"Look. Is that him?" she asked, blue stage lights illuminating her face.
"Yes, yes it is."
John Vincent III, a 28-year-old singer-songwriter, had wandered down near the front-row seats to say hi to family and friends. The fans approached him, asked for a picture and that was it: A current coursed through the next few rows as others realized the opening act was in their midst.
It didn’t matter that Noah Kahan was mid-concert at the Dos Equis Pavilion — dozens of Vincent’s faithful wanted pictures of their own.
“I’ve stewed on it, and I really don’t have a great answer,” Vincent says of this burgeoning popularity. “I think I got lucky.”
A few months after that sweltering Dallas night in mid-June, the momentum has continued for the Houston-born artist. Hot on the heels of his second album, Songs For The Canyon, Vincent and his band have toured North America, released more music and earned more fans. He is still adjusting to the popularity (“I’m a really private person,” he says), but he feels “extremely grateful” for the chance to play new cities and share his folk-pop with more people.
For Vincent, that’s the best part — those connections with people who find common ground with something he’s singing. “I’ll never get over people singing the words with me in the crowd,” he says. “I don’t want to get over that.”
Regardless of what the anxiety-inducing future brings — more music, more tours and all the uncertainty that comes with life on the precipice of greater fame — he wants those connections to be a part of his life.
“I feel weird even saying this, but it seems like my songs have done something for people,” he says. “And if I could make something that did something for someone, that, in my book, would be ‘making it.’”
Vincent’s high school days were soundtracked by the likes of Bon Iver and The Districts, an indie-rock group from Pennsylvania.
“They were the very first band me and my friends listened to, over and over,” he says. The Districts and the group Pale Seas made him realize “music can have a profound impact on the listener.” They also inspired him to start his own band.
Based on the way he describes the group — called The Links — they sound like your classic high-school jam band: they’d hang out, listen to some of their favorites and play a little, but the music ultimately came second to the camaraderie. Even still, those times undoubtedly played a role in his development as a storyteller: Many of Vincent’s songs are wistful, yearning for a simpler time.
Only one member of The Links (his guitarist, Nick) is in Vincent’s current backing band, but he insists, “We’re all still great friends, even if some of us aren’t doing music anymore because, you know, life.” This evokes a line from his newest song, “Never, No, Not Once”:
“Ain't it something, how life keeps moving?” he sings to an unseen friend. “Heard you're having a baby now, and you're moving.”
“What I’m singing about is usually something I’ve been stewing on for a while,” he says. “In ‘Never, No, Not Once,’ it’s a mix of friendship and romantic partnership — those people who stay with you even when you’re moving around.”
“Moving around” was how Vincent found his voice again when, not too long ago, he was considering leaving the music business.
He had built a solid following with his self-released 2019 debut, Songs from the Valley, which included songs “Lover of Mine” and “Next to You” — gentle, guitar-driven tracks that showcased his talent as a vocalist and a writer. In some ways, the work is reminiscent of Stephen Sanchez, for whom he would also go on to open. Then, Vincent went away for a bit. He wasn’t sure if the industry was for him; he bristled at the idea of a life that felt out of his control.
When the pandemic hit, he and his partner took a spur-of-the-moment, eight-month road trip.
“For most of that time in the van on the road, I was under the impression that I would be done with music, at least for a while,” he told Westword. But something about traveling stirred his creativity. He started writing new music while making his way through more than a dozen states. By the time he got home, he was ready to finish what would eventually become Songs For The Canyon, his first album distributed by a record label.
It bears all the clear markings of a road-trip record: The songs are driven by soft acoustic guitar, the tinkling of piano and vocals that sound like they’re moving through mountains and faraway fields. The lyrics call to mind something from Vampire Weekend, with echoey tracks about growing up, losing your innocence and finding your people.
No Depression calls Songs For The Canyon a “balanced record” that “welcomes you into its world if you let it.”
“It’s not perfect,” the review reads, “but Vincent’s willingness to risk sappiness and minimalism is commendable and even refreshing.”
Texas Tunes
One of the highlights, No Depression notes, is “That’s Just the Way It Is, Babe” — which Vincent tells the Observer is his favorite song to sing live. He especially likes the lyric “Let’s go walking in the light / Take a few on the chin,” as it conveys the hopeful, striving and resilient mentality that has come to symbolize much of his latest music.There’s also a clear sense of anxiety in his lyrics — and it sits alongside these feelings of hope. According to Vincent, this is because his songs are often a direct reflection of the thoughts that keep him up at night.
“I've found I've had to throw away any idea of a songwriting formula,” he says. “It typically starts with me and a guitar — the chords come first, and whatever I write about is usually something I've been stewing on for a while. And I’m a lot more anxious nowadays.”
He’s anxious about what the future could look like: where he will be in one year, when this year already looks so different from the last, and whether he will be the same person.
“It's kind of against my personality to be putting myself out there a lot,” he says, so he’s working hard to engage his fans and live a musician’s life in a way that feels truthful to him.
But even more than that, it’s the big, existential fears that jangle around his mind when he’s trying to catch some shut-eye after a show in Vancouver or Aspen or Omaha. He worries about death, as he makes clear on “Never, No, Not Once.”
“The older I get / So much more that I'm thinking about / Ways I might wind up dead,” he bellows in the song’s chorus.
“We're all gonna pass, but you never know how or when,” he says. “When you're younger, you're invincible, you can fall and be fine. Now, falling hurts more. It’s something we all experience, but we don’t talk enough about what that means, how that feels.”
Still, just as he reassures the subject of “Never, No, Not Once” that these fears will never stop him from picturing life without them in it, Vincent is quick to stress just how lucky he feels. That’s the thing about the future: It’s terrifying, but if you “walk in the light” with the right people around you, Vincent is optimistic you’ll find plenty of reasons to have hope.
“Sometimes at night, when I'm just thinking, I think about how strange it is that the same things can bring you two different feelings,” he says. “The same things are giving me anxiety and hope.”
