Hudson Westbrook
713 Music Hall
August 8, 2025
With all due respect to the East Coast/West Coast hip hop beefs, Kid Rock vs. Bud Light, and Drake vs. anybody, the internal rift between country music fans can be as nasty as any of them.
And I’m not even talking about specific artists (Toby Keith and the Chicks, Zac Brown and Luke Brown/Jason Aldean, Florida-Georgia Line acrimoniously splitting up and sparing us any more of their output), but the full-on (virtual) fisticuffs between the pro- and anti-Nashville factions. Cries of “sellout” have been heard since even before Garth Brooks’ stranglehold on country in the 1990s, with fans of traditional/Americana artists deriding “bro country,” and vice versa.
Enter Stephenville’s Hudson Westbrook. Expressing affection for the likes of George Strait and Red Dirt groups like Turnpike Troubadours and the similarly influenced Parker McCollum, Westbrook is about as new as it gets. His debut single “Take It Slow” dropped early in 2024, garnering over two million YouTube views (and prompting him to drop out of Texas Tech). It was followed later that year by a self-titled EP. The album Texas Forever, which he performed in support of last night, was released last month.
Westbrook is 23 years old. Excuse me while my bones crumble into dust.
Texas Forever is undeniably more polished than Westbrook’s EP. And if this current iteration sounds like the dreaded Nashville Machine has gotten its hooks into him, 1) it probably has, and 2) it doesn’t seem like it’ll matter in the long run.
There are reasons for that, unrelated to his gift for a hook or well-received songs like “Two Way Drive,” about commuting between Fort Worth and Lubbock, or “House Again,” an architectural lament for a lost love. He’s a young, good-looking dude who — as is the style of the time — favors a baseball cap over a cowboy hat.
Westbrook naturally played a number of cuts from Texas Forever, including “Funny Seeing You Here” and “Darlin'” (“Sing what you can’t say”), and even though the songs are just over a Scaramucci old, the crowd was pretty locked in. We got there about 10 minutes before opener Grant Gilbert took the stage, and the floor was already packed like sardines.
He and his surprisingly sizable band worked through their set with enthusiasm and good humor, with Westbrook good-naturedly goofing with guitar player Gage McNeeley and fiddle player Silas Clark. The visuals were kept to a minimum (his last name the sole backdrop), with the band switching up places and taking every opportunity to jam downstage.
So many hats.
Photo by Cody Barclay
In case it wasn’t apparent from the packed 713 Music Hall, Westbrook knows how to play the game. He’s as assured a performer at this stage in his career as I’ve seen (it doesn’t hurt that his voice in concert is notably stronger than in recordings). The question is: does he want to give up the crowds to stretch his creative wings a little?
Because the biggest reaction came for established songs like “Dopamine,” “Two Way Drive,” and his cover of Jacob Stelly’s “Johnny Walker.” Don’t get me wrong, the Texas Forever selections landed just fine, and the album debuted in the Billboard Top Ten. But it seems like there should be a finite number of times you can reference whiskey in your songs.
The crowd also showed its approval for covers of Miranda Lambert’s “The House That Built Me” (the two also collaborated on a remix of “House Again”) and Taylor Swift’s “You Belong To Me,” which caused the crowd full of Ariat shirts and big belt buckles to lose their shit in amusing fashion. It was (almost) enough to forgive him shouting out the Rangers and the Cowboys earlier.
Westbrook took a trip through the crowd — after pausing the show to help someone in the pit — during “Dressed Down,” which was also the subject of one of the better selling hats at the merch table. And he closed out with “5 to 9,” his response to the Dolly classic.
Hudson Westbrook’s level of success at this stage in his career is impressive, and further demonstrates the increasing irrelevance of traditional radio and media outlets when it comes to getting acts in front of people. Whatever he does from this point on, his ceiling is indeed high.
What About The Opener? Grant Gilbert, at first blush, couldn’t appear more bro country if you dialed him up in a musical version of Sylvester McMonkey McBean’s machine. There’s a compelling voice there, however, even if — like Westbrook to come — the biggest reaction came for covers of the Fray and Maroon 5.
Personal Bias: None whatsoever. Hadn’t even heard the name until a few months ago.
The Crowd: [nice] with the caveat that there were definitely dudes there that would have no problem lobbing a dildo into an WNBA game.
Overheard In The Crowd: “Someone threw up in my stall.”
Random Notebook Dump: “Gilbert’s guitarist wants to be Neal Schon something awful.”
All shall beer me and despair.
Photo by Cody Barclay