Featured Essay: On Good Looks, Old Guys, and Fandom

by Ryan Jones

There aren’t exact metrics for this sort of thing, but by any you might name—hours spent listening to, shows attended, friends and strangers annoyed with unsolicited recommendations—the Austin, Texas indie outfit Good Looks is my favorite band. This has been true probably since I first saw them—not even them, actually, just a sparsely attended solo set by singer and songwriter Tyler Jordan, which, more on that in a minute—back in the summer of 2023.

By this past January, when I saw them for the 12th time—at a small, rollicking venue in Leeds, England, on a night that ended far too late for a guy in his fifties with a 7 a.m. cross-Atlantic flight to catch—it was no longer a question.

I am still not quite sure how all this happened.

My old Twitter pal Josh Terry is a Chicago-based music writer who a couple of years ago started a terrific music newsletter called No Expectations, the very first edition of which featured his picks for the best albums of 2022. All but a few were new to me, and I tried to give all of them at least a quick listen. Most were pretty quick. The one that stuck was Bummer Year, the debut album by Good Looks, which was released that April. Josh opened his review with the line “Bummer Year floored me the first time I heard it.” Within a week or two, it was the only thing I was listening to.

Even at the time—this was early 2023—I found myself wondering why I liked this record as much as I did. I listened to it all the time. Good Looks—Jordan, guitarist Jake Ames, bassist Harrison Anderson, and drummer Phil Dunne—are four guys in their mid-to-late 30s who make indie rock with classic singer-songwriter and Americana influences, which I realize only barely conveys what they sound like. Jordan writes about relationships—mostly but not always unhappy ones, with women or former bandmates or his mom—and about how much capitalism sucks, and how hard it is to make it as an artist, and why he keeps trying anyway. The songs are honest and thoughtful and occasionally so personal you feel almost guilty singing along. Mostly they’re just really fucking good.

All of this comes through on Bummer Year, and seems like reason enough to love a record. But actually feeling invested in a band, especially when you are As Old As I Am, is different. This is where the narrative comes in. It’s generally helpful for a band to have a compelling backstory. This is a story about four guys who pretty easily could be dead.

Jake Ames more than once. The guitarist, whose singular style puts a weird, wonderful edge on Tyler’s songs, was hit by a car walking out of the band’s album-release show that summer in Austin. He suffered a brain injury and had to relearn how to play, but a quick recovery allowed the band to get on the road that fall. The following summer, in July 2023, they left Austin for a string of Midwest and East Coast dates. I’d been immersed in their music for six months, and I couldn’t wait to see them live.

They were barely out of Texas when their van was rear-ended on the highway and caught fire, leaving them banged up and costing them most of a tour’s worth of merch and equipment. (You can find video of the aftermath on the band’s IG.) While the rest of the band went home to recuperate, Jordan got back on the road, playing the next handful of gigs solo with a borrowed acoustic.

So, yeah. Easy band to root for.

My own narrative is not so interesting, but it’s relevant here. In the summer of ’23, my son had just graduated high school and moved into a college dorm. My daughter’s high school jazz band had a chance to play a handful of festivals in France that July, and my wife chaperoned the trip. Home alone with our dog, I was also a couple of months shy of my 50th birthday. I felt like I needed to do something. Or maybe just that I needed something to do.

And so my midlife crisis was a summer spent driving to see good bands, which is not much of a crisis and also far cheaper and less stupid than a Cybertruck. I made a couple of trips to Pittsburgh, first to see The Smile (aka Two-Fifths of Radiohead Plus a Different Drummer), then Queens of the Stone Age. Both shows were great.

I also made three trips to see Good Looks. The first was in Pittsburgh, at a tiny venue on a hot, muggy July day at the very fun Northside Music Festival. Jordan played solo and the songs sounded great, even if the borrowed guitar wouldn’t stay in tune and there were maybe 20 of us in the crowd. I introduced myself after the show as the guy who’d been cajoling him on Instagram to book a show in my not-exactly-on-the-way-to-anywhere college town. He was polite, and also understandably a little aloof.

Four days later, I saw him in Philly, this time convincing a college friend to join me. It was another solo set in a small room with an even smaller crowd, but I stuck around after and ended up hanging with Jordan and a friend from his hometown who had relocated up north. Everyone was really nice, and it only felt a little weird.

The next night was Baltimore, where the rest of the band had re-joined Jordan. I wasn’t going to miss the chance to finally see them play together. This was at Club 603, a house venue — not the sort of all-ages house show you might be picturing in someone’s cramped basement, but a nice older house in a secluded neighborhood, with probably 40 chairs set up in what I guess was the living room. The sound was a bit of a mess, but the energy was terrific. You could tell they were happy to be playing together again. They killed.

I hung around for a bit after the show and met the rest of the band, all of whom I can happily report are genuinely cool guys; turns out Good Looks is also a good hang. Still, throughout that week, I was mindful of giving the impression that I was some strange, lonely middle-aged dude trying to make friends with the band. Which wasn’t really my intent, but was — the making friends part, anyway — sort of how it turned out? Hanging with the band is a thing you can do when you see them at a bar with 15 other people, or at some guy’s house on the leafy outskirts of the city where they filmed The Wire.

It was in Baltimore that I bought one of the vinyl copies of Bummer Year that they’d salvaged from the burning van. I should mention here that I’m not a huge vinyl guy, but I’ve started buying more in the past couple of years; in my very modest collection, that copy of Bummer Year is obviously a prized possession. I bought a second copy to actually play. The burning-van one is purely a keepsake.

In the year that passed before I saw them again, Good Looks released their second album; my incisive critical take is that Been Here For a While is every bit as good as Bummer Year, and you should dive into both of them. And then they were back on the road, and what the hell else was I going to do but go see them again whenever I got the chance.

Last July, I linked up with my buddy Demetri at a show in Columbus; seeing them live flipped the switch for Demetri, who might care about music more than anyone I know. On their East Coast run in August, I convinced my friend Jake to come out for their show in Brooklyn, and then a night later crashed with my college pal Chad in Jersey before watching them open for some vaguely E Street Band-inspired local act at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park. Two nights after that, I met my buddy Len in Philly for a terrific set at a bar in Fishtown.

By this time, the awkwardness of the previous summer was gone, replaced by a familiarity that meant we could joke about my curious relationship to the band. Jordan said they’d decided I was their sole Deadhead—picture me in the parking lot making grilled cheese sandwiches with no one to sell them to, and how that seemed about right for their band.

A week later, they ended their summer tour with a late-addition gig in my central Pennsylvania college town, a stop that I had successfully annoyed them into booking with a promise to take them to our famous campus creamery, and which made sense only because it was mostly on their drive home from Buffalo. I caught them again in D.C. in October, this time dragging my wife along, then met up again with Demetri, this time in Pittsburgh, for another show there in December.

Not long before, they’d mentioned plans for a quick UK tour in January. I’d been trying to talk myself out of, or maybe into, flying to Liverpool to catch a soccer game at the historic stadium where my team, Everton, plays; it was the club’s final season there before moving into a shiny new ground, and I was itching to get there one last time. Good Looks’ UK run included dates in Manchester and Leeds, both a fairly short train ride from Liverpool, and scheduled for the two nights immediately following Everton’s midweek match.

I mean how could I not.

So it was that I ended up Manchester, linking up with the guys before the show for dinner at a conveyor belt hot-pot place, then hanging after the gig with them and a local music blogger who’s also a huge fan. The next night was Leeds, where I ended up lugging Phil’s cymbal case back to the hotel after the set. (It was nice to feel useful, and it turned out we were staying at the same hotel.) The night ended sometime around 3 a.m. in a noisy bar in the center of Leeds. They were up for another drink; I had to catch a flight.

I was in Austin this spring for a work trip and met up with the guys for Lone Stars and Mexican food, but I don’t know when I’ll see them play again; they’re playing a handful of European dates this summer, but another cross-Atlantic trip is not in my budget. Last month, they announced a deluxe edition of Been Here For a While. I’m counting on a handful of new songs to hold me over.

My family thinks all this is pretty funny, and I can’t argue. I told my 20-year-old son what I was writing about. “It’s kind of cool that you’re so into these guys,” he said. “But it does make me laugh.” I think my 17-year-old daughter feels the same, but a couple of times this spring, when she was walking back and forth between her bedroom and the bathroom in the morning getting ready for school, I heard a Good Looks song pop up on her playlist. She gets it.

Ryan Jones is a writer living in Pennsylvania. You can follow him on Bluesky at @thefarmerjones.bsky.social.