Five Highlights From Koe Wetzel’s Rowdy Turn at Billboard’s The Stage at SXSW

On Thursday night (March 13), Billboard’s The Stage at SXSW kicked off in Austin with a fiery set by Texas’s own Koe Wetzel, who is fresh off a five-week No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart with “High Road” with Jessie Murph.

Murph may have been absent from the stage at Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park, but that was the only thing missing from Wetzel’s 17-song set that stretched back to 2016’s Noise Complaint. After playing “Fuss & Fight” from that set, Wetzel shook his head and good-naturedly declared, “We’re taking you back to 2016 with that song. God-d-am, we’re getting old.”

But the audience loved the old stuff as much as the new songs, raising their beers in the air and turning his signature song, “February. 28, 2016— about getting arrested for drunk driving— into a group singalong with Wetzel, who was swilling straight from a tequila bottle, content to let the crowd do the heavy lifting, especially on one of his most famous lines, “Who is sober enough to take me to Taco Bell?”

His songs hit so hard because they are about the messy stuff that real life is made up of: the complicated relationships, the battles with substances, the inner voices that fill our heads. Areas that other singer songwriters may shy away from Wetzel goes toward like a firefighter heading into a burning building.  In Austin, the crowd loved him for it.

Below are five highlights from the evening.

(Coming up at Billboard’s The Stage at SXSW is música Mexicana band Grupo Frontera tonight (March 14) and electronic music superstar John Summit, Saturday (March 15)