Music in the air

This is a family home; see the kids’ sneakers lined up on the step. This is an easy-like Sunday morning home; see the rocking chairs and cushions on the porch. Inside, this is a poet’s home; the walls are lined from floor to ceiling with books. This is a musician’s home; guitars and music are part of the décor. This is a pilot’s home; framed photographs of family members and their airplanes are on the shelves.

“I grew up around pilots,” says singer/songwriter Drew Holcomb. “My great grandfather was a pilot in World War I. He died in an accident in a Lancaster when my grandmother was five. My great grandmother lived five doors down the street from us with my grandmother, so I grew up hearing stories about him and seeing photos of him. She loved to talk about her beloved Chuck, much of it was aviation related. And on my father’s side, my grandfather flew in World War II. My mom had a cousin who was a pilot and took me up when I was young. It’s in the blood.”

Shine Like Lightning

“Even when the rain pours down

Even when the light seems like it’s fading

Even when your heart aches,

feels like it’s gonna break

That’s when you sing out loud.”

Holcomb learned to fly in college. He’d considered the Naval Academy as his grandfather had flown in the U.S. Navy, but when he was offered a scholarship to the University of Tennessee, his father said he’d pay for flying lessons if Holcomb took the scholarship. He did.

“In the spring of my freshman year I started taking lessons at Island Home Airport in Knoxville,” he says. “I got pretty hooked. I flew for three or four years pretty intentionally. Around that same time, I started my music career and I just ran out of money. I stopped flying altogether after around 180 to 200 hours.”

He had played guitar since he was 12 years old and played in church. But the death of his younger brother pushed music to the forefront.

“Music helped me put a frame around that grief. I was listening to a lot of Van Morrison, Bob Dylan….Music really carried me through that season, and that’s when I started toying with writing songs,” he says. “In my junior year, I studied abroad in Scotland, took my guitar, and ended up playing guitar for two or three hours every day because I really didn’t know anybody in the place.”

He also started writing songs. His career plan was to study history and write travel and history books.

“My friends were like, hey, these songs are kind of good, you should give it a try. So, I thought I’ll just take a year off after I graduate and try this music thing. That was 22 years ago. I just never looked back.”

He took a 15-year hiatus from flying, mainly for financial reasons.

“I was on the road 200 days a year. I put 360,000 miles on a Volvo station wagon in three and a half years, playing five nights a week at coffee shops, college campuses, bars, playing covers, playing my own songs. I’ve always been a bootstrapped, independent artist. There wasn’t a lot of resources for flying for many years.”

Find Your People

“In a world of strangers, you don’t know who to trust

All you see is danger, trying to find what you lost

You can’t go it alone, everybody needs help

You got to find your people then you’ll find yourself.”

If you are thinking I’ve never heard of this guy, you’ll be surprised then to learn that Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors performed his song Find Your People in a Super Bowl commercial, Live Forever was the theme song for the TV show House, and What Can I Do Without You was in the show How I Met Your Mother.

If you look online, you’ll see the music described as “Americana” or “Alternative Country.” There’s a lot of soul in the words and a lot of joy in the tunes.

“It’s kind of folk rock. It’s country adjacent, but it’s more Tom Petty, less George Jones. It’s storyteller, songwriter music,” Holcomb says.

“My brother passed away suddenly, unexpectedly. I think it gave me a sort of old-soul perspective. It colored my creativity and my music. I have a lot of gratitude for my life and that spills out in my music. I think there’s a lot of things that are really beautiful and wonderful, and my music tends to reflect that.”

The band is called “The Neighbors” because that is how Holcomb has come to think of the musicians he plays with, two of whom have been with him from the band’s beginning in 2005. And Ellie, the woman he met in college and became his wife, is a singer and songwriter with him, too. The couple recently released their own album, Memory Bank.

“The two who have been with me forever are Nathan Dugger from Memphis who plays the guitar—he can play anything and is the musical director—and Rich Brinsfield plays the bass. Then, we have Will Sayles from Dallas is the drummer, and Ian Miller is the keys player,” he says.

Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors play venues such as Chicago’s House of Blues, festivals like the Mississippi River Festival, and perform city-to-city tours each year. Holcomb often flies one of the two Cirrus aircraft (both a SR20 and SR22) he owns in a partnership with 11 other pilots to his concerts, but the band also has a tour bus and trailer. He now has more than 670 hours, 433 of those in the Cirrus aircraft in the partnership.

“We’re not a household name and that’s by design,” he says. “The music I write and perform and that I love doesn’t have a mainstream radio culture like if I was a ‘country’ singer or ‘pop’ singer. We’re in the hustle category where we make a good living. We get to do a lot of really wonderful things.”

Family

“Family, all in this together

Family, we’re taking a chance

Family, like birds of a feather

Family, kick off your shoes and dance.”

Now you’ll know his name: This thumping song is featured on a Ford F-150 commercial that first aired during Super Bowl 2022. As soon as you hear it, you’ll get it. Family is one of the many songs that really gets Holcomb’s fans up and on their feet.

“A lot of people will know our songs but not know who it is,” he says. “Then we start playing and like, oh, yeah.”

As his fortunes changed, so did his desire to fly again.

“I still had some friends I would go up with now and then, and I’d been telling my wife that I really wanted to get back into flying. I think she always thought I was just talking,” he says. “But then COVID hit, all of our shows were canceled, and I had a lot of time on my hands. I was doing a podcast with a guy who told me he was in a partnership with a group of guys that own two Cirrus aircraft. The airplane we flew here today is part of that partnership. The last four or five years, I’ve been flying 100-plus hours a year. I think that long break made me realize how special it is to get to fly. I also have a lot more to lose now than when I was flying as a 20-year-old. There’s a lot of reasons to take it very seriously.”

He flies one of the two Cirrus airplanes more than most in the partnership, flying his family of five on trips, for the pure pleasure of it, and to his concerts.

“I can play a show and be home by noon. Flying for me allows me to hang out with my kids in the morning, play the show, fly back,” he says. “All my kids like to fly with me, and my wife flies with me as well. She likes the Cirrus. She has a lot of peace of mind with the Cirrus.”

He has written several songs about flying because, he says, flying is like magic.

“One of my favorite ways to fly is slow and low over rivers. I love to just fly like 70 knots, find a river, and follow it. The first line of my song Troubles is I want to float like a bird, slow and low….”

As we follow the Mississippi River on our way to his concert, he starts to sing from Troubles, which he wrote after the Uvalde shootings, his voice raw and accompanied only by the hum of the airplane’s engine: “I want to float like a bird, slow and low, I want to follow the river wherever it goes, I want the wheels of time to jump the track, I want to leave all my troubles and not look back.”

It is a moment.

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drewholcomb.com