Wyatt FloresIf you’re trying to figure out Wyatt Flores, you have to start long before the streaming numbers and sold-out rooms, back when he was just a kid watching his dad play drums.
“I think my dad really wanted me to be a drummer, especially as a kid,” Flores says. But while rhythm was in the house, strings had his heart. “What most people don't know is my uncle as well - [dad’s] brother - was a guitar player. So, growing up, what I wanted to be was a lead guitar player, and that has still not worked out for me to this day.”
That dream quietly morphed at 13 when he heard Diamonds & Gasoline by Turnpike Troubadours.
“For some reason, that just switched my entire process on the way I view music. From then on, I've just been more so focused on lyricism and storytelling. That's what really took it all off.”
Fast forward a few years and he’s a week out from his first ever paid bar gig when someone casually tells him he should probably try writing his own songs.
“That night I went home, I sat inside of our barn and I sat on a little radio, and in 30 minutes I wrote Travelin’ Kid. That was the first song I ever released, and from then on it just kept going.”
He didn’t even want to release it. But a friend, Wyatt Baker, started playing it at gigs purely to wind him up.
“He'd start playing my own song just to try and piss me off. It worked. He's like, ‘You have to release this song.’ I'm forever grateful for Wyatt Baker because if it wasn't for him, I would have never tried to even release my own stuff.”
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And as for that first recording? “I recorded that song for $100 inside of a trailer house there in Stillwater, and here we are today in Sydney.” And that is definitely not lost on him.
“I think a lot of times I have to find a moment during the show to take a deep breath and realise where we are and how far the music has gone. I've been telling the fans every single night ‘thank you for getting my music out of the Oklahoma state lines,’ because I never thought that it'd reach this far.”
His 2024 album Welcome to the Plains digs deep into where it all started. After two years trying Nashville on for size, home hit differently.
“There was a time in my life where I moved to Nashville for two years and I started trying to get away from, you know, everything that I ever knew.”
“And now I've traveled the world multiple times and I've come to find out that the only place that I truly want to be at is back home. There's something there that I can't find anywhere else in the world.”
He doesn’t romanticise it either.
“Truthfully it's the people. And that's what that entire album is about is definitely where I come from. It's not beautiful by any means, they call it a flyover state for a reason; but man, you miss so much when you don't go there.”
That transparency runs through everything he writes - even when it scares him.
“Being from Oklahoma and being raised in the Bible Belt, when I released the song I Believe in God, I was honestly scared for my life.” he laughs. He worried people would misread it entirely. “I figured people were going to hear that and go, ‘This song's about the Antichrist’ or something.”
Instead, a fan approached him with: “God does believe in you, brother.” Flores laughs recalling it: “Brother, I promise it's just a song. It was just about a feeling of not being worthy enough for the love that God has… I thought everyone was going to hate me for saying that, and luckily it didn't go that way and everyone kind of caught on.”
Sad songs, though? Those come easy.
“For the most part, I've tried to find a good happy medium of having my sad songs even have tempo, because I like disguising it, I guess.”
“But yeah, sad songs are always like the easier ones to write… the sad ones are always the fun ones to write all day long.”
Except when they’re brutal. Losing Sleep nearly broke him.
“Losing Sleep was one of the toughest ones. I rewrote those verses at least 10 times. The truth of it all behind that song is I never fully told the full truth about that song. Pretty much what happened was there was a girl that I was really into and she ended up going for my best friend… that's betrayal times two.”
And then there’s Australia, which he absolutely did not expect to fall for this hard.
“As soon as we got off the plane, the hospitality y'all gave us is far and above beyond anywhere else we've ever been to. My first time coming here, I was not expecting me to leave feeling that I was going to miss this place.”
So much so that he’s manifesting his return. “The next tour I come on, I'm going to call it The Dual Citizenship Tour. Because seriously, I love playing for Australians more than anyone else in the entire world. I'm not saying that because I'm here, I'm dead serious.”
This current run? The Bucking Bin Chicken Tour, inspired by a mildly traumatic ibis encounter near the Opera House. “I'm not questioning God, I'm just saying what was God thinking giving a bird this long of a beak?”
On stage, Aussie crowds are matching his chaos. “The greatest thing is that they're so down to be singing along with the song that all I have to do is just ask them to sing and they sing it back.”
He’s been running through the crowd during Oh Susannah, watching fans bounce during Don't Want to Say Night, and laughing at the sight from stage. “They kind of look like Mii's… Like the Nintendo Wii.”
And then, just when he thought Australia couldn’t top itself, he got a surprise video from Robert Irwin. “I looked like a teenage girl flopping her feet up on the bed talking to a boy -that's how it made me feel. I fan-girled so hard over that.”
“That was the best day of my life.”
From muddy Oklahoma sunsets to quokkas off Perth and packed Sydney rooms, Wyatt Flores isn’t just touring he’s fully present for each and every bit of it. And if he has his way, that Dual Citizenship Tour might not be a joke for much longer.
