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If you’re a fan of Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors, or even just curious, then you really should catch their show at The Warehouse at the Fairfield Theatre on April 11. It’s the Nashville-based singer-songwriter’s last tour for the foreseeable future. Two months ago, Holcomb announced on social media that, after years of going full throttle, he was getting off the road.
Since ascending a float in last year’s Thanksgiving Parade, Holcomb has been everywhere, man…. opening for The Head and the Heart, touring small venues with his wife, Ellie Holcomb, performing solo in Europe, and headlining concerts across the country with his band.
The Neighbors released their ninth studio album Strangers No More last summer, which yielded their first #1 Americana single, “Find Your People.” Fans of Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen will find a lot to like in the album’s heartfelt lyrics and easy-going-down, feel-good melodies. We caught up with the twenty-year veteran of Americana as he was about to release “Suffering,” a teaser track from Strangers No More Vol 2.
When was the last time you were in Fairfield?
We played the small room there twelve years ago. So it’s been a long, long time, and we’re excited to come back. We played the Hartford HealthCare Amphitheatre this summer with Darius Rucker, and after doing that, I told my agent we should definitely come back and do our own show in Connecticut. We had a really good rapport with the audience.
What was it like touring with a country artist like Darius Rucker?
It was cool. It was my first big summer country tour, and it was fun to be outside almost every show. Country summer tours are kind of a party, so you have to build your set to meet the level of the crowd, which is a good challenge. We ended up really feeling like we nailed the set. He had me up every night to do his first country number one from back in 2008, “Don’t Think I Don’t Think About It.” I took the second verse and sang harmonies with him.
You were part of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade last year. How did you land that gig?
Our publicist reached out to me and said the parade is interested in you doing one of the floats and doing “Find Your People.” It probably followed the success of the song at Americana radio. As much as an Americana act can have a hit, that song’s definitely been a hit for us. It wasn’t really on my bingo card, so it was an easy yes. I grew up watching the parade as a kid at my great grandmother’s house when I was very little in North Carolina. Honestly, it was an uplifting life experience because there were people ten deep on every sidewalk, just glad to be there. We had a beautiful day, it was sunny and 40 degrees.
Did that really raise your profile? Did your Spotify streams go crazy?
Well, the one funny thing about doing the parade is everybody who does it has to lip sync, because they don’t have the audio capacity to set up every float for sound. So when people are watching on TV, they’re actually listening to the album. So we had something like 40,000 Shazams of our song that morning, which is obviously a ton. Spotify went way up. The song went all the way to number one on iTunes for about five hours, which… iTunes is not as big of a place where people go anymore, but is still a good marker of cultural reaction. I definitely feel like we made a lot of new fans that day.
And now you’re back on TV. Your song “Dance With Everybody” is in the NCAA March Madness commercials. How did that happen?
Somebody at the NCAA is a fan of our music and was putting together the promo reels for the tournament, and I guess they thought it made a great fit. I mean it is kind of right on the nose; “put your hands in the air, put your hat in the ring.” And they have clips of people throwing their hats in anger, or throwing their hands up when their team scores. It makes a good emotional prep for March Madness.
It’s been funny to me, because I’ve never written songs specifically for any TV pitches, but they keep happening, so it’s kind of a nice surprise. In some ways, TV has been our radio over the last twenty years.
You wrote “Dance With Everybody” with your live audience in mind.
Yeah. I was with [co-writer] Ketch Secor from Old Crow Medicine Show. This was right when we were coming out of Covid, and we’d just both started doing shows again. We were discussing how much better it felt to play in front of a live audience than it did in front of cameras, and live streams and stuff. It’s an ode to the magic and the communal experience that happens in that room. While everybody loves music, not everybody participates in live music, and there’s something particularly satisfying about a room full of strangers singing along to music that they all love.
The country is so divided these days. Are you conscious of that as you go on tour and put music out in the world?
Absolutely. I mean, it’s impossible not to be aware of the division.
I’m also keenly aware that the two options of political anger that are presented to us are not where most people live their lives. There’s a lot of money to be made by getting people angry and afraid, and that’s not really where most people actually exist.
I think that music has the power to speak to our common humanity. I’ve definitely made political comments in the past. I usually save those for social media. But even there I’ve sort of quieted that, because I’ve felt more and more homeless, in a way, myself. But, like last year after the Covenant shooting here in Nashville, and I’m sure in Connecticut, this is close to home for everybody.
But I’m very outspoken about the insanity of our gun obsession here in America, which is literally killing our children. I wrote “Troubles” from the new record about the Uvalde school shooting. And it’s about what I see as extremism inside of our political system, and the helplessness that a lot of us feel. But I try to write those kind of songs from a perspective of humanity, not with a finger pointed, but more of a hand raised, you know.
And I think that my audience relates to that, because people on every corner of the political spectrum are still humans who have hopes, dreams, and fears. So I can express my own frustrations in a way that hopefully doesn’t dehumanize others. I see that as the main problem with our political moment. The people in power who have the microphone are making it sound like the other side is trying to ruin our lives. Well, in some cases it may be true, but it’s certainly not a helpful way to get civil society to move forward and move together. So I’ve tried to be more slow to speak, and put those thoughts and feelings into songs, and less into yelling on X.
You get to meet your fans directly through the VIP experiences you offer on tour.
Yeah, we’ve got one new one this year, which is the Bourbon on the Bus thing. I’ve been doing the pre-show VIP thing, where you sing a couple of songs, meet everybody, and take pictures, for about a decade. It’s a great way for people who really want to say hello or have a quick story to tell, or want to hear some intimate storytelling a/bout a couple of songs.
There’s a practicality to it, too. I mean, like everything, touring has gotten more and more expensive to pull off, and there’s more and more artists out there. And it helps us fund some of the expenses of touring, the travel and the production.
And it seems like our fans are pretty smart and understand that, and are willing to help keep us on the road by doing fun things that we put on offer. There’s a nice mutuality to the whole experience.
Do you ever find yourself just singing to one person acoustically?
We’ve never had one, but we’ve had a few small crowds of seven or eight. And, you know, it’s all good.
“Family” has such an uplifting message. You recently went on tour with your wife, Ellie Holcomb, and you brought the kids with you. How did it go?
It was great. We’ve been touring like that for about seven years. Ellie was in the band for many years and then she left to do her own music. So it’s a way for us to do some songwriting, performing and recording together. The show is very much a mixture of her songs, me and the band songs, and songs that she and I have done together. And the kids get to see us sort of in our element.
Is it a challenge to be on the road with your kids?
In many, many ways, yes. You’re living in a bus together, and you’re trying to keep up with school. And then, there’s just the normal, interpersonal workings of three siblings who are young and growing up and learning their ways and fighting and arguing. But the benefits far outweigh the challenges because we get to show them new places and go on adventures. This year, my daughter was very engaged with the merch table. She has aspirations of being in charge of merch by the time she graduates high school. We’ll see.
What do you listen to in the car together?
We make a playlist and everybody gets to pick a song. My daughter is in the fifth grade. She’s in a major Taylor Swift phase. Our youngest, who’s five, is playing Watermelon Meow Meow. And our older son is into all sorts of things, like The Weeknd and Imagine Dragons. They’re keeping us up to date with the current pop music, and we’re making sure that they know the essentials, like The Beatles and George Strait.
What are you listening to these days?
Josh Ritter’s The Animal Years. Nathaniel Rateliff. We’ve been listening to the new Kacey Musgraves record while we’re cooking dinner. Malcolm Holcombe, this old classic songwriter who passed away last week. And then I’ve got this piano playlist that’s got all sorts of stuff like Chilly Gonzalez and Nils Frahm. I put that on when we’re needing a little peace around the house.
You recently posted that you plan to slow down when this tour is over.
Yeah. We’ve been going 90 in the left lane for twenty years, and it’s time to get in the right lane and go about 72. It’s not a major break, it’s just a slow down. With the kids at the age they are, and the travel I’ve done… There’s this idea that musicians break themselves by trying to develop every city and write all the time, record all the time, and say yes to every opportunity. We’ve done that for a long, long time. Last fall is a perfect example. Our tour was about seven weeks long, and I missed all seven soccer games. To me, that’s unacceptable fatherhood behavior. So it’s time. We’re still going to tour, we’re still going to write and record. We’re just going to slow down the pace a little bit.
Does this change how you’ll approach the shows?
We’ve always given it our all no matter what. That’s certainly not going to change. We’ll play a lot of old stuff, a lot of new stuff. It might make for a longer show just because, you know, some of these places we may not see for another four or five years. But you never know. A lot of times I say that and then we get booked for a festival in that state later that summer, and it’s like, well, I guess I am going back.