Sawyer Hill

One Liner:  Deep-voiced rocker from Arkansas who feels right for Austin

Wikipedia Genre:  No Wikipedia, this is alternative rock, indie rock, guitar rock

Home: Fayetteville, AR

Poster Position: 22
Weekend One Only.
Saturday at 1:25.

BMI Stage.

Thoughts:  Wow.  You hear that name, and I immediately thought okay this is going to be a country guy.  Then you pull up the Spotify and the dude looks like Sebastian Bach from Skid Row.  Then you click the first track and it is like that dude from the Crash Test Dummies was allowed to sing something other than the humming song.  I have no clue how to parse all of these inputs.

His tiny bio provides that he grew up playing bars in the Fayetteville, Arkansas scene, and ended up playing "countless" shows in the south with his band.  But COVID nuked that band.  He also says this dumb phrase: "It's sounds you're familiar with, but with a delivery and composition you haven't heard before."  C'mon man.  But then he came back with a new thing, and has managed to nail some TikTok and Instagram viral action to get popularity.  He now says that he'll get randomly noticed around Fayetteville as that singer with the deep voice.

"Look at the Time" is that big track that has blown up - it has a great line about "when you say that I'm the only one, did you mean that I'm the closest one around?" and also calls back to the guitar stylings of Eric Johnson at one point.  I enjoy it.  He claims that it just flowed out of him in 15 minutes, which is also cool.  12.1 million streams.

Mmmmmmmhhhhhmmmmmmmmhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmm.  Nah, just kidding.  This is a good one.  No official album yet, just a handful of singles out there.  "Firestarters is the second most streamed with 5.1 million.

This stuff reminds me of those Austin bands of old - not just a flash of Eric Johnson here and there, but more like the Arc Angels and Charlie Sexton type of guitar-forward, loosely-collected rock and roll.  Not quite into the Gary Clark Jr. guitar heroics thing either, but it just feels like this dude would be at home here in Austin slinging these songs.  I like it.