around like that and mean more to me than it did when I wrote it.”
Beckmann’s third album and Warner Music Nashville label debut is his most collaborative project to date. Instead of tackling all of the tracks himself, the songwriter branched out to ensure his new record reached its full potential.
“I don’t think there’s a single song off this record that I wrote by myself, which is pretty rare for me because I started off writing songs alone," he says. "There’s two or three songs that I didn’t have a hand in writing at all, but I just love the songs, so I recorded them.
“Aside from a Bruce Springsteen cover, I wrote all of the songs on my first record, Faded Memories, by myself. Slowly, over the years, I’ve been co-writing more. I have a publishing deal in Nashville, so I write a lot of songs now with other people and I get to collaborate with everyone from buddies of mine to Rhett Akins and anybody in between. That allows you to open up your mind a little bit and chase different directions because you’re collaborating with other people that have different tastes.”
Writing alongside others took some getting used to, but it’s proved to be a boon for Beckmann in the long run.
“I think it might’ve bothered me at first, but I’ve since adjusted to it pretty well,” he says. “Now, I can start an idea and I’ll immediately think of somebody, like, ‘Oh, I should bring this to so-and-so! They’d be perfect on this song and they can help me finish it.’ Another thing I learned by doing both processes is when you write by yourself, you don’t have anybody to bounce ideas off of or to tell you if an idea is good or not. Sometimes when you’re in the weeds you have a hard time sussing that out, and when you’ve got someone else in the room you can get their feedback.”
While Beckmann’s voice alone could draw every eye in a crowded room, what’s even more jaw-dropping is how easily he switches to singing in Spanish and the way his vocal delivery completely changes when he does. His recent set of Christmas singles is the perfect example. It’s hard not to do a double take when the Sinatra-esque “White Christmas” rolls over to his cover of “Ven a Mi Casa Esta Navidad,” and that’s not even taking his country twang from songs like “Bourbon Whiskey” or “Borderline Crazy” into consideration.
Para Español Presione Dos
“It’s not hard for me because I took vocal lessons when I was younger,” he says. “I went through a big Frank Sinatra phase, and I also grew up in Del Rio, so there was a lot of Hispanic influence too. Mariachi music specifically has a lot of big, round voices with big vibrato, so I was doing that [for “Ven a Mi Casa Esta Navidad”], and then “Not That Strong” is more laid-back, like a James Taylor type of thing.”The cover isn’t like listening to Johnny Cash or Josh Turner or some other burly baritone stumble through a rough translation. It’s more like watching that clip of Tom Segura speaking Spanish from his Disgraceful special or hearing him talk to his mom on his Tom Segura en Español podcast. He does it with an ease and authenticity that’s honestly impressive.
“I’ve never had a problem going back and forth, but if I’m being honest, I’ve always been a little self-conscious that people wouldn’t know how to receive it,” Beckmann says. “This record is colorful and has a bunch of cool things on there — I’m very proud of all of them — but there are a few songs where it’s like, ‘I can’t believe that’s the same dude on the same record,’ and that’s just how I’ve always been as an artist. And the fact that I speak in Spanish too — people trip out when I do that — but that’s just how I am. That’s just how I was raised.”
His upcoming album is mostly original material, but also includes two covers. One is “Por Mujeres Como Tú,” a 1998 hit from Mexican artist Pepe Aguilar about a man dealing with heartbreak, and another is an unreleased song by a popular Kentucky-born country singer.
“It’s actually a Chris Stapleton song that he wrote about 10 years ago and never put out. Man, I had to fight hard to get that song,” he says with a chuckle. “It’s a song called 'Honky Tonk Blue.' I think he just really wanted it to go on one of his records, so I had to ask him like two or three times and finally he said, ‘OK, you can have it.’”
Beckmann plans to release two more singles before the album comes out, and he’s playing a show at Southern Junction Nightclub & Steakhouse in Royse City on Friday, Feb. 21. Ultimately, his main goal with the project is to reach new audiences and put out songs that resonate with his fans.
“I love the live aspect of what I do, and one of the most fulfilling experiences for me is to get to go out and play and hear people sing the songs back to me,” Beckmann says. “That’s the coolest feeling in the world. I’ve done everything from playing to nobody to playing in arenas where a bunch of people have no idea who I am, but there’s nothing like packing a place out with 700 people and every one of them is singing the song back to you. I’d rather play for 700 of my fans than 15,000 people who had no idea who I was. For me, it’s the connection that you make with people and knowing that they all came to see me play these songs that I wrote in my bedroom.
“I obviously want to play for 15,000 of my own fans one day, but you know, one baby step at a time, right?”
