Austin Meade

He's an artist molded by red dirt, grunge, nostalgia, melody, and the raw spirit of vintage rock. But there's much more beneath the surface of his music. Austin Meade doesn't play dress-up. When he shows up in grease-streaked work clothes, it's because that's what he wears when he's building his bus barn, fixing his house, or chasing his two toddlers around the yard. And when it comes to his music, he delivers songs as unfiltered as a voice memo -- honest and confessional anthems for outsiders about the weird, beautiful chaos of real life. "I don't have time for anybody's bullshit anymore," Meade says. "If I'm not 100% in on something, I move on. I want every song to feel like the coolest thing I've ever done." Raised in small-town Texas by a Baptist preacher dad who took him to see AC/DC, Journey, and Judas Priest, Meade grew up immersed in guitar-driven storytelling across multiple genres. His voice carries that legacy -- soulful, southern, and unmistakable -- even as it swerves between styles. There are echoes of heartland troubadours and Warped Tour vets in his songs. The fusion is uniquely his: rock n' roll urgency delivered with the swagger of a dive-bar poet and the heart of a family man. Meade earned his stripes by grinding it out across the Southwest -- playing solo acoustic gigs in dimly lit restaurants, leading bar bands in a rotating cast of vans, and eventually joining diverse rock and country bills with acts like Sevendust and Treaty Oak Revival. His 2021 breakout album, Black Sheep, served as a rallying cry and a mission statement for him. 2022's Abstract Art of an Unstable Mind incorporated fuzzy guitars, emotional depth, and self-aware cynicism.