Lockhart music Archives - KUT & KUTX Studios

When it comes to natural landmarks, Texas is absolutely teeming with them. From meteor craters and sinkholes to canyons, rivers, forests, mountain ranges, lakes, and caverns, our vast landscape offers a ton of variety to make up for those long car rides. And none of that Earth-born beauty could be conserved as well as it has been without the Texas Parks & Wildlife Foundation, who just celebrated the centennial of Texas State Parks last year.

If you missed it, TPWF recently teamed up with KUTX favorite Walker Lukens to produce Texas Wild, a collection of iconic Texas tunes performed by some of the Lone Star’s finest to commemorate that hundred-year legacy of astonishing state parks. That eleven-track vinyl packs a wallop on its own, no doubt, but because everything’s bigger when you’re here, the Texas Wild team just had to make some extra hay for this salute.

So, alongside the KUTX Multimedia Crew, Walker, The Bright Light Social Hour, Shakey Graves, and Jess Williamson took a field trip out to Longhorn Cavern State Park in Burnet to bask in the ancestral acoustics and primal reverb that only an eon-old limestone cave can provide. Their chamber-filling rendition of Daniel Johnston’s “True Love Will Find You In The End” can haunt any home stereo, but to fully immerse yourself in this one-of-a-kind space, you gotta check out the video. Because like witnessing all-star set of stalagmites suddenly come to life, with outward reverence for their surroundings and instruments at the ready, it’s a visual treat that plants you into a truly magical habitat, one you won’t want to leave when the music’s over.

Aside from professional full-timers who can realistically sustain themselves with their craft, it’s easy to assume that musicians are putting all their extracurricular hours towards songwriting, recording, touring, and performing. But of course, musicians are as humans as the rest of us, and will take every bit of recreation they can get.

See: Shane Renfro, who’s floated all across Texas, from Grapeland to Marfa, and even to L.A. before settling back down in the Lone Star State. As the frontman behind our August 2019 Artist of the Month RF Shannon, Renfro’s spent a considerable amount of time here in Austin, but his home base is decidedly a stone’s throw away out in Lockhart. And it turns out that Renfro’s become somewhat of a slugger in recent times. Alongside his fellow Lockhart creatives, Shane Renfro co-founded the Lockhart Sandlot Baseball Club last year, who have since gone on to fundraise for community non-profits, volunteer for political rallies, and even ump local little league games. And yeah, unsurprisingly, between all the clean hits, beer-shotgunning tie breakers, and post-game pizza and BBQ, Lockhart Sandlot’s gone on to release some great collaborative records off the diamond.

Last Friday they knocked ten central Texas-bred tunes right out of the park with Sandlot Season One: Lockhart. If you manage to snag a copy of SSO:L on vinyl, you’ll notice that Renfro is first up to bat on both sides; following this May’s Red Swan in Palmetto, Side B starts off with a demo version of RF Shannon’s “Tangerine Marigold”, and the Side A welcomer “Come On Down” serves as Renfro’s solo streaming debut. Capturing that iconic Texas twang from its first downbeat, “Come On Down” is a grand slam of mellow sounds somewhere between Mac Demarco, T. Rex-era Marc Bolan, and classic country Americana.