Rebellious, outlaw country folk music has always been a hit in the lone star state, from Willie Nelson to Waylon Jennings to Jerry Jeff Walker. Now, folk artist Sam Hodgson is paving his own way in 2026 out of Austin, Texas. Hodgson has given us thought provoking music on the political state of the USA, creating his own modern version of counterculture and outlaw country music and using social media to boost it. “Nothing’s ever really exactly what you imagine it to be,” Hodgson said as he commented on what it’s felt like for his music to take off in the past three months.
I interviewed Hodgson over Zoom at the end of October. He has recently begun to gain a wide audience of 121K followers on Instagram and 104.8K followers on TikTok from his most popular songs, The Coup and Talkin’ WWIII Blues, which are political protest songs against the current state of the USA from the eyes of a democratic Texan. Hodgson’s music is especially important now as political midterms are coming up. “People should go vote!” he said.
Hodgson has written other songs with deeper, more obscure feelings of self expression like Honey I’m Not Sleeping Right, and Wasted. He is also part of Lemongrass, a folk duo with fellow folk artist Taylor Rae, who is from Santa Cruz, California. Hodgson said, “it’s been really nice to have my voice heard by people,” as his music has grown.
Hodgson’s most recent growth spurt over the last three months would not have been made possible without his first political commentary, Talkin’ WWIII Blues, written in June of 2025. He said that was his first song that did well online, and after that, fans were reaching out to him with song requests. He said he had begun to feel like his songs were becoming too reactionary to headlines and that he was becoming “an ambulance chaser,” and “constantly scraping headlines,” so he stopped writing political songs until about three months ago.
“I majored in legal philosophy, and the political stuff didn’t ever leave my brain, I just wasn’t writing about it, and then I realized any time I have a fully formed thought about something, that’s something that’s worth writing a song about. I’ll be having political conversations with my friends and I’ll say something that’s like, ‘okay!’ or they’ll say something and now I have a full idea about something, whether it’s about the 2028 election, or the criminalization of cannabis in Texas, or the laws surrounding bodily autonomy of women in Texas. I had been able to form full opinions on those things, and so writing about them has been made easier. By virtue of not writing reactionary music anymore,” he said.
Hodgson said he also enjoys writing music that is “not about something that you can identify in the first two lines of the song; it’s a little bit of a deeper feeling,” but that he will also always feel compelled to write both types of music. He said he doesn’t “prefer one to the other, they’re just different modes of expression.”
Hodgson said his biggest influences are The Beatles, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and Elliott Smith, as well as his friends. However, for his political songwriting, he has been influenced by Jordan Smart and Jesse Welles, though he tries not to let Welles’ music shape his own too much. He said he enjoys Welles’ music so much that if he let it, it would have a very heavy influence on his song writing. He said,“because I try to keep a good distance from the songs that he’s writing so that I can focus on my own stuff and not copy him, he doesn’t really influence what I do at all.” While he enjoys Welles’ style of songwriting which reacts to headlines, Hodgson prefers to take a different approach to his music.
“If you want to be different, you’ve gotta try to stay in a lane a little bit, [but] he’s great! He’s one of my favorite guys doing this right now. He’s one of the world’s favorite guys doing this right now,” Hodgson said.
Hodgson commented on the behind-the-scenes difficulties he faces while still in the beginning of his career: “Right now, if I wanted to go record an EP with this music, it would still have to be me paying for everything out of pocket, and I was kind of hoping that problem would be solved by now, and in some way I would be able to go in and record this music with a guarantee or something. There’s a lot of different ways that it’s possible, and I’m not saying it won’t happen, it just hasn’t materialized physically yet.” Despite this obstacle, Hodgson is working hard to continue writing and producing music.
You can help support Sam Hodgson by following his Instagram and TikTok @samhodgson14, and you can find him on all streaming platforms.