“I feel like this is the moment in that movie, The Shining, you know?” Daniel Allen deadpans. “It’s the door scene. We’ve been chopping at this door for so long, and we finally broke through. ‘Hey! It’s us from Alabama!’”
Allen is the lead singer and co-founder of the Vegabonds, and ostensibly he’s talking about the band’s sixth studio album, Young & Unafraid, out now. But he’s really just enjoying the recent surge in popularity for his band and other artists from his native Alabama.
The Vegabonds were founded in 2009 and quickly forged a fanbase big enough to sustain long-term success. Today, however, the Yellowhammer State has seen a run of artists mixing Southern rock and country rise from the independent ranks to the mainstream. Bands like Red Clay Strays, who once opened for the Vegabonds, and Muscadine Bloodline have axed their way through the door and found mass appeal. His band may be forerunners in this respect, but Allen recognizes that the attention is paying off for all of his Alabama contemporaries.
“The Strays, Taylor Hunnicutt, Them Dirty Roses — we’ve done shows with all of them,” he tells Rolling Stone. “They’re our buddies, and they’re having great moments. I think it’s great, because it puts a spotlight on Alabama. For a long time, it was Oklahoma and Texas, but Alabama is the one having this moment right now. It’s awesome.”
The Vegabonds are Allen, guitarist Richard Forehand, bassist Paul Bruens, keyboardist Beau Cooper, and drummer Bryan Harris. Allen, along with Cooper and Harris, joined Rolling Stone on a video call ahead of their album release and back-to-back shows on the beach at Windjammer in Isle of Palms, South Carolina, to celebrate the record — a 10-track project with music that dates to 2019, and the band’s first since Sinners and Saints in 2021.
Young & Unafraid finds the Vegabonds pushing their music beyond the mix of country and Southern rock that has been the group’s trademark from the outset. This record incorporates elements of blues and soul to several tracks, which Cooper attributes to himself and Forehand studying and adding effects to their live shows and translating that to the studio.
“The first time people hear it, they’re not going to think about every word,” Cooper says. “The second time they hear it, they think about the lyrics. I think all that matters, and I’m a big vibe-feeling person, and the way it all kind of mixes up into one.”
That focus on vibes, Allen says, led to the collaboration that gave Young & Unafraid its musical range.
“I love writing songs,” he says. “That’s my passion. And they usually come out like country tunes. But I’m not married to the music. I’m married to the lyrics. I’ll bring a verse, chorus and bridge to the guys, and sometimes the music works great. Other times, they’ll say, ‘OK, the music is not working, but the song is there.’ That’s when it becomes a full-band collaboration. The music comes in from them.
“We want to put out stuff we believe in, and stuff we can get behind. I went back and looked at these songs, and from a lyric standpoint, a lot of them started six years ago. They’re older songs to me, but they’re brand new to our fans.”
Along with the record, the Vegabonds released a video for one of those older songs, “Where Do You Have to Be Tomorrow.” The tune, which the band delivers as a pop ballad behind Allen’s gravelly, raw vocals, has its roots in the peak of the pandemic.
“During 2020, I was 27 at the time, and being told that you can’t go do this or that,” Cooper recalls. “And I’m thinking to myself, ‘I’m in the prime of my life. I want to adventure.’ So that’s an adventure song.”
After the worst of the pandemic passed, members of the Vegabonds maintained that quest for adventure. Harris says the time at home — most of the band now lives in Nashville, with families or significant others — allowed them to re-prioritize the role of music and touring in their lives. The group formed as a college band at Auburn University, and in the decade that followed, the band found that barnstorming the country and playing with the likes of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Gregg Allman, or Blackberry Smoke was the easiest way to connect with fans. The break in 2020, in retrospect, allowed them to hit reset as the Vegabonds collectively aged out of their 20s.
“We were on the road for a hundred, two hundred dates a year,” Harris says. “But I think that covid actually helped us in that respect. It let us realize that we didn’t have to go out for weeks at a time. We learned we can do the weekend stuff. For me, in my personal life, balanced with the band, this is great. We go out and do three or four shows, and then you get to come home.”
These days, the group is more likely to play 40-50 shows a year, but in major clubs like the Windjammer, Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl, the 40 Watt in Athens, Georgia, or the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. — all of which feature on the Vegabonds’ calendar this year.
“This is year 16 for us,” Allen says. “We’ve nailed down the places we are comfortable in, and we know where our fans are. There’s always the next place, the bigger room, but these are the venues that we collectively love to play in.”
Young & Unafraid should allow the Vegabonds to have that option indefinitely. The band’s best-known song is from 2010 — “Shaky Hands” has more than six million streams. But the music they have released since paints a more accurate picture of the band, and the members view each of their records as a snapshot of a period of time in the group’s history.
For Allen, that holds especially true as the primary songwriter. He says it is the Vegabonds’ record that will sound the most like his biography.
“This record almost plays out like a life story for me,” he says. “This is a Vegabonds record, not a Daniel Allen record, but it’s cool for me to look back and have it take me back to the very first time we got together, up to present day, and everything in between — relationships, broken relationships, sacrifices I’ve made for the band and through the band and in my personal life. It probably is my favorite record we’ve ever put out, because of that.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose latest books, Never Say Never and Red Dirt Unplugged are available via Back Lounge Publishing.
