American musician Shakey Graves will be performing at the Auckland City Limits music festival in New Zealand.
American musician Shakey Graves will be performing at the Auckland City Limits music festival in New Zealand.
Auckland City Limits has its own Austin music hero in the line-up with Shakey Graves heading to the festival. He talked to Russell Baillie backstage at Austin City Limits.
It's early Saturday evening on the sweltering second three-day weekend of Austin City Limits and Shakey Graves is a man in demand.
He may have played a scorching set of a few hours earlier - a fiery mix of finger-picked country-blues and wiry feedback-laced rock'n'roll before a crowd as big as some of the event's headliners get later in the day.
He may have signed many autographs to a long line of young fans.
But out the back of the signing tent as he talks to TimeOut, the handsome 28-year-old born Alejandro Rose-Garcia, barely gets a thought out before there's a request for another fan selfie or handshakes with others on the festival's massive bill.
Graves is a big deal in these parts. That's him on the cover of The Austin Chronicle's newsprint coverage of the festival's first weekend.
While bluesman and former high school mate Gary Clark jr - looking stylish on the cover of the glossy monthly Austin Way magazine ahead of his own homecoming ACL appearance - might be the Texas capital's best-known recent export, you get the feeling Shakey Graves is the ground-level hometown music hero in this city that bills itself the "live music capital of the world".
"Austin says it's the live music capital of the world, which is an absolute lie," smiles Graves about the branding which kicks in as soon as you get off the plane.
Shakey Graves features on the cover of this week's TimeOut:
That might be a sacrilegious thing to say about a place whose mayor proclaimed in 2012 that February 12 be known as "Shakey Graves Day".
"I would say for every band that is playing live in town now, in Nashville or Los Angeles or New York city there are probably three times more. But that is not what any of that means. It is sort of the spirit of it ... ".
Rose-Garcia grew up here. He played as child in the massive central city Zilker Park, where the festival is held, before debuting there as a musician at ACL in 2013.
Shakey Graves performs in on stage on at the Austin City Limits Music Festival in Austin, Texas. Photo / Getty Images
He pursued an acting and music career in Los Angeles - where he wrote his first album, 2011's Roll the Bones - and then New York. Eventually, he returned home to base his prolific career - three official albums out, four or more available for free on the net - out of his hometown. Also available at those airport shops alongside the merchandise for Austin City Limits (the long-running local live music television show that inspired the festival) are T-shirts with the slogan "Keep Austin Weird". It seems even the backlash against Austin's commercial growth and gentri fication - its tech sector growth has made it a distant suburb of Silicon Valley - has become a brand itself.
Which amuses Graves.
"I don't know anyone in Austin who has a Keep Austin Weird shirt ... for my generation Austin is inherently weird. But there is something really comforting in that, even in the hokiness of it. It's promoting something that still warms my heart when I am back here."
He laughs that the place has its drawbacks. It's not a very big city. It's hard to hide out and write songs. "So you can go out to a coffee shop to write music and immediately run into three people you know and then it turns into drinking margaritas and hanging out all day. I have to purposefully hide in my house." These days Graves has progressed from the one-man band he started out as - playing a suitcase kickdrum while singing and strumming - to a three-piece group.
"As shtick-y it might seem the one-man-band thing, the novelty factor got people in the door. I had contact so hopefully people will continue like that. But it's a lot easier playing behind a band." Though he still likes to mix it up on stage.
Shakey Graves is a hit in his hometown of Austin.
"I love having the acoustic songwriter storytelling stuff and I also love psychedelic rock and terrifying scary noise stuff and I really intend and demand having a show that has all these things in it and it's not jerky.
"That is what I listen to. I listen to acoustic music and death metal." His playing was influenced by everyone from late sensitive singer-songwriter (and Texas escapee) Elliott Smith to good ol' boy blues-rocker George Thorogood.
Talking of guitar greats, no, he has no regrets about not forming a high school band with Clark - "because he has always been shredding so much harder than I was. Maybe in the future we will be a supergroup or something like that" - but out on his own, under a moniker that started as a joke about Native American guide names and stuck, it seems Graves is on a roll.
He was nominated alongside the likes of Lucinda Williams and for Album of the Year at the Americana Awards in September and came away with the Best Emerging Artist prize.
Next March he returns to play at Auckland City Limits as a kind of unofficial ambassador for the parent festival.
"That's so hilarious," he says of Austin City Limits setting up a branch in Auckland, before he is interrupted by yet more selfie requests and handshakes.
Who: Shakey Graves What: Auckland City Limits When and where: Western Springs March 19. Latest album: And the War Came
