NASHVILLE, TENN.- In early February, singer and songwriter Wyatt Flores relaxed on a green room couch in Nashville, Tennessee, before headlining the 1,200-capacity Brooklyn Bowl for the first time. The show had sold out nearly instantly, thanks in part to “Life Lessons,” his seven-song EP filled with raw, emotional country songs that added fuel to the “blowup” — his word for the last year of his career and life.
Flores, now 22, had been playing professionally since age 16 and releasing music since 2021 when his song “Please Don’t Go” caught fire on social media in early 2023. The spare track, written by Flores as a plea to a loved one not to take their life, features a simple fingerpicked guitar arrangement, centering the song on his raw vocals. His emotion resonated with fans, helping Flores stand out among the young, stripped-down singer-songwriters that country music is rapidly embracing.
“I’ve always talked about mental health, and that’s what that song is,” Flores said, “so I made a video explaining it — me sitting there in the studio doing a little acoustic of it. Next thing you know, it just started spinning. I could not believe it. I went from doing lives on TikTok at 2 in the morning, and there’d be 24 people in there. Next thing I know, I’ve got a thousand, then 1,500.”
Suddenly, he found himself included in discussions about the future of country music. The rise left Flores, who had always struggled with anxiety, in a constant state of near panic.
Less than a week after the Nashville show, he broke down during a gig in Kansas City, Missouri, telling the crowd in a lengthy address that he felt numb despite his musical dreams coming true. The next day, his managers made the call to pull him off the road.
“I had to focus on being me, and finding things that I love, and putting myself back into my own skin, honestly,” he said in March, chatting once again on a backstage couch — this one in a tiny green room at Wooly’s, a rock bar in the heart of Des Moines, Iowa. Downstairs, fans at the sold-out venue were filing in for his first club show back. During his break, Flores cut his long hair, and was now wearing it in a mop covering his eyes.
Flores sings with sincerity, and his autobiographical songwriting is often heavy with emotion. Home is his family’s ranch on the outskirts of Stillwater, Oklahoma. Flores is native to the state, with Mexican American heritage. His father, Noe, is a welder, and Flores says if it were not for music, he would be one, too. He often writes about Stillwater and that ranch. He flipped his truck into a ditch barely a mile from the house after a night of drinking, and turned the story into the song “3/13,” a cautionary tale.
Stillwater is a college town and the center of a music scene called Red Dirt, which showcases candid songwriting and simple musical arrangements that evoke Woody Guthrie, one of its inspirations. Noe, a drummer, introduced his son to the Great Divide, one of the area’s flagship bands; Scotte Lester, the group’s guitar player, became a mentor.
“What struck my first chord was sitting around campfires with my dad and Scotte, and listening to Scotte either tell a true story or one that he was making up real quick, and then playing a song that he either knew or was making up as well,” Flores said. “That was my childhood. I was always surrounded by music.”
Flores gave college a try, spending two weeks at the Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology before dropping out to play music full-time — an experience he documented in the upbeat song “Life Lessons.”
When Flores was in middle school, he lost one of his closest friends to suicide. “It hurts you, because one day, they’re gone, and you can’t do nothing about it,” he recalled. “All you have are these leftover conversations.” In August 2023, while he was on tour, his maternal grandfather took his life. After that, Flores began covering the Fray’s “How to Save a Life” during shows, often using the song as a chance to discuss mental health with his audiences.
The track made it onto “Half Life,” his new EP due April 19, as its only cover. Its devastatingly personal title track, written before his grandfather’s death, includes haunting, specific lyrics reminiscing about their time together. Its single “Wish I Could Stay” is about a date Flores had — an evening spent driving around looking at Christmas lights — that he did not want to end. The song is a waltz, heavy on strings and keyboard, with Flores almost screaming the refrain in his pained twang.
Flores’ music is not always dark, but it is true to his life, and message-driven. “I wanted to create something that said, ‘Go chase your dreams. Understand that there’s going to be down spots where you’re going to hit rock bottom,’ ” he said of his “Life Lessons” EP. “But that’s part of it.”
“Half Life,” Flores added, is about understanding that all of that will end one day. He took inspiration from “If We Were Vampires,” a 2017 Jason Isbell song that grappled with the same topic.
“It sounds emo, but it really did open my eyes,” he said, acknowledging he thinks about death a great deal for someone just a year above drinking age. “That’s what I hope it’ll do for other people, too. Go live your life while you can.”
Flores seized his moment in late 2023 when he debuted at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium over two nights, sandwiched between headliner Charles Wesley Godwin and opener Cole Chaney. Godwin, 30, is a West Virginia native whose personal songwriting style is similar to that of Flores, whom he sees as a budding superstar.
“I see the potential for Wyatt to play stadiums,” Godwin said in a phone interview. “For him to already be expressing himself in the way he does, in the songs he composes and his melodies, to connect with people the way he is, the sky is literally the limit for him.”
Flores knows that in order to work up to his future potential, he needs to grapple with his past. When he left the road after his onstage breakdown, one of the first things he did was to seek counseling. His 2020 move from his lifelong home in Oklahoma to Nashville — and a near-constant industry buzz of writing, recording or playing shows — had left him more homesick than he realized. Last summer, his first headlining tour resumed a week after his grandfather’s funeral, leaving Flores with little time to grieve. The cumulative effect, he realized during counseling, amounted to years of pain he had been suppressing.
“Goodness, it opened up a lot of wounds,” he said. “I didn’t even know what I was experiencing was trauma until they told me. I thought I had to be abused, that it had to go that far to be considered trauma.”
Flores spent most of his break at his parents’ home in Oklahoma. He played with his dogs. He hung out with his family. After a few weeks, he picked up a spur-of-the-moment gig at a Stillwater bar called the Salty Bronc. His dad sat in on drums.
When he returned to his own stage in Des Moines, he was recharged. He played for two hours before ending with “West of Tulsa,” a song with a driving beat from “Life Lessons” about a hollow one-night stand that has become his preferred set closer. The packed house sang along: “I just wanna be somebody, oh/We just wanna be somebody, oh.”
Flores walked off first, leaving his band to jam the final few minutes, and brought his two managers in for a group hug.
“I did it!” he yelled. He was back on track.
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If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
