“We’re pickin’ riffs on an old guitar, workin’ on a brand-new tune,” veteran Austin. TX. rocker Natchet Taylor growls just ten seconds shy of a minute into “Texacana Summer,” a key note in a batch of country-flavored tunes penned for his Americana/Country outfit, Natchet Taylor Band. Putting aside that the song could decimate every other track around it were it played on commercial country radio, that line could serve as his motto going into the new phase of his long, multi-faceted career.
No one knows exactly why Natchet Taylor left Texas. Some say he got weary of the noise, others say he saw something coming. A few whisper he was running from something, or toward something. But what’s certain is this: one day, the man disappeared from Austin, and the next, he was seen tuning a weathered guitar beneath a cracked streetlamp in the El Born quarter of Barcelona.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama and raised in San Antonio, Texas, Taylor was marked early by music. The Stones were his first sermon, preached from the back seat of a Ford Pinto, and the blues quickly followed like baptism in a whiskey river. A gifted kid who taught himself to play keys on his grandmother’s organ and strung together chords like prayers, Taylor was a lifer from the start.
He came up through the ranks of punk and hard rock, earning his stripes fronting Austin’s New Disaster and co-founding Nowherebound, bands that toured the U.S. and Europe with furious heart and swaggering noise. His style? Somewhere between Keith Richards’ guitar grease and Joe Strummer’s rebel soul, dipped in Texas storytelling and lit with a punk rock fuse.
But the myth changed when he crossed the sea.
Landing in the tangled streets of Barcelona, Taylor didn’t come to rest, he came to rise again. He set up camp in the old city’s shadowed veins, in a district soaked in art and rebellion. And it was there, deep in the pulse of Catalunya, that he began the next chapter, quietly at first, like smoke before a fire. Some say he was searching for a new kind of sound, one that could hold all the lives he’s lived: the brawls and ballads, the punk rock dive bars and desert skies, the raucous noise and the serene stillness.
Now, he’s making music that draws from every scar and sunrise. Texas roots, punk attitude, Americana soul; Natchet Taylor carries it all in his voice, which rasps like a busted speaker, crooning like a lonesome mocking bird. His songs don’t pose for the camera. They’ve got blood under their nails and stories to tell.
Don’t ask him why he left. Just listen to what he’s found.