“You see a really quick rise, and a lot of people don’t see that you came from nothing to a hundred real quick,” Hudson Westbrook says. He’s speaking from experience.
A little more than a year ago, Westbrook was just another student at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, working cattle in his downtime. He’d dabbled in music since he was a teenager in Stephenville, the town heavy on cowboys and rodeo west of Fort Worth where he was raised, and he’d been experimenting with songwriting for roughly a year. One viral hit in the summer of 2024, followed by a Billboard Top 30 country and Hot 100 single last fall, and Westbrook is on the cusp of bona fide country music stardom.
His 17-track debut album, Texas Forever — announced on Friday and due out July 25 — may well push Westbrook off that cusp. But, at only 20, he’s doing all he can to keep his career blow-up in perspective on the album.
“I took all my songs from last year,” Westbrook tells Rolling Stone, “and I went, ‘Hey, these are songs about where I am at right now.’ I want this record to be where Hudson is at this point in time. That’s the best way to describe an album — a point in time.”
He is banking on that point in time being enough to parlay his demographic of college-aged country fans into a sustained fanbase. At a time when the artists experiencing similar rises are either teenagers — Ty Myers, Bayker Blankenship, and Maddox Batson — or in their post-college 20s — Zach Top, Wyatt Flores, and Dylan Gossett — Westbrook has managed to pull the best of both worlds into his orbit. His support shows in May at the youth-skewed Calf Fry Festival in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and the older-focused Lone Star Smokeout in Arlington, Texas, were among the best-attended sets of each festival.
He’s also banking on learning the ropes of both performing and fame as he goes.
“The first time I stood onstage, my legs were shaking,” Westbrook says. “I was nervous as hell. But the more that I do it, and the more that I am myself, the more people are gonna love all this. At the same time, I’ve also learned that it’s not mentally stable for me to sit here and try to please other people. So, I do my best to try to be myself as much as possible onstage and through my songs.
“But, now, if you go to the grocery store, and Hudson bumps into your cart and doesn’t say ‘excuse me’ or says ‘screw you’ or something worse, and someone takes a video of it — you’re done. That’s the part that’s not fun.”
Being from Texas, Westbrook sports a powerful roster of musical influences to help him manage.
“The main reason I love music, really, was Cross Canadian Ragweed. And I listened to Parker [McCollum]. I listened to Koe [Wetzel]. Stoney LaRue, Randy Rogers — all those dudes. I was breaking cattle in college, but going all the way back to when I was a little kid, I just had a bone in my body meant for music. I didn’t say anything about it, and I never really told my mom that I wanted to learn guitar, but they knew I loved listening to music. So, when I got my Parker on or my Koe on or my Ragweed ‘17’ on, don’t talk to me.”
McCollum ended up being more than an influence. The viral song that started it all for Westbrook was “Take It Slow,” which he put out on social media in May 2024. Nearly immediately, the comment sections were filled with comparisons to McCollum. This is mostly because the two lanky, blond Texans could be dead ringers for one another.
“Even though I listened to these influences, I found that my sound, naturally, has veered so far away from them,” he says. “People compare me to Parker, and I get it, because I have blond hair and blue eyes, and you want to connect something to it, but it’s also not how I sound.”
This is evident on Texas Forever, where Westbrook’s natural baritone is delivered with a twang that echoes George Strait much more than it does the range of McCollum. The album’s 17 tracks are all written or co-written by Westbrook, including a fresh version of his Top 40 country radio single, “House Again,” which has already been certified gold since its release last fall. The songwriting is straightforward, often incorporating Gen-Z slang prominently.
“On this album, there’s a cool trend that’s been going on,” he says. “We’ve used titles that are everyday sayings, like ‘Funny Seeing You Here’ or ‘Good Taste in Whiskey’ — things that people always say that you might think are clever or whatever. So, I took my age and my demographic’s slang — and just natural sayings — and used them for song titles. That’s the stuff I’ve related to. ‘I’ve been living rent-free in your head’ is a song title, to me.
“I love a good melody and a catchy melody. I hate writing from the hook. I hate having to get that first and then going through the rest of the song. I’d rather let the song go where it wants to go. ‘House Again’ was written in an hour. ‘Five to Nine’ was written in 12 hours.”
Before becoming a country singer, Hudson Westbrook worked cattle and attended Texas Tech in Lubbock. Photo: Ian Noh*
Notably absent from the project is “Take It Slow” — a bold move given the recognition that song has with Westbrook’s fans.
It’s by design. Westbrook appreciates the song for launching his career, but it’s already been overtaken by “House Again” as the must-play song at his concerts.
He feels he’s put better music out in the world, and plans to continue that trend.
“That was such a weird time for me, because so many things had to line up and go perfectly,” Westbrook says of his viral hit. “I met a guy at Guitar Center, and he knew bass, and knew a drummer. The drummer knew a lead player. We all got together, and we went into the studio and recorded ‘Take It Slow.’ My fiddle player, Silas Clark, took a video of it, and I posted it. I woke up one day to ten million views. But I didn’t know or care about a viral moment. As a new artist, I didn’t know what good was or what bad was.”
Pat Fielder, however, knows good or bad like the back of his hand. Based out of Lawrence, Kansas, Fielder is a senior buyer for Mammoth Live — one of the last major independent promotion companies left in the United States. In the wake of “Take It Slow,” Fielder immediately put together a series of shows for Westbrook at small to mid-sized clubs across the Midwest last fall and winter. Nearly as quickly, Fielder and his colleagues found they had underestimated Westbrook’s draw: The shows sold out.
“We put tickets on sale, and after a few days it became obvious that we needed to decide if we were going to let these shows be sellouts or move them into larger venues due to the demand,” Fielder tells Rolling Stone. “We ended up doing a little bit of both. I’m not sure that my bosses believed me that he could sell out the larger venues at first, but that only lasted for a day or two.”
One of the shows Fielder and Mammoth originally booked for Westbrook was at the 900-capacity Granada Theater in Lawrence, Kansas, set for early February. After selling out in the presale, the show got moved to the 2,400-capacity Uptown Theater in Kansas City — which also sold out. Westbrook took the stage at that show in a Kansas City Chiefs jersey with “Sold Out” stitched across the back, and he had another viral moment for covering the Chiefs’ best-known fan, Taylor Swift, during the set.
In hindsight, Fielder says he may have stumbled upon the most concise explanation for Westbrook’s appeal.
“My wife and I had her niece, a senior in college at the time, over for dinner,” he recalls. “She said, ‘All my friends who used to make fun of me for listening to country music are obsessed with Hudson Westbrook now.’”
That may be a lot of brand-new pressure on Westbrook, but he plans to handle it by putting himself in front of as many people as possible. He’ll make his CMA Fest debut this week before launching a full-fledged summer tour on June 7, a tour that includes major Texas shows at Whitewater Amphitheater in New Braunfels and Cook’s Garage in Lubbock.
He also has a run as McCollum’s opener slated for July, for anyone looking to compare the two up close. In fact, that’s where Westbrook will be when Texas Forever is released. If he gets his way, he’ll be in McCollum’s shoes a year from now.
“I want to tour the hell out of it,” Westbrook says of Texas Forever. “The goal is to play stadiums and headline festivals. Keep working my way up, keep getting better — and stay the same person I was the year before.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose fourth book, Never Say Never: Cross Canadian Ragweed, Boys From Oklahoma, and a Red Dirt Comeback Story for the Ages, was released in April via Back Lounge Publishing.