A dry chill blows through Drew Womack’s lyrics.
Take this slice from “Butterfly” on the Austin musician’s recently released “Sunshine to Rain”:
“Don’t you go letting your guard down now/I’ve got a big appetite/I fight every urge to devour you now/With your beauty maybe I might.”
The urgent melody sweeps along a first-person warning that pairs words like “danger” and “threat,” “instinct” and “alarm.” It sounds like an ominous physical attraction. So it’s surprising to find that Womack wrote the first drafts with his 10-year-old son Maxwell.
“It’s actually about a vegetarian frog,” Womack, 42, admits. “He got bored with it. But I had the melody. Sounds more like a stalker song now.”
Frustrated, he returned to Texas to raise his son with wife Tara Hughes-Womack. And to recover from debilitating back pain only recently relieved after double surgery at a Round Rock hospital.
From his retreat in Lago Vista, Womack has written enough songs to fill five more albums.
If there were any justice in the music business — there rarely is — his Americana rebirth in “Sunshine to Rain” would balloon into a huge hit. It combines tender hooks with darkly tinted stories, including the title song about a drunk whom Womack saw loading her belongings into liquor boxes.
On a bright, warm day on South Congress Avenue, the black-and-silver clad Womack appeared upbeat, curious and anything but a tortured singer-songwriter.
He isn’t short, per se, but he doesn’t tower over the cafe-goers and jokes about his stature on the warm, wise song “The Way Love Rolls.” His salt-and-pepper locks and grizzle look more relaxed and even a little dashing these days.
Despite the angst fused into his writing, Womack seems to have reached peak contentedness.
“Some of my songs are pretty dark because that’s where I go when I’m in a creative place,” he says. “I write for me now. I feel like people enjoy it more if I like it. I have to love it.”
In Brownwood and San Angelo, Womack grew up among a mess of siblings in a blended family. One brother, Tres Womack, is in the music business, while another, Tim Womack, played guitar for the Waco-launched Sons of the Desert, named after a Laurel and Hardy movie.
Raised Southern Baptist, Drew Womack took the ups and downs of childhood in stride.
“I was always the happy kid,” he says. “Always smiling. Kinda quiet. Really extroverted when young, then I grew introverted. At football games and church, I got left behind often. It’s quite the family joke.”
While an easy talker revealing an inner ham, he doesn’t like large crowds. That posed a problem at his first concert after the Sons signed with Epic Records. They opened for Tim McGraw before a crowd of 24,000.
“I had been playing honkytonks and small clubs,” he recalls. “I walk out, the lights go down, the crowd goes wild. It was overwhelming and beautiful at the time.”
Womack’s mother played classical recordings at home. His father sang around the house. His first encounter with a guitar came at age 12.
His oldest brother was given a new instrument for Christmas, which Drew Womack picked up along with an Eagles songbook. He hung out with a San Angelo rock band that rehearsed for hours and hours. Then the lead singer lost his voice.
“He got through two songs,” he says. “So I jumped in. That’s what started it.” He was 14.
Wanting to develop his voice, Womack enrolled in the music program at McLennan Community College, where he appeared in operas.
“My teacher said twang was carrying over into the opera singing,” the tenor says. Channeling Neil Young, Jackson Browne and John Hiatt, Womack also polished his songwriting skills.
“I loved the way they painted a picture that was open for interpretation,” he says. “In Nashville, it tends to be more literal. It relies on a formula. Nashville is a very Thomas Kinkade town. Now, the writers I was blessed to collaborate with in Nashville are unbelievable. My own writing lands somewhere in the middle of literal and abstract. You have to listen a few times to my lyrics before you catch all of it.”
Sons of the Desert started as a five-piece outfit in 1989. After the lead singer left, Womack auditioned for the job. The band, inspired by the likes of Steve Earle, Kevin Welch and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, went from playing weekends to making a career out of music, with Womack doubling as booker and manager.
When a gig in Arlington was canceled the Sons took the offer to fill in at a new Nashville club called the Wild Horse Saloon. They were offered a recording deal the very first day.
After driving all the way from San Angelo and bowling all night because they couldn’t get a hotel room, they rushed from a sound check to a showcase for Sony executives. During the second song, the sound system started blaring.
“We had to stop playing,” he says. “I’m freaking. They were waving us up. We go up there and the say: ‘That’s all right, we heard enough.’ We were so shocked. Finally they stopped talking and said: ‘You do want a record deal, don’t you?’ We just couldn’t comprehend it.”
The Sons enjoyed a good run, hitting the charts and attracting wide attention. What happened next is heartbreakingly familiar to anyone who loves music but not necessarily the music industry.
Personnel at the label moved around. The Sons lost their main benefactors. Womack wrote songs on the side, including Chesney’s first big hit, for other artists.
Then the Sons discovered “Goodbye Earl,” a Dennis Linde song about woman drafting a friend to help kill her abusive husband. The Sons played it regularly in concert and included it on their second Sony record. About that time, the Dixie Chicks were exploding onto the scene.
“We gave them a blessing to record it, too,” Womack says. “According to the label, it was never supposed to be a single for them. But the label knew the Chicks had a record that would sell millions, so they didn’t release our version as a single. We were doing radio and club tours to promote it.”
After several long frustrating weeks, Womack learned while deep sea fishing in Tampa that the label had no intention of releasing the Sons’ version.
The Sons moved over to MCA and recorded another album. One single hit the Top 10. A second album — full of hits for other artists — was never released.
After moving back to Texas, Womack suffered from problems worse that perfidious music industry types.
“I had struggled with back problems ever since I was young,” he says. Womack had spondylolisthesis, a condition in which a crack in a vertebra doesn’t harden, remaining in the cartilage stage. “Mine got so bad, the vertabra above it slipped forward. There was no disc left. A couple of times on stage it felt like it was getting worse.”
The pain increased.
“It was like I was walking around and I was 85 years old,” he says. In 2006, doctors decided on a full body fusion. Over the course of nine hours, surgeons pushed his spine back into place, then inserted perforated dowel rods.
“It worked. But there was a problem with the screws,” he says. “I woke up from surgery and my wife didn’t recognize me, my face was so swollen. And I was in enormous pain.” Turns out one of the screws was rubbing up against the sciatic nerve.
“I wake up two hours later and I was smiling,” he says. “It was the first time in years I wasn’t in pain.”
He was then free to complete “Sunshine to Rain,” his first album in seven years. He retained control over its future.
“We own the album, so if we wanted to license it to a bigger label, we can do that,” he says. One single is already charting, but just about any of the 12 cuts could stand on its own. What defines such a good song?
“If it makes you feel something,” he says. “It might piss you off. It might make you feel good. Ask why something was a big hit — it made a lot of people feel something.”
Correction: A previous version of this post reported incorrectly that Womack wrote “I Hope You Dance.”