Photo by Jessina Leonard
Austin Wilson’s path has carried him from the Louisiana oilfields where his dad worked to studies in Illinois and North Carolina, and eventually to Rhode Island, where he now lives. On his sophomore release as Convinced Friend, he turns back toward the place he left behind, writing songs rooted in Louisiana people and landscapes without slipping into nostalgia or caricature. In a recent conversation, Wilson talked about “autofiction,” the gray space his songs inhabit between fact and invention, where the world feels real even as details are reshaped.
Musically, Wilson pairs the sturdy, understated songcraft he admires in writers like Jason Molina and Vic Chestnut with an Asheville-adjacent strain of ’90s alternative rock, alt-country, and Americana associated with artists like MJ Lenderman and Fust. His new album, Nowhere Songs, is his loudest and most collaborative work yet: eight songs recorded live in a room with his full band.
We spoke about growing up in a town most people leave, the influences Wilson shares with many of his peers, and how he thinks about touring while balancing a day job and parenthood.
You grew up in a small town south of New Orleans. When people ask where you’re from, is Louisiana still the answer?
AUSTIN: Yeah, definitely. In terms of culture and where I identify, that’s what I’d say.
What made you one of the only people from your hometown who left?
AUSTIN: In some ways my family encouraged it, I don’t think they thought I’d go as far as I did, but they were like, “Do good in school, you don’t have to live here anymore.” That was very much the narrative. Where I’m from, in a place where pretty much all the work is blue-collar, you get separated pretty early. My dad is super handy, knew how to do a ton of stuff, but for various reasons – family tensions and dynamics, but also because I was identified early on as “the smart kid” – I don’t think he thought it was worth teaching me any of that. So you get kind of siphoned off early. I always thought I’d leave. Looking back, it’s a mixed bag, a mixed blessing. There are parts I miss, or feel separated from. I can go back home, but I’m always going to be looking from the outside in at this point. I’m happy with how my life’s turned out, but it was always kind of a thing.
Has leaving changed how you write about the place?
AUSTIN: It’s made me think more about where I’m from, especially in songwriting. You identify more with something once you’re gone from it, if that makes sense. I want to be honest about my experience, which does contain some of the darker stuff people assume about a place like that, and a lot of the people I know, without exoticizing it too much or going too Southern Gothic with it. But clearly that’s something I’m exploring.
Your songs often read like they’re pulled straight from your life, but you’ve said you don’t think of yourself as an unreliable narrator the way some songwriters describe themselves. How do you see the line between yourself and the characters in your songs?
AUSTIN: I think of it as a fragment of me, a part of me. Songs are where I go to wrestle with certain things in my life, but they don’t fully characterize who I am, or what I care about now, or how I approach the world. A lot of the characters or attitudes in my songs, I wouldn’t personally endorse them but I don’t know that I’d put it fully outside myself. I like the term “autofiction.” It’s a big thing in a lot of contemporary novels, pretty thinly veiled versions of the author, but it’s still fiction; you can fabulate whatever part you want, shape things however you want. That resonates with how I approach songwriting. It’s not pure confessional, “here’s my deepest feelings,” but it’s also not just setting characters on a stage to illustrate something.
So if the album were a book, it would sit between the fiction and nonfiction sections?
AUSTIN: Yeah, I think so. There’s a writer I love, Scott McClanahan, he’s from West Virginia. He’s famous for a book called Crapalachia, which is sort of a memoir, sort of stories about his family, but you’d find it in the fiction section. I resonate with that approach to writing.
Tell me about “Little Life” and “Shrine”. Those were the two songs that stuck with me most on first listen.
AUSTIN: I’ll start with “Little Life,” because sonically, that one kind of kick-started the whole record, it made the world the record lives in. It started as an exercise, at least melodically and sonically. I don’t know how many songwriters talk about recycling, but it started as a recycling of something from a couple years back that just wasn’t working. I started writing it around the same time the band I have now was forming. The first record I basically did myself with my now-drummer, released it, and a band formed out of that. I was really energized by being in a room with a band, that live-wire energy, and sonically that’s where the song comes from: big-hearted, big chords, not shying away from a big finish.
In terms of sonically, the part of that process that was helpful for me is that recycling it radically simplified what the original thing was. This new record is pretty much … there are overdubs, of course, on certain parts … but we recorded it essentially in a day, in a room. Part of the sonic journey of the record was wanting it to be a rock-band record, and to lean into that. Lyrically, it’s one of the more oblique ones. I feel like I have two minor modes of songwriting: some songs are very specific, diving into place, experiences, people’s names. With both “Little Life” and “Shrine,” I leaned back from that a bit, though it’s still writing from that place, that world, the same kind of characters.
“Shrine” is the opposite, actually. It’s the last song that got put on the record, and the most recently written. It’s an eight-song record, so there’s a lot that got left out. I was very intentional about only including what I really wanted, and I was pretty ruthless this time, more than I’ve been in the past. Even though there’s a band around the project, I write pretty much everything myself. That song, though, was far more collaborative in process than some of the others, and I’m really happy with how it turned out.
It’s eight songs, twenty-six minutes. Do you call that an album or an EP?
AUSTIN: It’s an album. I think you can call that an album now. Things keep getting shorter.
This record is louder and more of a full-band effort than your earlier work. What changed?
AUSTIN: Even with the first record, which was pretty much a solo affair with band arrangements, everyone kept using the word “twangy,” and at the time I thought, come on, that’s too easy. There’s one song with pedal steel on the whole record. I thought I was doing something totally different. But with this second record, I’ve owned that more, because I realized I do like playing music like that, and there’s a band around it now. The drummer’s from small-town Rhode Island, the guitar player’s from rural California. They’ve pushed me to just own that part of it, where some of the songs naturally want to go. It’s a much louder record too, which I’m happy about. It’s fun to play live.
There’s a female voice on the record too. That’s part of what makes it stand out.
AUSTIN: Yeah, a friend, Ella, who had a project called Lady Pills for a number of years, relocated here from a Boston band. We toured together in 2024, which is the year we recorded this record. I wanted something else on it. I love her voice, she’s great, she’s from Virginia but lives here now. It was actually something we added after we tracked the songs. When we went in to record, I wasn’t certain there’d be anything like that on there, but it felt like something was missing, so she and I did those parts together and brought it to the studio a couple of months after we’d finished recording.
You’ve said there’s something about place and songwriting that runs deeper than just subject matter for you. Is that still true even now that you don’t live there?
AUSTIN: In my life, if you met me on the street you probably wouldn’t assume I was from the South, but when I sing, it’s pretty obvious. There’s something about place and songwriting where, even if I don’t live there anymore, there’s a symbiotic thing that I tap into when I’m writing in that mode. Whether that’ll be forever, I don’t know, but so far that’s what it is. There’s obviously a big tradition of Southern writing that I feel connected to. I have musical influences, but also plenty of writers I think about when I’m writing songs.
A lot of the songwriters in your lane right now – Fust, Wild Pink, MJ Lenderman – are around the same age, and mostly from the South. Was there something specific you all gravitated toward growing up?
AUSTIN: Wilco’s an obvious one. I definitely had a moment with them. In my small town, the milieu was very pop-punk, mall-hardcore-screamo stuff, and I had my time with that too. But I had a real moment when I saw Wilco at Voodoo Fest in New Orleans, I was probably fourteen or fifteen, right around when Sky Blue Sky came out and Nels Cline was in the band. I saw them play “Impossible Germany” live, and it blew my mind. They weren’t a band anyone I knew listened to. I have friends whose dads listened to them, but that wasn’t my world. And then, Drag City Records, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Smog, Bill Callahan, that world. The other thing I don’t think gets enough credit is Counting Crows. Did you see they covered an MJ Lenderman song? I think there’s a lot more crossover than people give it credit for. If you strip away some of the trappings, some of MJ’s songs could be Counting Crows songs. August and Everything After was a CD in my dad’s car, and I remember hearing “Round Here” at like seven years old and thinking that’s the saddest song I’d ever heard, and it’s so beautiful to me.
Do you have a musical touchstone for becoming a father, something you were thinking about while writing this record?
AUSTIN: Have you ever listened to Hiss Golden Messenger? When we lived in North Carolina, before he went full-time with music, he was actually my wife’s boss at a desk job at Duke. His record Bad Debt, the story behind it is that he wrote those songs right after the birth of his son, recorded on a cassette deck, at home, just guitar, at the kitchen table. It’s a special record to me, really amazing songwriting, and I was definitely thinking about it while writing this record, given the parallel of becoming a dad. The idea that the songs are so simple but so sturdy and powerful, I think songs can be well built the same way a chair is, and that’s something I was thinking about. Sometimes it really is just putting things together and making sure they work. That was a big preoccupation writing this album.
You’ve mentioned Vic Chesnutt and Sparklehorse as influences too. What draws you to that lineage?
AUSTIN: He’s been an influence on me for a while, for sure, same as Sparklehorse. Honestly, it’s the same sphere as Jason Molina of Songs: Ohia, Magnolia Electric Company. They were all kind of in the same zone, and that’s obviously a well this band draws from a lot. One of the last records Vic Chesnutt made before he died is called At the Cut, produced by members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, who were also his backing band. If you haven’t heard it, I really recommend it, it’s always in rotation for me. If you’ve seen him, you know he was in a wheelchair, very frail, with this creaky voice, and his songs are hilarious and dark, everything at once but that record in particular is such a cool pairing of his songs with that huge Godspeed sound.
Is music your full-time thing at this point, or do you have a day job?
AUSTIN: No, not even close, unfortunately, certainly not with having a kid. I was doing academia, decided not to continue, worked in nonprofits and education for a while, and recently started a non-technical role at a software company — I basically teach people how to use HubSpot. I needed daycare money. It’s fully remote, and honestly it’s worked really well alongside music. I feel lucky for that.
How does having a young kid change how you think about touring?
AUSTIN: Convinced Friend’s touring so far has been regional. The nice thing about New England is I can get from Maine or Vermont to Philadelphia pretty quickly. That’s been the touring radius so far. I do want to tour more with this record, we’ve got some release shows coming up. I don’t think having the kid is the barrier so much as needing bandmates who can commit the time. My current bandmates are all my age or older, and they don’t have kids, but they’re just not that into leaving home for long stretches. They’re fine with regional stuff. I’ve been making connections with younger musicians who are more able to tour.
I have a good friend in Connecticut, Dave Scanlon, he’s almost like a session player, used to be a hired gun touring with bands, who has a four-year-old, and right before we had our son, he told me it’s not that you can’t tour once you have a kid, there’s just more logistics, but it’s doable. He said, though, that you kind of don’t want to. And when he said that, my reaction was, no, I’m still going to want to but I get it. You don’t get the time back, and that’s really important to me, it’s a thing in my life that’s brought me more joy than music, which is saying something. So I don’t have any clean answers, but the indie music landscape is quite rough right now, and I have a feeling things are going to tilt more toward DIY, just because of how expensive touring is relative to the return. I want to keep doing it out of the joy of it. I don’t want it to take joy away from other parts of my life but I also want my son to see me pursuing the things I want to pursue.
Last question. I always end interviews the same way. Is there a song that instantly transports you back to a very specific time or place, no matter what?
AUSTIN: Two come to mind. The first is “Metal Heart” by Cat Power, I think it’s off her first record. To me, and probably because of this memory, it’s the most beautiful song ever written. I’m honestly having a hard time talking about it, and I have a hard time listening to it these days, but I have such distinct memories of it playing on the stereo in my bedroom at thirteen or fourteen, during a very sad time in my life. It’s gorgeous. She interpolates the end of “Amazing Grace” into it, “I once was blind, but now I see,” and I have a religious background, so those songs are in my bones too. I picture myself sitting on the carpeted floor of my bedroom with the stereo on.
The other one is “Round Here” by Counting Crows. In that memory, I’m sitting next to my dad in his 2001 Subaru Forester, kind of an out-there car to have in South Louisiana, him driving. I was young, my parents had a rocky marriage, they divorced when I was sixteen, and I was probably too young to know the full extent of it then, but I could tell that song meant a lot to him when he was singing it. I remember the leather of that seat and that song, and that’s probably why, to me, it’s one of the saddest songs ever. It brings back the way my family intersects with it in different ways.
