Flatland Cavalry frontman Cleto Cordero has pretty sound advice for Red Dirt bar bands making the sudden leap into theaters and onto festival main stages.
“Keep your ears open whenever you walk on stage,” Cordero tells Rolling Stone. “We have in-ear monitors, and those things change how you’re perceiving reality. Pop them off, experience the room for 30 seconds, and then get to work.”
Cordero, seated on a couch this past weekend in one of the half-dozen or so dressing rooms at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, reflected on the band’s journey to keep his nerves at bay. Mostly, he was talking through how he would approach Flatland’s first-ever performance at the venerable theater Saturday night.
But the Ryman debut felt more like a victory lap for Flatland than something to worry over. Cordero kept every eye in the house on him for nearly two hours, as the band played tracks from their four studio albums, including October’s breakthrough Wandering Star. Kaitlin Butts, Cordero’s wife and duet partner on “A Life Where We Work Out,” surprised him onstage as he sang the song, then hung around for a mid-set ceremony certifying the track as gold — Flatland’s first such honor. When the band closed their set, opener Colby Acuff emerged to trade verses with Cordero on “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” a tribute to Toby Keith.
“No words,” Cordero texted afterward, before thinking better of it and finding a few. “The evening was momentous, surprising, and truly glorious. Performing at the Ryman is everything that everyone says it is: reverential and peculiarly special.”
Flatland is Cordero, drummer Jason Albers, bassist Jonathan Saenz, guitarist Reid Dillon, fiddle player Wesley Hall, and keyboardist Adam Gallegos (who also plays mandolin and banjo). Formed in Lubbock, Texas, in 2012, the band spent most of its career enjoying modest success and a Lone Star State fanbase big enough to make a living, but not big enough to make headlining the Ryman a reality.
Then, in 2022, Flatland’s “Mountain Song” was featured in Yellowstone. The next year, the band found itself opening for Luke Combs at a handful of stadium shows. Now, the 2,362-seat Ryman is too small — Saturday’s show sold out nearly instantly. Cordero, however, feels band and venue were meant for one another.
“We started in a garage,” Cordero says. “I had grown up listening to country radio. It’s a hallmark moment for us to get to the stage where all those songs came from.
“Strange analogy, but it feels like I received a ping like at the end of the movie Iron Giant, right before it all starts coming together,” he continues. “I got my signal way out in west Texas, and it took 31 years, but eventually we found our way home, right here.”
Away from the stage, Cordero is reserved and soft-spoken. Waiting to begin the band’s sound check, he sits in the pews at the Ryman lamenting that Butts — who is in the midst of her own career breakthrough and who at the time was returning from this year’s Outlaw Country Cruise — would miss the show. He discusses an upcoming visit to New York with tepid excitement at the idea of walking down the street without being recognized. When it’s time for this interview, he settles into his seat the way someone might do if there were snakes all over the floor.
Once he takes the stage, however, Cordero carries one of the most dynamic presences in country music. Flatland kicked off their Ryman set with about 90 seconds of the Eagles’ “Heartache Tonight” in which Cordero changed the refrain to “It’s gonna be a party tonight” at the top of his lungs, catching the crowd’s attention before launching into Flatland’s “Oughta See You.” Midway through the show, he told the crowd he gets accused of not being country due to his too-tight pants to set up “Country Is.” He demanded, and received, audience-wide participation during the chorus, which ends with “Country is what country means to you.”
“Every show on this tour so far, they’re really singing along and honing in on the new songs,” Dillon says. “It’s almost a different crowd now. They’re more diverse in what they want. They still like the old stuff, but most of them are just diving into the new stuff.”
Cleto Cordero, singer for Flatland Cavalry, was surprised by his wife Kaitlin Butts at the Ryman in Nashville. Photo: Fernando Garcia*
The band is still flying blind, at least where managing their current breakthrough is concerned. But the members say that a few moments over the last two years have given them a pretty good idea of where they’d like to take their music going forward.
“We did a couple of shows with Willie Nelson last year,” Albers tells Rolling Stone. “It was at these amphitheaters where he was just sitting down with his son. It was more-or-less just a broken-down show with nothing crazy, except there were 10,000 people out there. It felt like a giant campfire, where everyone was just connected. And I just went, ‘I hope we can do something like that.’”
Cordero adds, “Yeah, it would be pretty dope to be 90 years old and still playing Flatland songs.”
The Ryman performance, while high energy, was also heavy on emotion. Acuff’s opening set and “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” cameo came the day after the death of his father, Pat. The Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, native broke down on stage paying tribute to his dad — and left to a standing ovation.
For Flatland, the loudest cheers of the night came when Butts emerged from the wings with a microphone in hand. Cordero was already a verse into “A Life Where We Work Out” when Butts appeared, timing her walkout to the point in the song where she first sings a verse. The roar from the Ryman all but gave away the secret to Cordero before he realized she was in the building.
Butts’ phone had died while on the Outlaw Country Cruise, leaving the couple without any communication for four days leading up to the Flatland show. As artists, they understand this is a price to the breakthroughs they’re both having.
“The words we speak to each other, we hold in our hearts,” Cordero says. “My feeling is like, ‘You’re having a moment like we’re having a moment, but that’s not going to get in the way of us. I want you to fly as high as you can.’”
If Cordero gives off positive vibes when he speaks — and when he smiles onstage — it’s by design. Cordero’s life before music shaped his appreciation for his craft, as well as his determination to foster a community among Flatland’s fans.
“Art sometimes comes from tragic places, sad places, or not beautiful places,” Cordero says.
For him, that was being bullied, an experience that he takes with him today. He vows to not let any Flatland Cavalry fan ever feel that way at their concerts.
“I’d been treated in a way that made me feel unwelcome or unloved. But there was something about songs. When I would share songs with people, it was the exact opposite of that feeling, and that’s worth pursuing,” he says. “When you come to a Flatland show, that’s all we’re trying to do — create community.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author of the 2020 book Red Dirt: Roots Music Born in Oklahoma, Raised in Texas, at Home Anywhere and the 2023 book The Motel Cowboy Show: On the Trail of Mountain Music from Idaho to Texas, and the Side Roads in Between.
