He's an artist molded by red dirt, grunge, nostalgia, melody, and the raw spirit of vintage rock. But there's much more beneath the surface of his music. Austin Meade doesn't play dress-up. When he shows up in grease-streaked work clothes, it's because that's what he wears when he's building his bus barn, fixing his house, or chasing his two toddlers around the yard. And when it comes to his music, he delivers songs as unfiltered as a voice memo -- honest and confessional anthems for outsiders about the weird, beautiful chaos of real life. "I don't have time for anybody's bullshit anymore," Meade says. "If I'm not 100% in on something, I move on. I want every song to feel like the coolest thing I've ever done." Raised in small-town Texas by a Baptist preacher dad who took him to see AC/DC, Journey, and Judas Priest, Meade grew up immersed in guitar-driven storytelling across multiple genres. His voice carries that legacy -- soulful, southern, and unmistakable -- even as it swerves between styles. There are echoes of heartland troubadours and Warped Tour vets in his songs. The fusion is uniquely his: rock n' roll urgency delivered with the swagger of a dive-bar poet and the heart of a family man. Meade earned his stripes by grinding it out across the Southwest -- playing solo acoustic gigs in dimly lit restaurants, leading bar bands in a rotating cast of vans, and eventually joining diverse rock and country bills with acts like Sevendust and Treaty Oak Revival. His 2021 breakout album, Black Sheep, served as a rallying cry and a mission statement for him. 2022's Abstract Art of an Unstable Mind incorporated fuzzy guitars, emotional depth, and self-aware cynicism. 2024's Pretty Little Waist EP broke through rock radio with the Top 25 single "BLACKOUT." But it's his latest album, ALMOST FAMOUS, that completes the picture -- an anthemic, personal collection that shows who he is now: a young music veteran with plenty to say and nothing to prove. The album opens with the title track, a loud, loose, and self-deprecating anthem that builds on the persona he crafted long before the Dallas Observer compared his looks to the guy from that movie. The song is unrelated. "I'd be out somewhere and somebody would go, 'Hey, are you Austin Meade -- or do you just look like him?'" he laughs. "So, I started joking, 'Yeah, I'm almost famous.' Then we wrote the song, and it just poured out. It's basically my whole life in three and a half minutes." Unfiltered to the point of hilarious, "ALMOST FAMOUS" skewers music industry ass-kissing, pokes fun at his rising fame, and namechecks everything from his grandma to front porch Bush Light binges. The song's music video roasts clueless record executives. But as always with Meade, the sarcasm is just one layer. Peel it back and there's a deep-running thread of identity, anxiety, and purpose. "My grandma's the only one that knows I'm falling off," he sings, halfway joking, halfway not. "I'm just a white trash, dive bar local favorite." It's funny. It's raw. It's real. That emotional honesty deepens on tracks like "HONEY DO YA" -- a breezy, harmony-soaked love song written with longtime collaborator David Willie and producer Riley Bria. The play on words (from "honey-do list" to "honey, do you want to do this forever?") is classic Meade: heartfelt, clever, and vulnerable. It bridges the gap from his "Happier Alone" era to his current style of songwriting. Throughout Almost Famous, Meade weaves musical and lyrical callbacks to his earlier albums, creating a kind of self-referential songbook. The voicemail from his wife at the end of "SHE LOVES ME NOT" bleeds into the opening of"HONEY DO YA." The ending of "ALMOSTFAMOUS" flows straight into "BAD DAYS," a cathartic rocker about marital squabbles. The album's closing track, "LIKE FATHER LIKE SON," traces a generational through-line from his grandfather to his newborn baby. "I'm trying to build the life I always wanted growing up," he says. "My parents live ten minutes away. My dad helps me fix up the tour bus. I work my ass off so I can make music and still come home to my kids." Meade's work ethic is part of what makes him stand out in a scene crowded with artists chasing trends. As SPIN noted after watching Meade perform at Louder Than Life, he brings an "in-the-moment freedom" to his shows. "You don't know the people five feet from you," he said, "but a lot of times you're singing the same damn song." That shared electricity is what fuels him, from clubs to festivals. For all the labels people have used to try to categorize him -- country, rock, Red Dirt, alternative -- Meade remains mostly uninterested in labels. "I think we're just Southern alternative rock," he shrugs. "Some days we're the country band at a rock fest, some days we're the rock band at a country fest," he says, with a good-natured laugh. "But we always sound like us." There's no affectation. No costume. Just a hard-working songwriter with a beat-up guitar, a sharp tongue, and a big heart. Almost famous? Probably not for much longer.