Garrett Boys - Back Home (feat. Steve Earle) EP (2026)

“It’s a funny thing about humility,” songwriter T-Bone Burnett once wrote. “As soon as you know you’re being humble, you’re no longer humble.”

The same is true for authenticity. Essential to great roots music, it works best when it’s felt rather than announced—like hot sauce in a pot of gumbo. The Garrett Boys—brothers Stephen and Russell Garrett, joined by Stephen’s son Carter—are rooted in Overton County, Tennessee, on land their family has worked for generations.

The heart of the album is the title track, which lays out the Garrett Boys’ worldview with uncommon clarity and restraint. Built around creeks, red mud, fishing holes, and a family tree stretching back generations, the song understands heritage not as nostalgia but as responsibility. It moves easily between tenderness and threat—between a grandfather’s gift of a first guitar and an older generation’s readiness to defend what mattered—without tipping into melodrama. Like the best communal storytelling, it isn’t really about one person at all, but about how land, memory, and family shape identity over time.