Artist Spotlight - The Garrett Boys

The Garrett Boys’ It Runs Deep searches (“Back Home”) and seeks (the title track) with endless energy (“Who I Am,” “Back to Akron”). We recently spoke singer-songwriter Stephen Garrett about the superlative new album.

“We’re a family band so we’ve been together a while,” Garrett jokes. “Myriad things came into play during COVID times when we were all shut down. We also lost a couple family members during that time, which had us back home a bit.”

Alt. Country Specialty Radio Chart: Describe how It Runs Deep took shape.

Stephen Garrett: We started writing songs that were more personal than we had ever done before. This concept came out: What if we wrote a bunch of songs based on true stories about our family that were passed down? So the record is about home and family history.

Which is the overall lyrical theme.

Yeah. We wrote a song about this property we grew up on that was a part-time farm when we were kids. That got us thinking deeper about deeper things. The songs actually led us here more than us writing songs that came from that place. We were writing songs that made us think deeper about our history and what we wanna be. The songs led the way there for sure.

How long has your family lived there?

My son is the ninth generation to live on this land. Our first decendent to move here, Jacob Garrett, moved here a couple hundred years ago and started acquiring land in Overton County, Tennessee. We took this for granted as kids while we were doing all these chores we hated. Now that we’ve moved away and see it more fondly, we’re like, “I wouldn’t mind doing those chores nowadays.”

What chores? 

Well, we joke now that my son Carter and I are back. A tree falls down across the road in the middle of a storm and we have to go cut it down and move it and we’re like, “Yeah, maybe we did romanticize this a bit (laughs). Maybe we aren’t looking forward to all this work after all.

The title track It Runs Deep fits that theme.

For sure. “It Runs Deep” was the last song we wrote for the record. I had that one bubbling for a while because it seemed important and be a centerpoint for the record. There are basically three concepts in the song. One is about my dad and growing up and fishing on (Dale) Hollow Lake here in Overton County. Also, everything mentioned in that song is real life like the lines about being “deeper than a Carter Creek canyon.” Carter Creek runs across our property down to the lake. There’s a line about “further than the boat dock road.” That’s the road that runs straight through our property. And the song talks about our great grandfather introducing us to music and getting us our first guitars and our grandpa handling some family business because someone was mean to his sister. So, standing up for family is the album’s common throughline for sure.

You either write ficton or nonfiction as a songwriting. Why nonfiction?

Writing about the truth might have been harder at first, but then it gave us rails to run on once we had this concept. The concept was right in front of me the whole time, but I wasn’t sure if it would be that interesting to people. I learned that it was as I started getting older and for us to have a grandfather who felt it important to pass down (the land) to us. We were like, “These songs are so specific to us. Is anybody gonna connect with them?” People did. Our drummer said, “Your music makes me nostalgic for something I have never experienced.” I thought that was astounding.

- Brian T. Atkinson