Jonathan Terrell, Texas Country’s Ultimate Multi-Hyphenate, Fought AI and Won

There are multi-hyphenates, and then there’s Jonathan Terrell. The Texas native is equal parts a singer, songwriter, guitarist, sideman, photographer, and deejay, and, over the last two decades, he’s evolved into an ambassador for Austin’s vital music scene.

When he’s not playing his own shows, he’s talking up the merits of Texas bands like Midland, Silverada, and Shane Smith and the Saints, touring with them, or featuring their talents on his albums, including this year’s sonically adventurous Dove.

“Killers. Guys that you look at and say, ‘There’s some really heavy-hitter motherfuckers on here,’” Terrell tells Rolling Stone of the musical colleagues he’s shared a stage with or who appear on Dove. “I happen to be buddies with people who play a lot better than I do. Being in Austin for 20 years, you make those contacts at some point. These guys would have never played on my record unless we were friends.”

Officially the fifth studio album for Terrell, Dove features a string of A-list musicians and artists joining him to create a mix of folk, funk, rock, and anything else that moved Terrell when he was writing the tunes. Depeche Mode drummer Christian Eigner makes an appearance. Silverada backs Terrell on a track. Jake Lynn, who plays drums for Wyatt Flores, contributed, as did bassist Scott Edgar Lee Jr. of the Texas Gentlemen. Terrell also brought in a series of producers rather than leave the project in just one pair of hands.

The album’s twists and turns were inspired during a moment of introspection while Terrell was touring Europe with Midland (a journey he documented for Rolling Stone in a vivid gallery) and continued as he observed how other major Texas bands perform. He also kept a keen eye on audiences during his DJ gigs — he mans the turntables as “DJ Vegan Leather” — and learned what made them dance.

“A big part of this record was going out and touring with Silverada, Shane Smith, Midland, and watching how the crowd moves,” Terrell says. “There’s a way that people’s bodies naturally want to move when you go to a night club or go to a concert. I’d look at my catalog and realize that I had some holes. I was missing something. There were gaps in the communication that I was having with the audience. I thought I could talk to them better if I built those vehicles of communication. Then, I started writing songs that were based around those rhythms.”
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Listen to the Lone Star rap of “10 on 6,” or “Mona,” which sounds like the-Killers-go-country, for prime examples of the rhythms that Terrell uncovered. Both songs capture an artist unafraid to push the boundaries of country music.

“Born on a Saturday Night,” which opens Dove, is another. The song cooks, thanks to Terrrell’s swaggering drawl of a delivery and his choice to enlist Silverada as the backing band.

“JT had sent me the song a few months prior and we immediately had the same vision for how hardcore honky-tonk it could be on record,” says Mike Harmeier, Silverada’s frontman. “He said he wanted to have the most ‘hot-shit country band in Texas’ on it, so we obliged. I got to co-produce, and we cut it at the studio where we were already [meeting for] bus call. It was the perfect storm.”

But not every piece has lined up so perfectly in Terrell’s career. While his 2020 album Westward helped put him on the map, it also recently resulted in one of his biggest headaches. According to Terrell, the album was incorrectly flagged by Spotify as having its streaming numbers artificially boosted, and TuneCore, the company that brokers music to streaming sites, removed it from all platforms. When Terrell took to social media to voice his frustration over the mistake, he realized he was far from alone — the latest victim of artificial intelligence’s infiltration of the music business.
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“One of my songs got snagged on a bot farm account,” Terrell says. “But when I posted a general ‘Hey, it’ll be back soon,’ post, that’s when I saw literally hundreds of my friends and colleagues chiming in saying that the same thing happened to them.”

Terrell says some never got their music back, were tied up in vacant emails for months, or were so overwhelmed with the process that they gave up and deserted their music altogether.

“This made my blood boil for my music community,” he says. “This community has had my back for over 20 years and seeing them getting pushed around infuriated me to no end.”

Terrell didn’t just leverage social media to make his point. He reached out to contacts at both TuneCore and Spotify and staged an impromptu concert at an Austin bar, which doubled as a discussion of the impact AI is having on streaming and independent artists. He played Westward in its entirety and was joined by a handful of local musicians whose music was impacted the way Terrell’s had been.

TuneCore ultimately restored Westward to streaming services and Terrell created and shared a “how-to” guide aimed at helping artists encountering similar issues.

“We as a community got real loud about it,” Terrell says. “We got pissed about it, and they heard us all the way to the top. I got my album back, but many have not. It’s a small win and TuneCore has kindly reached out personally to resolve the issue since. I don’t see this going away, but I’m glad I went through the steps so I could help other folks in our community resolve this bullshit.

“The streaming services are completely swamped with an extra 50,000 AI uploads a day,” he continues. “It’s like filtering Niagara Falls with a fishing net.”

In that sense, Terrell did for other artists what Midland, Silverada, and others did for him on Dove. He says that’s all he’s really looking for in his career: a sense of community.
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“With my last project, I was leaning into some opportunities that I had,” he says. “Diving into, ‘What is country, and what is not country?’ Why do I give a shit? Let everybody else be as country as they want to be. I started looking at my heroes and going, ‘Would Nick Cave worry about what other people are doing, or would he just go into the studio and go, ‘What is my true voice?’”

Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose book (Almost) Almost Famous will be released April 1 via Back Lounge Publishing.