Good Looks Aren’t Going Anywhere

At the Paste Party in East Austin earlier this year, Good Looks were a last-minute fill-in—squeezing their four-piece setup into the indoor space of High Noon on a Thursday afternoon during SXSW week. The band’s drummer, Phil Dunne, actually bartends at High Noon, but it was the first time the Austin natives had ever played at the bar as a group. You’d have never known that, though, as Good Looks packed in the biggest crowd of the day—and on short notice, too, it was a refreshing, kindred moment to watch unfold, as vocalist/rhythm guitarist Tyler Jordan, lead guitarist Jake Ames, Dunne and bassist Harrison Anderson ripped through a 30-minute set that culminated in “If It’s Gone,” the country-rock dynamo that kicks off the band’s newest album, Lived Here For a While. “If it’s gone, say goodbye,” Jordan sang out to the crowd. “Say, ‘Goodbye, it’s nice to know you. Yes, I lived here for a while.’”

Then, at once, Ames shreds a head-splitting guitar solo injected with decades of geographical influence. Good Looks made their debut album, Bummer Year, in a week-and-a-half on a shoe-string budget six years ago and, even though they’ve got a record deal from Keeled Scales and flaunt a wall-to-wall sound that would fit well in 1,000-cap clubs, they’re still a beating-heart bar band from Austin’s DIY mecca. “If the venues are too big, the guys start grumbling,” Jordan laughs. “We definitely feel very at home in a 200-cap room.” Good Looks make tunes full of heartache, fleeting triumphs, socialism and regular stories lived a thousand times over. There’s no reading in-between the lines of Jordan’s lyricism. These guys are do-gooders who’ve found peace, who follow their own compass but stop to give other folks directions along the way. It’s a rock ‘n’ roll soul that evokes a bygone, still-coveted era in the Lonestar State’s history, a moment in time now replaced by gentrifiers and a military-backed music festival.

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If you’ve driven around Austin during SXSW week recently, then you might also agree that it’s hard to feel anything but bummed out during it—especially when you see what the festival’s presence does to the city’s homeless population, how it exiles those people into already-impoverished neighborhoods. And, when something like that is done while thousands of Platinum badge-wearing, well-off festival-goers from all parts of the world are in such close proximity, it cheapens the whole vibe. And thus, “I lived here for a while” is a statement that holds more weight than Good Looks’ roaring, anthemic rock meddle might initially let on. Jordan recently ditched his longtime home in Austin for Lockhart, 14,000-person city 45 minutes south. There’s a song on Lived Here For a While called “White Out” that leans into this unsettling truth that the city of Austin shows no desire to nurture neighborhood growth and excuses their ignorance as being a product of a tragic, spiraling property market. Jordan zeroes in on joggers casing the streets with their dogs, Tesla tax breaks, Whole Foods trends and farm house mark-ups. “What the fuck is a job creator? They’re just stealing our labor. This used to be a Black neighborhood, more density on paper’s good,” Jordan cries out through a vocal draw, as the band revels in a brash, chunky garage arrangement behind him. “They’re whiting out a Black neighborhood.”

“[‘White Out’] came from sitting on my porch and [watching the city] put up eight houses on three lots, all matching, right across the street. I lived in Austin for 17 years, I saw a lot of change and I felt so frustrated—because in Austin, and a lot of other cities, Black and Brown people were pushed across town through policies, through redlining,” Jordan tells me over Zoom, from his apartment in Lockhart. “In Austin—in the freedmen town of Clarksville—they cut off services to Black people to get them to move to the other side of the city. And, as gentrification happens, the city ignores it because they have no incentive to fix it. The property values rise, and the taxes are tied to the property value. It makes you sick to watch these descendants of folks that were forced to be over here now get forced out. It was pretty dark over there.”

Likewise, “White Out” segues into “Vultures,” a slow-burn lament of the way the world treats low-income housing. “We sleep or sell most of our time until we finally die,” Jordan hums, as he reckons with land developers buying up trailer parks and raising rent costs on poor families who don’t own property. The two songs were written close together and serve as good measurements for how far Jordan has come as a songwriter. “One thing that happened unintentionally, after going through the pandemic, was my writing got a lot more focused,” he explains. “‘Bummer Year’ and ‘First Crossing,’ those songs are political, but they’re also wrapped up in other things. I’m more confident in my writing.”

Good Looks played around with multiple track sequences, but every order had those two songs paired together. “I think that’s because they’re the most sonically different songs on the record,” Jordan admits. “I think it’s less about the content of them and more about, sonically, how they fit together.” It wasn’t until a good friend of the band, Chicago’s best music critic Josh Terry, gave them his “Wario order.” “He sent it back and I listened to it and I was like, ‘Now, this rules,’” Jordan continues. “I love the flow, because I feel like the first half of the record really establishes the meat of it—what our sound is and what we do. And then, as soon as you get comfortable with that, ‘Vaughn’ happens and ‘White Out’ and ‘Vultures.’ If there were three or four more songs that sounded exactly the same as the first half, they would get boring.” It’s Terry’s tracklist, which begins with Jordan waxing earnestness on “If It’s Gone” and closes with the six-minute, skyscraping guitar epic “Why Don’t You Believe Me?,” that made the final cut.

The saying goes that you have your entire life to write your first record, and Bummer Year was recorded all the way back in August of 2018 and mastered a year later before sitting on the shelf until April 2022. “As soon as we were about to put [Bummer Year] out, the pandemic hit, so our label didn’t want to put it out without us being able to tour it,” Jordan says. “We felt the same way, so we sat on that for several years.” Most of Lived Here For a While, as a result, was written before Bummer Year even hit streaming—an unorthodox way to start a career, but a bang-up way to avoid a sophomore slump. “They talk about the pressure of writing that follow-up record, and I didn’t feel any of that—because I had no idea what was gonna happen with the first record,” Jordan continues, laughing. “I just kept writing and went through one of my most prolific periods. I’m typically a ‘three or four songs a year’ kind of guy. But we went in to record 16 songs [for Lived Here For a While] and came out with 10. I imagine that, on the next record, I will feel that pressure. It’ll be the junior slump.” Despite side-stepping any expectations or fears while writing and recording Lived Here For a While, Jordan wouldn’t wish having a debut record shelved for three years on anybody, even if it did work out for Good Looks.

If you were already hip to Bummer Year, then you are likely already in the know about Jordan’s penmanship. He’s the kind of lyricist who acts like a landscape painter, sitting before his subjects for hours, days and lifetimes before putting the final brushstrokes on an image. This is something that Jordan is well-aware of and embraces—likening his process to that one Family Guy bit about Randy Newman “singing about what he sees.” “I don’t think that’s very fair to Randy Newman at all, because he doesn’t write literal songs,” Jordan adds. “But, it’s probably very true about me.” But across the 17 recorded songs that make up Good Looks’ tight catalog, Jordan delivers portraits of the places and people around him—some arriving more graceful than others, like the heartfelt, eponymous song he wrote for his partner Vaughn. Yet still, there’s a glint of empathy in every track Jordan writes. On “Bummer Year,” especially, he chastised his high school classmates for voting for Donald Trump but said he didn’t “think they’re evil, even when they’re awful” because they’re the “kind of people you’d want with you in a bar fight.”

But because Bummer Year came out seven years after Jordan wrote the first song for it, he found the version of himself in those songs to be something of a stranger. “I felt like a different human being,” he says. “I still related to a couple of the songs, but some of the relationship songs from that record, they didn’t feel fair. They didn’t feel honest; the truth had changed. That record, I was just trying to keep my head above water. I was so fucking depressed and down in it.” That searching and longing manifested deeply in a song like “Vision Boards,” where Jordan confessed the thesis of his life spent pursuing music up until that point: “Making money from my art, man, it’s just not working out.” On Lived Here For a While, he balances family dysfunction (“Can you see me tonight, Mama? I’m still trying to win you over”), burgeoning romances (“Not every single lover has gotta be a sad song”) and local economic collapse (“Some call it innovation, some call it preying on the poor / All the hawks I thought I saw were vultures”).

On the first day of the pandemic, Jordan and his then-partner of four years broke up. They’d made music in a different band together and, on the day they cancelled tour dates because of lockdown, the relationship ended. On Lived Here For a While, you can hear Jordan open up. He explores the intimate partnerships all across his life, be it through romances, friendships or family dynamics. But during the final days of that relationship, Jordan found himself grappling with a stress-induced writer’s block. “I think my songwriting is so truthful and so literal that I felt really stuck,” Jordan says. “I think most of the songs I would have written in that time period would probably have been about how hard life was, within the context of that relationship, but I didn’t feel like I could write. So, as soon as the relationship ended, I was writing immediately and a lot.” He decamped to an empty house in Elgin just outside of Austin, which was owned by Good Looks’ old bass player Robert Cherry, and hung out there for a few months to get his head straight. “If It’s Gone” came to life there, and then Lived Here For a While came together quickly, piece by piece.

But the road to making Lived Here For a While was difficult for the band, too, but in severely opposite ways. On April 8th, 2022, Ames was struck by a car while crossing the street outside of Hotel Vegas after Good Looks’ sold-out Bummer year release show. He fractured his tailbone and skull and, after a stint in the ICU, was plagued by short-term memory issues. When Paste interviewed Jordan for the band’s Best of What’s Next feature two years ago, he was at Ames’ house with his bandmate’s mom and partner, taking turns watching over him. Jordan started a GoFundMe for Ames, raising nearly $64,000 so the guitarist could take care of his medical expenses and cover any lost income during recovery. As Ames slowly got better, the future of Good Looks was being dangled over the edge. “The first month or two were really intense, and then it was not knowing where things were going to land,” Jordan says. “We cancelled everything except for this appearance in June 2022 at the Kerrville Folk Festival, which was Jake and I’s home base. We go every year, it’s an 18-days-long festival. I figured we wouldn’t be able to play it, but I was like, ‘We’ll wait until the last minute,’ but then Jake was actually able to play the show.”

Immediately after that gig, Good Looks started working on Lived Here For a While, working on new songs for all of June 2022 and recording them in July. As the folklorish, inexplainable aspects of human life would have it, Ames’ guitar-playing post-accident was as good as ever, if not better than before. “It was crazy that his guitar-playing felt untouched,” Jordan says. “There were so many parts of his brain that were still healing, like his speech and his emotions. Those parts felt very different, but the guitar-playing—the musical part of his brain—felt the same. After two weeks in the hospital, where he slept 20 hours a day, if not more, the second that he got home he picked up a guitar and I was like, ‘Oh, I think it’s gonna be okay.’ He just immediately started playing and singing and felt like himself. It was bizarre.”

For Good Looks, a future without Ames wouldn’t have been a future worth having. “I just don’t believe that there’s anybody that can do what Jake does,” Jordan contends. “I think he is a singular guitar talent. I’ve never met anyone whose brain works like Jake’s, which I think is his greatest superpower but also his greatest weakness. He’s an incredible improviser—a wizard. I’ve never seen anybody summon guitar solos like that guy.” And those sessions for Lived Here For a While, which spanned a total of three to four weeks spread out across six months at Dandy Sounds in Dripping Springs, were beneficial to Ames—as Dunne and Anderson recorded their parts first in July and Jordan and Ames overdubbed guitar and vocals in August and September, giving the latter more time to get better. And now that Good Looks finally had a recording budget, they were in much less of a hurry to get the whole record finished.

And then, on July 8th, 2023, Good Looks found themselves involved in a car crash in Hot Springs, Arkansas on the first day of a three-week tour. A car going over the speed limit crashed into their tour van from behind and pushed the vehicle into an 18-wheeler that was traveling ahead of them. Though the van went up in flames, Jordan, Ames, Dunne and Anderson all made it out relatively unharmed—no broken bones, but a few bruises and scratches. “That’s probably my closest near-death experience,” Jordan says. “We were in the hospital afterwards—we all went to the emergency room—and I think maybe because of my childhood trauma, I’m immediately scheming and planning. I’m really good in a crisis. I get bogged down in the everyday shit, but when something has gone wrong, that is when I am really on.” Jordan’s desire to continue on to the next show was met with negative feedback from his bandmates initially. “I’m in the emergency room like, ‘Okay, we’ve got to rent a van.’ And Phil is like, ‘I don’t fucking have shoes!’ He didn’t make it out of the crash with shoes, he’s barefoot in the emergency room. He’s like, ‘I don’t give a fuck about renting a van.’ I think a lot of that drive to finish that tour was around my unwillingness to cancel those dates,” Jordan admits.

But Jordan did carry on solo for a while, as he was the least hurt of the foursome. Time passed, shows got played and, eventually, Ames, Dunne and Anderson regrouped with their vocalist and finished off the last string of dates once they all healed up. The one-two punch of tending to your guitarist as he recovers in intensive care from a potentially career-ending accident a year prior, only to witness your tour van go up in flames would be enough to break most bands. But Good Looks aren’t most bands. “I think all four of us are really locked in. This is what we’re doing, we’ve all made certain sacrifices in our lives; you have to take jobs that are very flexible to tour, and you have to cater your life to pursuing this thing that you never make any money at.” While Dunne bartends at High Noon, Ames is a music booker for the Sagerush club on South Congress Avenue and DJs on the side. Anderson, for years, has been a waiter at Hopdoddy Burger Bar. After working as a waiter himself for 10 years, Jordan does a remote clerical gig at a house moving company.

What Jordan is saying about the band being so locked in rings true, especially if you’ve seen the guys rip through a live set at some point over the last five years. Lived Here For a While—and songs like “Can You See Me Tonight?” and “Self-destructor”—show just how far Good Looks have leveled up. “I feel a lot more connected to this record, because that was a major turning point in my life,” Jordan says. “I started dating Vaughn in 2020 and then we started living together in January 2021. In some ways, those four years have just gone by really fast. I feel the same, I feel more fully formed as a person since [writing Bummer Year]—maybe the time sped up because I’m getting older, or maybe I grew up, to a certain point. I don’t know what it is, but those songs feel a lot closer than the previous songs did.”

Having the kind of chemistry that Good Looks possess in spades might offer some musicians an opportunity to take risks in the writing process or in the studio, but Jordan senses it having an opposite effect on the band. “I think everyone has their thing so ironed out—because the pathways are so worn and we know what we do and we show up and we arrange a certain way—that, sometimes, you have to do the opposite,” he says. “You have to take a second to think about doing something outside of what you would normally do. I feel like being locked in is actually the enemy of creativity, or the enemy of risk.” And that’s how you get Lived Here For a While and a DIY punk and Americana sound colored by its makers’ underdog, subversive and tender outlook towards a roughed-up, unbearable world. It’s why they can fill an entire Austin bar with fans on short-notice and tear the whole joint up; it’s why Jake Ames has gone from a hometown guitar hero to one of the tightest pickers in the country. Good Looks have put everyone on notice, and their claws are still being sharpened.

And so, for Tyler Jordan, Jake Ames, Phil Dunne and Harrison Anderson, making music has now transcended the big-picture, communal spirit you’d expect a great band with a far-away ceiling to aim for. Through tragedy, healing and resilience, the band went through hell and back before their second record even came out. And yet, the mission for them remains the same as it was six years ago: Take everything day by day, song by song. Good Looks were put on this earth to make music in each other’s company. On Lived Here For a While, that destiny sounds holistic and earned.

“There are people out there that write concept records and there are people out there that have a lot of thoughts around how they present their art. That’s not us,” Jordan says. “Sonically, we don’t feel limited. It can be whatever it needs to be. The fact that we go to these cities that we’ve never played before and, if 35 people show up, we’re fucking stoked—because we would have done that five years ago and nobody would have been there. Now there’s people showing up and singing along. It’s just the best thing in the world. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, play shows and connect with people.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

Good Looks Aren’t Going Anywhere

Bandleader Tyler Jordan discusses how a postponed debut album can dispel a sophomore slump, how the Best of What’s Next alums survived two near-death accidents within a year, and came out of it all with their new LP, Lived Here For a While.