ABOUT

If anyone knows how to roll with the punches, it’s Travis Roberts. At 24, the Texas songwriter has already battled addiction, buried friends, and been so broke he couldn’t put a roof over his head. Hell, he even joined an underground fight club just to pay for studio time.

“Whoever won the fights took home the lion’s share of the money,” he explains, “but even if you lost, you made something. I lost a lot, but I got what I needed out of it.”

It should be no surprise, then, that Roberts comes out swinging on his blistering debut, Rebel Rose. Recorded with Roberts’ longtime live band, The Willing Few, the album fuses earnest country storytelling with rowdy rock and roll energy as it blurs the lines between roots, punk, folk, and power pop. The writing is raw and visceral here, built on gritty portraits of working-class underdogs just trying to get by, and the performances are nothing short of explosive, propelled by a relentless rhythm section, searing guitars, and infectious melodic hooks. The result is an exhilarating album that defies easy categorization, an alternately bruising and triumphant reflection on growing up, getting clean, and giving it your all from an artist who’s taken more than his fair share of hits.

“Everybody thinks they want to be a badass,” Roberts muses, “but it takes clarity to know that the badass thing is showing up to your 9 to 5 without having to put on cheap body spray to mask the smell of the night before. Badass is being there for your kids. Badass is hugging your dad. It’s not saying, ‘Fuck everything.’ It’s saying, ‘Fuck the things that don’t matter,’ and then standing up for the things that do.”

Born into a military family stationed in South Korea, Roberts moved frequently as a child before eventually landing in Amarillo, Texas, where he spent most of his formative years. On Sundays, he sang hymns in church, and the rest of the week, he listened to George Strait, Waylon Jennings, and whatever country music he could find on the radio. When his parents split up, Roberts headed to Tennessee with his dad, where he learned to play guitar and had his first brushes with punk music, which utterly captivated him.

“After that, I remember visiting my mom back in Texas and she had a copy of Steve Earle’s Copperhead Road in the car,” Roberts recalls. “I couldn’t believe it. It was this perfect blend of everything I loved, and suddenly I realized there were other people out there who cared about the same things I cared about.”

Roberts was running into more and more trouble in Tennessee, though. He began drinking and using drugs, his grades started to deteriorate, and soon his personal life was spiraling out of control. In the face of rising tensions with his father, Roberts moved back to Texas to live with his mother, but his descent only intensified there, even as he drifted in and out of twelve step programs.

“My family saw that I was going off the rails and they finally had to have an intervention,” he explains. “I went to a treatment center in Houston, and that’s where I started to get my feet underneath me a little bit.”

Roberts had been writing songs and performing regularly in local bars up to that point, which made breaking the link between music and alcohol more difficult—and more rewarding—than he’d ever expected.

“I didn’t know how to be a musician without getting loaded,” he reflects. “They had a guitar in the treatment center, though, and when I started picking it up, that’s when I really learned how to write the kind of songs I’d always wanted to write.”

Newly sober and without a cent to his name, Roberts moved in with his grandmother, who gave him a place to stay while he picked up the pieces of his life. He took work painting houses and restoring old furniture until he could afford a place of his own. It was around this time that Roberts also began fighting on the side in order to earn enough money to record his songs, which had caught the attention of fellow Texas artist Dalton Domino, who stepped in to help mentor and briefly manage him as well.

“I knew Dalton as a songwriter first,” Roberts says, “and it still dumbfounds me that he wanted to work with me. We started saving up, and once we’d scraped together enough money, we headed out to Arizona to record.”

Roberts and his band tackled the majority of the album live in the studio, bottling the fierce energy of their live set into taut, electrifying takes under the guidance of Domino and fellow co-producers PH Naffah and Jeff Nusby-Breault.

“Me and the band cut our teeth playing dive bars around Texas, but we’re not honky-tonk and we’re not country,” Roberts explains. “We’re just a bunch of guys who still believe that rock and roll can save your soul.”

That near-religious fervor is plain to hear on Rebel Rose, which opens with the anthemic “Bellemarie.” Built on slamming drums and roaring baritone guitars, the track calls out to a woman hopelessly lost between fantasy and reality, not because she doesn’t know any better, but because she doesn’t want to know any better. Like many of the characters on Rebel Rose, she’s her own worst enemy, a sincere, goodhearted woman tripped up by some combination of naivete and willful ignorance. The narrator of the raucous “Ink Ain’t Dry” owns up to his mistakes in a search for something more than the superficial Sunday School crowd has to offer, while the singer of the aching “Arapahoe” (penned by Roberts’ friend Rhett Uhland) ponders his role in generations of family dysfunction, and the voice of the rousing title track offers a gentle hand to a wayward soul straying down a dangerous path, asking, “My dear Rosie, aren’t you tired of being a rebel?”

“Some of that song is my story, some of it is family and friends, but at the end of the day, it’s everything I wanted to say with this album,” Roberts explains. “Screw being a rebel. When you’ve been through Hell, sometimes all you want to be is normal.”

The quest for some kind of normalcy is one that Roberts’ characters pursue throughout the record. The spare “All My Friends” tries to find some kind of peace and comfort in the wake of overwhelming loss (two of Roberts’ friends from treatment died of overdoses in the same year); the rip-roaring “Hereford Blues” (written with Ray Wylie Hubbard) dreams of nothing more than making it home before the world comes tumbling down; and the ferocious “Minefields” desperately tries to stay one step ahead of a tumultuous past. But it’s ultimately the album’s love songs—the tender “Kudzu” and soulful “Fake Magnolias”—that come closest to transcendence, surrendering to the power of intimacy and embracing the security of faith and commitment in the face of chaos and instability.

“I think love is learned the hard way,” Roberts reflects. “I think it’s earned the hard way, too.”

Every fighter knows, it doesn’t matter how many times you get knocked down. All that matters is how many times you get back up.