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Font Finds Success Through Singular Focus
by Jeff McCord
When it comes to getting a band’s career started, there’s the well-worn path; record, post, repeat.
Font hasn’t really done those things.
The Austin five-piece has been playing furious dance-rock sets to sweaty appreciative crowds since 2022. Yet their recorded output adds up to just two songs. And good luck finding much about them online.
It’s not as if Font set out to be rule-breakers. But their origin story is organic, slow, maybe more thoughtful than most.
Singer/guitarist Thom Waddill and drummer Jack Owens were North Carolina college roommates, playing in dance cover bands. They wanted to continue in music, and Thom figured Austin might be the place to forge a new trail.
“I’m from Texas,” he explains. “I grew up in Beaumont. I came to Austin, mainly to evacuate from hurricanes growing up. But it always felt like the sort of place where it was natural to do that in Texas. It was kind of between here and New York. It helped that I knew people here in the arts and in music. I didn’t know people in New York. And so I moved here.”
Jack soon followed, and it wasn’t long before the pair met guitarist Anthony Laurence.
“Thom and I met at the Cactus Cafe open mic way back when I used to bartend there,” Anthony explains. “I guess he came down there one of his first nights in Austin.”
Thom had some plans on the direction he wanted his music to take. Then 2020 happened. You know what they say about plans.
“2020 was a lot of just hunkering down and trying to write music. I was thinking yesterday about how strange that period was because Jack had moved down for us to play music together. Back in 2019, I was still writing stuff on the guitar, I was a songwriter, and we talked about forming a band. We played our second show. And then the next week, the pandemic happened. The way that I had been writing music totally dried up. I remember that summer just trying to throw shit at the wall and see what stuck. There was a feeling of Nihilism, almost. But out of that is when we started writing the Font stuff, just in our living room. I guess we’re technically another pandemic band, in that sense.”
As COVID began to ease, they were left with a lot of music, without a clear idea what form it would take.
Thom recalls what happened next. “Anthony, and my partner at the time and I all moved into this space in East Austin that was a DIY arts space. It had visual art shows and installations, and sometimes we would have these jam sessions, kind of freeform with various friends. It was kind of through that that we ended up assimilating Logan [Wagner] into the band, who plays auxiliary percussion.”
Bassist Roman Parnell would complete the lineup. And Font slowly began to take shape.
“I think from the beginning,” says Thom, “when Jack and I were writing stuff, we were thinking about the most we had ever felt playing music. And those were times in college when we were playing with a nine piece band and just riffing on stage, playing these long shows and just feeding off of each other. When we were writing the initial Font stuff, I remember us wanting to make just sketches for vamps that we could do on stage. Our eyes were always turned toward wanting to make stuff for the stage, to perform. It wasn’t really by design that we didn’t record or keep things off the internet. It was because we felt the main way to figure out what our art was had to happen in a room, with people playing. The music took shape in that way, through that tension and generation.”
Font would release a recording of “Sentence I” in 2022, a year later a second song, “It”, would appear. But overall, they’ve kept the rest of their material close.
“I was listening to this Jeff Tweedy interview,” Thom recalls. “He was talking about one of the best moments of creating. It’s the initial moment when you have a musical idea and [haven’t] arranged it. For us, we have a song idea and we haven’t recorded it yet. That is a moment of possibility. You’ve made this new thing. But there’s still all of these ways that it can continue to evolve and to exist. With recording, there was always a fear of letting go of the possibility for the music to continue to change and evolve. Part of that comes from insecurity about being sure that what we do on stage can actually transfer into a recorded setting, but also, uncertainty about wanting to commit the material to one kind of existence.”
I bring up Bob Dylan, who has stated that his songs are never finished.
Anthony chimes in. “As a Dylan fan myself, something that I’ve taken from him is his love for, or his trust in spontaneity, his ability to record the same song in the same session in different ways. And then just deciding that take four is the one that’s on the record that’s going to live forever. At least for me, it’s not [about] perfecting a part to tape. It’s perfecting an energy.”
Thom continues the thought. “I think it’s important for us that what we do feels essential, you know what I mean? I think it’s also true that we just didn’t really need that [other] stuff for a while for what we wanted out of the band.”
Yeah, it’s true. It’s as if their scarcity of recorded output and social media presence, so unusual in this day and age, has fed into a mystique and curiosity. Font has opened for a lot of big roadshows, and had the surreal experience of playing an enormous stage at last fall’s ACL Fest. Intentional or not, Font has been very successful at leaving fans wanting more.
And, rumor has it, they may be getting it soon.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to confirm or deny,” says Thom with a smirk.
OK, cagy. But it seems fairly certain we’ll get more recordings from Font sometime this year.
“We have been working,” Thom confesses. “We talk a lot about medium specificity, that something in a given medium should use all of the resources available to create the effect. Our live show is something that we try hard to make dynamic and performative in all the ways that a live show can be. With recording, we really wanted to exploit all the things that we can in a recorded setting to really push production to a place that you know where you still recognize the songs, but they don’t sound exactly like how we do them live. We’re really interested in sharpening and widening that range from light to dark, juxtaposing, feedback and screaming with singing and more kind of exalted feelings. As a lyricist, I’m really interested in the collapse of rage and euphoria.”
How this translates into a new Font record is something we’re all anxious to discover.
“I guess it does come down to the fact that, yeah, we haven’t really put music out,” Thom says. “And we got some opportunities that other bands maybe didn’t [before] putting music out or a lot of development of their identity online. I see a lot of stuff about, you know, how to brand yourself as a musician, how to increase online engagement, how to treat your music or your band like a business. Our trajectory has hopefully reaffirmed that you don’t really have to do that. We’ve tried to not think about industry stuff, and have instead directed those energies into the immediate thing.”
