Behind the Scenes with Midland

For the band’s photo shoot, we spent a morning in Dripping Springs

Just outside of the rehearsal studio on Cameron Duddy’s property, he keeps pigs, chickens, donkeys, and a number of goats — appropriately named after country icons, including Dolly, Loretta, and Garth. The rehearsal studio, nicknamed “Little Pink,” is where the band first honed its harmonies.

JESS CARSON, on their “On the Rocks” album cover look: “Each of us put together a little scrap board of inspiration, stuff that meant something to us, mixed with some of the old Nudie suits that, like, Gram Parsons, Elvis, all those people wore, and then just handed it over to Fort Lonesome and they brought it to life.”.MARK WYSTRACH, on taking a risk on Midland: “I think the reason we felt strong about this is because we had already gone all in on projects before, on bands and ideas before and failed, so we understood the failure part. I think also this time we felt like something was different, so much so that we were willing to put all the chips on the table.”

MARK WYSTRACH, on the inspiration from classic country music: “The music and my voice, songwriting, all that stuff, so much of that comes from that wide-open songwriting style and performance that came out of that ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s.”CAMERON DUDDY, on his first band: “I played music my whole life, my first band I organized in sixth grade… I think ‘go where no one else is,’ that was my motto always growing up. If everybody played guitar, I needed to play bass. It wasn’t enough to just have, like, a garage band, we needed to book shows, we needed a recording, flyers for the shows, groupies, T-shirts, the whole deal.”

_{Read more from the Music + Film Issue | March 2018}