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The Band Releases Their Debut Album ‘Sweethearts Only’ on March 29th.
by Jeff McCord
It’s been a while since Austin has been known as an exclusive country music town, but that certainly doesn’t mean the music has vanished. It’s too ingrained in the dirt and fabric of Texas life, and in every generation, it seems to bubble back up like oil from the ground.
Camille Lewis, Kyle Albrecht and Matthew Shepherd are the songwriters and backbone of the Sentimental Family Band, a fixture of the Austin scene since 2019. Augmented by various lead players, they’ve filled the dance floors at the Sagebrush and White Horse, and more recently, Thursday nights at Sam’s Town Point, with their takes on country classics. Slowly, their originals began to creep into the set. Last summer, they released the single “Face To A Name”, and their full-length debut, Sweethearts Only, drops on March 29th.
While all seasoned Austin players, none of the three hail from the country roots scene. Matthew played with Dana Falconberry, Camille and Kyle shared duties in the indie band Dead Recipe. Nothing really pointed towards this trajectory, yet here they are. I asked Camille how the Sentimental Family Band came to be a thing.
“It was sort of a gradual getting back into country music for me. I was raised on it. I think Kyle and I, we met when we were really young, and we got really into experimental music, electronic music. We’re in some bands making that type of stuff and toured around. Then we both really fell in love with being hired guns and playing and other people’s bands. We felt that was making us better musicians. And, Matthew was kind of in the same boat. He played with Dana, he recorded on a Molly Burch album a while ago, he has played with and recorded with and toured with a lot of great bands from the Austin area. We all have wide-ranging musical tastes, and have all kind of just gone through different phases of different types of music that we want to make. But it was sort of fortuitous timing that I think we all really got interested and wanted to learn some country songs together.”
Camille recalls listening to a lot of country music in her youth.
“My parents listened to a lot of country music and bluegrass and took me to see that type of music. And, as young children do, I began to reject it as I became an adolescent. I felt like I had to find my own very different type of stuff to listen to. So for me, it feels like coming back.”
Hearing this made me suspect there was an intentional tribute hidden behind their name.
“There is a significance to it. I’m glad you asked. Kyle and I grew up with, a high school friend of ours, Avalon. Her family, the Hancock family, was a part of Tommy X [Hancock] and the Supernatural Family Band. And Avalon gave us some CD’s of her family’s band back when we were in high school. That was an early seed of us starting to get back into country music, but sort of in a little more of a hippie kind of flavor, which appeals to us. Before I met Avalon, my parents would take us to on Sundays to see the Texana Dames. So before I even knew that I knew them musically. There’s layers of appreciation there, for sure. So, yeah, our band name, we picked it when we were just starting out. Their music was a big touchstone for us.”
“And, as young children do, I began to reject it as I became an adolescent. I felt like I had to find my own very different type of stuff to listen to. So for me, it feels like coming back.”
Camille Lewis, Sentimental Family Band
You can hear traces of the Hancocks on Sweethearts Only, also Loretta, Gram Parsons, even a little Michael Nesmith. But curiously, what you don’t hear a lot of is the two-stepping rhythms the Sentimental Family Band has delivered to packed dance floors over the past few years.
“Our original music has developed from playing these clubs and playing the two steppers.” Camille explains. “And we play these two hour sets, so there’s a lot of covers. We first wanted to try writing these originals that would blend into a set that had Ray Price and Buck Owens songs. It was a writing experiment to see if we could make our own stuff that sounded similar to the songs we were covering. But inevitably, because of a lot of our other musical influences, we infused different flavors into it. I agree that the album is pretty mellow and there’s not a lot of fast shuffles or certain touchstones of a lot of country albums that we were influenced by, we just come from musical backgrounds that are a little bit more experimental. There’s not as much of like a rulebook or a precedent for how the music should be arranged and written, whereas these country records there are. So when we went to record with [producer] Billy Horton, out at Fort Horton Studios, he’s really steeped in a lot of this very traditional country and blues stuff. That’s where his recording approach comes from, and that’s where his gear comes from, that’s where his notes come from when we’re working with him. It’s sort of meeting in the middle, our influences and and Billy’s knowledge in terms of recreating some of those sounds, and especially with the way that he mixes his records. Some of our other sensibilities that were less informed by country.”
The album has been a long time coming, and they’re looking forward to getting it out there. Long term, they’re hoping they can make some road excursions, meet up with some friends in Nashville. In the meantime, you can find them Thursday nights at Sam’s.
“Hopefully this year we’ll do a little run of something where we can go up through Texas and get to Nashville, play a couple shows up there and come back home. That’s kind of our main touring goal right now,” says Camille.
“We’re real happy just playing in town, playing in South Austin. We recorded [the album] over the course of last year. We would scrape up enough money and enough time to go in for a couple of days, every few months and cut a few songs. So it feels like we’ve been familiar with these songs for a while. We’re happy to have met Billy and to kind of have worked up this process with him because we feel like, you know, we have a good collaborator moving forward. We’re excited to have it out there and to be able to start working on the next thing. Hopefully we can make the next one a little bit faster.”
