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Born and raised in the small border town of Del Rio, TX, William Beckmann spent his formative years with a radio dial dominated by the sounds of northern Mexico. Though he’d eventually gravitate more towards classic country and American roots, Beckmann’s early immersion in mariachi and Norteño music left an indelible mark, one that would help shape his distinctive style and guide him on his path to becoming one of the most promising young voices in country music today.

“My family has Mexican heritage on both sides,” says Beckmann, “and speaking Spanish around the house was a regular occurrence. All of my friends were Hispanic, too, so when I started learning how to play guitar, I was just naturally singing in Spanish as much as I was in English.”

While Beckmann still slips a bilingual moment or two into his live shows, these days he primarily delivers his evocative, literate tunes in the plainspoken English of Townes Van Zandt or Guy Clark. Writing with an old soul maturity that belies his tender youth, Beckmann crafts rich, detailed character studies fueled by loss and longing, intimate portraits of lonely lovers, big dreamers, and hard drinkers. He sings in a timeless baritone and commands the stage with poise and charm, delivering his seamless blend of vintage country, Americana, and Latin music with a captivating, slow-burning intensity. Take a listen to a track like “Bourbon Whiskey,” which Beckmann wrote at just 19, and it’s easy to see why he’s already managed to catch the attention of elder statesman like Randy Rogers and fellow Del Rio native Radney Foster.

“I met Radney when I was still in high school,” says Beckmann. “I told him I wanted to be a musician, and he said that if I went and wrote 100 songs over the course a year, that he’d take me seriously as a songwriter and help mentor me. I didn’t come from a particularly musical family, so having someone like that in my life was huge.”

Indeed, Beckmann’s family was an agricultural one going back several generations, and while his father and older brother made their living working with cattle, Beckmann always found himself more drawn to singing about cowboys than becoming one. In high school, he started his first band, and in college, he discovered a treasure trove of traditional country music that would change the course of his life forever.

“I remember buying a record player my freshman year and going around to all the great record shops in Austin looking for cheap, used vinyl,” says Beckmann. “I’d stumble onto boxes and boxes of Kenny Rogers, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and George Jones, and the more I listened to that stuff, the more I realized that my voice could do a lot of the same things those guys were doing.”

Beckmann felt an immediate kinship with those old country records, and he began infusing his own writing with the sincerity, simplicity, and visceral emotion they exuded. Whenever he finished a new batch of songs, he’d share them with Foster, whose honest, constructive feedback helped him learn to cut straight to the heart of things as a lyricist.

“Radney taught me how to make every line count,” Beckmann reflects. “He showed me how to really pick things apart and understand the mechanics of songwriting, and I still send him stuff I’m working on to this day.”

After a few years in Austin, Beckmann relocated to Nashville, where he finished college and headed into the studio to record his 2018 debut, Outskirts of Town. Produced in part by Foster, the EP helped earn Beckmann a performance at the Texas Regional Radio Report Music Awards, where his audience included the likes of Randy Rogers and Wade Bowen (who would both eventually invite him on tour), and landed him a publishing deal with Warner Chappell, which led to co-writes with Brent Cobb and William Clark Green, among others.

“I honestly wasn’t even planning to put those songs out at first,” says Beckmann, who now splits his time between Tennessee and Texas. “I booked the sessions more for the experience than anything else, but the recordings ended up sounding great and I’m glad I convinced myself to release them.”

With things heating up, Beckmann decided to launch a new chapter based around a series of singles that would allow him to experiment with different recording techniques and explore the full range of his sound. Working with producer/engineer/multi-instrumentalist Oran Thornton (Angaleena Presley, Adam Hood, Brent Cobb), he began capturing tracks both live with a band at the Sound Emporium in Nashville and a layer-at-a-time with Thornton at his studio in Springfield, MO.

“I found that I really love both approaches for very different reasons,” says Beckmann. “I love nailing those one-take performances with the band and capturing all the energy that comes with it, but there’s also something really rewarding about working on your own and having the time and freedom to take risks and push yourself to new places.”

“Bourbon Whiskey,” the first of the new singles, showcases the old-school live approach, with shuffling drums and languid pedal steel underpinning Beckmann’s Hank Williams-meets-Don Everly delivery. Like much of his material, the song absolutely radiates yearning and heartache, facing down pain and despair as it searches for comfort at the bottom of a bottle. The breezy “In The Dark” grapples with all the unanswered questions that linger when a lover walks out, while the bittersweet “30 Miles” looks back wistfully on a small town romance that was destined to end, and a mesmerizing take on Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire” transports all the lust and despair of the original into a haunting, desert-noir landscape.

“’30 Miles’ and ‘I’m on Fire’ were both tracks that Oran and I built from the ground up at his place in Missouri,” says Beckmann. “We played all the instruments ourselves and just let the songs dictate where they needed to go, which was a really different way of working for me.”

Going forward, Beckmann aims to continue challenging himself and pushing his creative boundaries, with plans to return to the road and to begin recording some of those Spanish language songs he’s carried in his heart since childhood. You can take William Beckmann out of the border town, it seems, but you’ll never take the border town out of him.