With neotrad sounds and Urban Cowboy revivalists dominating country music, Midland reveal themselves as trendsetters on new album Stages

Mark Wystrach of Midland refuses to accept the fact that he once owned overalls. “Nope, not me,” he says, seated on a velvet couch in a mysterious secret wing of Garth Brooks’ Nashville bar, Friends in Low Places, his feet kicked up on the coffee table. Today, he’s wearing jeans, a striped pearl snap, and a hat, but I remind him that, last time we met up around the release of their second album Let It Roll, there was a mustache, a mullet, and most definitely a pair of overalls.

He still denies it. Am I sure?

“You had overalls on when you played fucking Kimmel, dude,” his bandmate/bassist Cameron Duddy says. He’s tucked next to Wystrach on the couch with more than a few of his shirt buttons undone. Wystrach eventually concedes: Turns out, there is photographic proof. “Regrets, I’ve had a few,” he sings, before he, Duddy, and guitarist Jess Carson devolve into a conversation about the merits and comfort levels of various styles of overalls. Wystrach turns my way and says, with a dead straight face, “You getting all this?”

Over the past 12 years as a band, Midland have made only a couple of questionable fashion choices. They’ve made plenty of generally questionable life choices, as bands thrust into the limelight tend to do. Many of them involved alcohol. Out the window facing Lower Broadway, Duddy looks down at the famous honky-tonk they once got kicked out of (Robert’s Western World) for circumstances (intoxication, unnamed bandmember falling backwards off a stool, and something Duddy said to a bartender) that they refuse to repeat “until the statute of limitations is up.”

These days, they’re in a reflective, slightly more demure mode. Besides, Duddy says, “We can’t afford rehab.” They’re fathers, husbands, business owners, and bandmates who Wystrach insists have been through the wringer and almost broken up a couple of times (Duddy disagrees: “Mark is just a sensitive soul and feels everything”). And now, with neotrad sounds and Urban Cowboy revivalists dominating country music, they’re also true trendsetters.

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Midland’s newest album, Stages, takes stock of the legacy they’ve built, but also the legacies that built them — key influence and tourmate Clint Black is featured on “Up in Texas,” and the lead single “Marlboro Man” was co-written by Country Music Hall of Fame member Dean Dillon. The album spins dancehall, fiddle-propelled shuffles and classic Midland drinkin’ (and thinkin’) tunes into a fully realized version of the trio, without losing the band’s signature country chaos.

Midland are in Nashville from Texas (Duddy and Carson) and Colorado (Wystrach) for CMA Fest, where they just played a tiny stage on the rooftop of Brooks’ venue, inexplicably introduced by a cast member of Love Island. There were various other Love Island and Summer House stars present, for reasons not explained, all mostly wearing yellow, also for reasons not explained. This is just how Midland seem to roll. Friends of Wystrach’s mother-in-law, in from Vancouver, took video from the VIP area, while George Foreman Jr. tapped along. One of the sons of the boxing legend has become friends with the band, and even lent them a horse for the cover of Stages. 

When they finish the set with 2017’s hit “Drinkin’ Problem,” their first country single, everyone hollers along. The song feels like both a classic and completely on trend next to the smooth twang of Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas.” If the song were released today, it isn’t crazy to think that it, too, could have crossed over to the Hot 100. In fact, a strong argument can be made that Midland had to walk (in overalls, debatably) so that songs like “Choosin’ Texas” could run.

But when Midland first rolled into Nashville, a neotrad revival on Music Row seemed unlikely. Clad in Nudie suits, Stetson hats, and plenty of tongue-in-cheek cowboy glamor, the trio was repeatedly warned that the tones and aesthetic of Eighties Texas country wasn’t on pace with where the genre was going in the mainstream. “We knew it was going to be an uphill battle,” Duddy says. “We recognized that when we first came out with ‘Drinkin’ Problem,’ that a band out of Texas was going to have a hard time having a hit.”

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It was at a CMA Awards party in 2015 when they realized there might be a place for them in the evolving country scene, thanks to a certain famous duet between Justin Timberlake and Chris Stapleton. “I’ll never forget, just as they were playing, someone turned to us and goes, ‘That just changed you guys’ life,’” Duddy says. “Because Chris was doing something that was traditional-adjacent.”

Their first album, On the Rocks, debuted at Number Two on the Billboard Country Albums chart, and though they never managed to make a big radio dent after “Drinkin’ Problem,” Midland built a reputation as a live band that is as musically solid as they are fun to watch. The group’s schtick, showmanship, and penchant for casual bedlam is part of the package. “That element of fun has got to be there,” Carson says. “People want to be entertained. They work hard to buy that ticket.”

“We’re very serious about what we do, but the way that we’re able to handle the pressure, and the workload, is by not taking ourselves seriously,” adds Wystrach.

Stages is meant to have a double meaning, nodding to both the stages they’ve played, and the stages in life they’ve tumbled through. Produced by Trent Willmon (Cody Johnson), it’s both a distillation of the Midland Texas country sound and an expansion, thanks in part to fiddle playing from five-time CMA Musician of the Year, Jenee Fleenor. And, for the first time, almost half of the songs are outside cuts. All the members of Midland are writers, but there’s a reason for recording songs they didn’t write: Finally, what’s coming out of Music Row is a natural fit for the band.

“For years, we weren’t hearing any songs that sounded like us,” Duddy says. “And now that’s shifted. We’re hearing material for consideration and going, ‘Holy shit, that sounds like Midland!’”

The secret to that Midland sound is that the band was never trying to engage in Western cosplay — there’s always an element of kitsch, humor, and modernism to what they do. “We’re not interested in pretending it’s 1989 and we don’t have cell phones or whatever,” Carson says. “It can be vintage inspired, but it’s also got to be something new.”

“You have to iterate,” adds Duddy. “Otherwise, you’re a fucking fake. If Dire Straits didn’t come with that cool shit, he would have just been a Bob Dylan impersonator, you know what I mean?”

It seems almost quaint that Midland themselves were once part of their own “authenticity” debate. In the eyes of some self-proclaimed purists, they hadn’t put in enough miles to be considered a true Texas road band, or were maybe too glamorous to be “real” country. Now, careers are launched on TikTok by singers who have spent nary a night on a stage, and AI can create entire artists at the push of one button, all while the sound that has always defined Midland fills country radio airwaves. 

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“We recognize that there were generations before us doing the things that we looked to, and were inspired by,” Duddy says, shaking his beer can to confirm that is it, indeed, running empty. “But we are really excited to see people who are trad-influenced, like Parker McCollum, Carter Faith, Flatland Cavalry, we could go on. If they had seen this all through our eyes, when we first showed up in cowboy hats 12 years ago — well,  it was a much more intimidating prospect.”

And now, Duddy has started to get a little bit squirrelly. Their friends are waiting, somewhere down the hall of Brooks’ mysterious VIP wing. “Look, we love everything we do. We have fun. We joke around. We take outside songs. We have a reverence for Nashville. We’re authentic Texas. We love our families,” he says. “Literally, we are impenetrable.”