Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 645 with Calder Allen.

Introduction

Calder Allen: Fishing was the first thing for me that I realized I could really express myself freely. It was kind of a safe place. I was never the best student, but I always knew I had the capability to focus, because I could always fish for eight hours by myself. My teachers were like, "You need to be on track, you have learning disabilities." And I was like, well, I don't think so. I just think it's more focused on nature, and connecting that way with the world. So that was kind of my outlook.

Tom Rowland: This is the Tom Rowland Podcast. Fascinating stories to amaze, encourage, and inspire you in fishing, fitness, and the outdoors. I started this podcast as a way to connect with my friends, people I admire and respect, and you. It's been a learning journey that's made me a better person, a better fisherman, a better father, and a better athlete. If you have show suggestions, guest suggestions, or questions, the best way to reach me is by text at (305) 930-7346, or by email at podcast@saltwaterexperience.com. Everything lives at tomrowlandpodcast.com, and you can find us on social media at tom_rowland on Instagram, or our bigger account, saltwater_experience. Now let's get on to today's show.

Calder Allen: How's it going? This is Calder Allen, and you're watching the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Meeting at Bonnaroo

Tom Rowland: Calder, how are you doing? Man, I'm so excited that we made contact and I got you on here. You were the first person I saw at Bonnaroo, the first show this year. Congratulations on getting that gig. Did you like Bonnaroo?

Calder Allen: Yeah, it was awesome. It was my first time playing outside of Texas, since I'm originally from Austin, and it was my first show ever out of state. It was cool to see all the campgrounds and that whole scene.

Tom Rowland: That's a pretty big festival to play, and you're nineteen years old, right? That's incredible. Your sound is awesome — we listened to the whole album this morning while we were working out, and all the guys liked it. You've got this great sound. So when I looked at your album cover, I saw a fly-tying bobbin, flies, a fly reel, a knife, even a pencil sharpener. What's the significance of the album cover — why did you choose all those things to sit on top of your cowboy hat?

Calder Allen: The idea was kind of a bird's-eye view of the brand — a collage of all my experiences over the past four years. I started writing songs during COVID. I already knew how to play guitar a little, but I'd never really written to the chords I knew — it was always just campfires and stuff like that. Over COVID I started writing a bunch of songs and realized they were all connected to what I'd experienced over those four years, and that became the inspiration for the cover.

Growing Up in Austin and Learning Through Fishing

Tom Rowland: Tell me how fishing has been so influential in your life.

Calder Allen: Fishing was the first thing that let me really express myself freely. It was a safe place. I was never the best student, but I always knew I had the capability to focus, because I could fish for eight hours by myself. My teachers said I needed to get on track, that I had learning disabilities, and I just didn't think so — I think it's more about being focused on nature and connecting with the world that way.

Tom Rowland: I think we came from the same place. I would have been diagnosed with every learning disability, but it wasn't really a disability — it was an interest level. I just wasn't interested in what was going on at school. I was a wrestler, I was interested in fishing, hunting — there was no problem concentrating on the things I liked. It was just that nobody was talking about the things I liked in school. Was that your experience too?

Calder Allen: Exact same experience, yeah.

From Songwriting During COVID to a Debut Album

Tom Rowland: This seems extremely accelerated — you start writing songs during COVID, which wasn't that long ago, and now you've released your first album and so much is happening for you right now. Does that feel accelerated, or did it feel like a natural process that just started flowing?

Calder Allen: It's definitely something I'm still getting used to, especially performing in front of people, since I'd never really done that before. Singing songs that are meaningful to my life, my family, and my experiences — showing that to other people in an honest way is a little weird, but I'm getting used to it and it's super fun. My band members and I are really close, so I feel comfortable with them and don't worry much about what's going on off the stage. It's gotten to a place where I'm pretty comfortable, but it is very new, especially with the two-year gap from COVID where you weren't really seeing anyone.

Tom Rowland: It was also missing from the fan side — Bonnaroo didn't happen for two years, once because of COVID and the year before that because of flooding. So everyone there hadn't been to that festival in two years. It felt new for everybody, kind of like you were getting used to being on stage again, and we were watching you get used to it too. How did you hook up with your band?

Calder Allen: I grew up in Austin — I'm a sixth-generation Austinite — and I met them through my family. My whole dad's side is really into the arts; if they're not doing playwriting, they're writing songs. My uncle's a keyboard player, and really it was through him and through the producer who helped me with the record, Charlie Sexton, that the band came together. He helped me piece it together one by one, slowly, over the past year.

Tom Rowland: What's that process like — you write a few songs during COVID, and then does someone hear it and say, "This kid has some talent, let's put a band around him"? What is that like?

Calder Allen: It's different for everyone, but for me — my brother has a record out too that he did in high school. Given how much my family is in the music world, I figured I'd do something like a record, but I never thought I'd pursue it full time. Then COVID hit, I wrote all these songs, and it fast-tracked the whole process in my mind of what's important to me and how I want to look at things. The whole recording process with Charlie, Jacob Skiva, and everyone over at Arlyn Studios made me realize I wanted to pursue it full time — it was just a really welcoming experience.

Calder Allen: After the recording process, I realized I wanted to play live and do shows, but I still had to go up to the University of Montana for about three months, because that's really when I realized I wasn't a college kid. Maybe it was because I was fishing too much.

College in Missoula and Discovering the Bitterroot

Tom Rowland: Tell me about that — that was the plan before, you were going to go to Missoula, University of Montana. What were you planning on studying there?

Calder Allen: I was going to major in outdoor recreation through their PTRM program and minor in music. Pretty shortly after I got up there, I realized I was really distracted by all the rivers and fishing opportunities.

Tom Rowland: What rivers were you fishing mostly?

Calder Allen: The Bitterroot is where I spent most of my time, but the Clark Fork was always easy since it ran right through town, and the Blackfoot was right there too. There are a bunch of little spillover creeks off those rivers that are amazing fishing too, but mainly the Bitterroot.

Tom Rowland: What was your trout fishing experience like before you went to Missoula?

Calder Allen: My brother went to college in Boulder and was going to play basketball there, but he got injured and ended up rooming with another fly fisherman from Austin named Noah Thompson — and that's how my brother got into fly fishing. When we'd go visit him at school, I'd fish with him. Besides that it was pretty much all bass fishing in Austin and around Texas, which is great, because bass fishing in Texas teaches you to double haul, strip, and move a fly — all the stuff you need for saltwater. And I love saltwater, so it prepped me pretty well.

Fishing with Jaco Lucas and Redfish on the Flats

Tom Rowland: I checked in with some friends around your area and heard from a mutual friend of ours, Jaco Lucas, who sent me some pictures of you fishing with him — a black drum, and some video too.

Calder Allen: Yeah, he's awesome. I've only fished with him that one time — we've hung out a few times before at film festivals in Austin — but that was the only time we fished together, though we still text all the time and I'm trying to find another date to go out.

Tom Rowland: Were you catching those fish right up in that Spartina grass behind you?

Calder Allen: It was pretty insane, because it was twenty mile-an-hour winds, but these fish were tailing. It was cool to see, because the flat wasn't really wind-protected — it was still rippling in there — but to see them comfortable in that kind of water was pretty nuts.

Tom Rowland: That happens in South Carolina too — the fish get way up into that Spartina grass on the big tides, eating snails and crabs that aren't normally available to them. It's pretty special, and it can only last a fifteen- to thirty-minute window, so you want to be with somebody who really knows those tides, because one flat can be three inches deeper than another right across the channel.

Calder Allen: I was actually just looking at social media videos of that yesterday and thinking about how cool that would be to see — flood tides and all that.

Tom Rowland: So when did you record this album and put it out? It came out right before Bonnaroo, right?

Calder Allen: Yeah, it came out before Bonnaroo, but the whole thing was recorded about a year and a half ago in Austin. We held it because we wanted to release it at a time when I was playing a lot of shows to work the record — I'm not officially doing a full tour right now, just a lot of independent dates, opening up for people or doing festival stuff, not a different town every night. So it's pretty spaced out, and we released it right before everything happened this summer.

Tom Rowland: So right out of high school you decide to go to Missoula — where in that process had you already recorded the album?

Calder Allen: I recorded it the summer before I went to college, and the first week of school I got the masters back — that's when it was all finished.

Tom Rowland: So what's your thought process like — you're a freshman in college, in Montana, fishing all the time, and you get this album back?

Calder Allen: It's a distracting, unfocused mindset in one way, but funny enough, as unfocused as I was in one part of my life, I was diving everything I had into this other part. What I really want to do, and why I was so happy you reached out, is figure out how to tie fly fishing in with my music — not just make it about the songs, but about my outlook on how I want to pursue life, get into conservation, and work with amazing people in the outdoor industry, and write songs about that too. The first record ended up being a storyline of my high school experience, but the second record, whenever it gets recorded, is going to be more about the fishing and the outdoor perspective.

Tom Rowland: On your website you've got a conservation tab right up front with all the groups you support, which is really cool. In country music we've had a fair number of legit rodeo cowboys — guys like Chris LeDoux, or even Robert Earl Keen out of Austin, who jokes about his eight-second rodeo career being eight bulls that each lasted one second. But I don't know that anybody's done that with fishing the way you're doing it — with your heart in it, not just the cliché fishing references in country songs. It could be a really cool angle.

Calder Allen: Going back to what I was thinking that first week of college — how does this work, what do I do — the only thing I've come up with is just to be honest about how I view things, and hopefully everything works out. We'll find out.

Family Support and Life After Dropping Out

Tom Rowland: What are your parents thinking at this stage? You go to college, you're there a couple of months — is there a phone call home?

Calder Allen: There's a series of conversations, and I'm really fortunate that my parents understand pursuing a passion and what you're most invested in. My mom ran a study-abroad program before she retired — her passion was traveling and cultures, and that's what she did. My dad's a visual artist with an art gallery in Fort Worth, and his whole side of the family is musicians, playwrights, artists, sculptors. So I was in a good place with my family to say I wanted to pursue music and see where it takes me, and they've always been supportive of what my brother and I are passionate about. It wasn't hard conversations, but it was scary and nerve-wracking for me, because once you're out of school you realize you have to make your own schedule — nobody's making it for you. There was a lot of free time that first month after dropping out where I was trying to figure out how to get organized and stay on track.

Tom Rowland: What does getting organized look like — are you writing more, practicing more? What are you doing?

Calder Allen: Writing isn't a consistent thing for me, because inspiration hits in weird moments — I'll be with my friends and suddenly have to go write something down, and once I'm in that headspace it's game over, I have to go home and finish it. It's really consuming when the inspiration hits, but it's different every time. When I have writer's block, I get organized through fishing — I just focus on that and distance myself from writing for a while. There's a story about the songwriter Guy Clark, who was also a woodworker — when he'd get stuck writing, he'd have his whole workshop behind him on a swivel chair, and he'd turn around and work with his hands for a while. I do something similar with fly tying — I'll have my vise set up at the same station where I write, so if I get stuck I can just tie flies for a bit.

Songwriting, Fly Tying, and Fishing Inspiration

Tom Rowland: What kind of flies do you like to tie — bass bugs, trout flies?

Calder Allen: All sorts of stuff. I haven't tied many trout flies since I've been back in Austin — mostly saltwater, redfish patterns, and even though I don't fish for them much, a lot of grand-slam species just because I like the way they look.

Tom Rowland: That looks like an EP-style crab pattern — that flare-out design is really popular in Cuba for permit, though not as much in the Keys for some reason. We use a lot of that rug yarn material, and there's also the Strong Arm fly, with a realistic crab claw off the back, that's really popular. When I went to Christmas Island, I started tying the craziest stuff, just to see if the fish would eat something different, and it was almost as much fun to see if they'd react to a variation on something you know already works — rubber legs, more flash, a different wing.

Tom Rowland: When you get writer's block and go fishing, do you try not to think about it at all until it suddenly comes clear, or is it more gradual?

Calder Allen: It's really inconsistent, and I don't think it'll ever be totally consistent. Sometimes when I'm fishing I'm thinking about a lot of things that aren't related to music at all, my mind just roaming, and other times I'm really dialed in on the fishing — if I'm on the flats on the Texas coast I'm typically more locked in than if I'm wading a creek for bass. I love both, but they're different mindsets, kind of like freshwater versus saltwater in general. That's changed for me as I've gotten more comfortable double hauling and being on the bow of the boat — at first saltwater felt more intense and freshwater didn't, but really they're the same thing in their own way, just different, and I've gotten more comfortable with both.

A Fishing Bucket List

Tom Rowland: What's on your bucket list for fishing?

Calder Allen: So many things. I've been looking a lot at jungle species for freshwater — some of my buddies have gone down into the Amazon to fish for peacock bass and arapaima, and it looks insane. But honestly, I used to always want to travel, travel, travel to different places. Now I'm really close with a guide on the Texas coast named JT Van Zant — we've been longtime family friends, and he's mentored me not just musically but in what it means to respect nature. I really believe in his approach of knowing a place intimately — that's the greatest achievement you can have as a fisherman, knowing your fishery as well as you possibly can. That's my outlook now, and I'm trying to figure out what that fishery is for me, whether it's in Texas or somewhere else. I'd love to work at a lodge or a guide service at some point — my dream would be five months on tour, five months working on a boat and guiding, and then a couple of months recording again, and cycling through that.

Tom Rowland: Did you ever hear the story about David Lee Roth deciding he wanted to be a paramedic? He actually trained and worked as one in New York — he told the story on the Joe Rogan podcast. One of the biggest rock stars in the world, and he wanted to do something regular people do, something to keep it all from getting to his head. He said he was the first one in the truck and the last to leave, cleaning up afterward. Imagine you're in trouble and David Lee Roth is your paramedic. But hearing you talk about wanting to guide, I can see it in your future — if you put out another album like this one, it's going to be "this is your guide, Calder Allen," and people are going to be starstruck, because the music you're putting out right now is really good.

Calder Allen: Thank you so much. My whole outlook is that I can only be honest about what I'm honest about — as long as I'm writing songs that fulfill me and are true to what I think, then I'm doing my job. When you start straying from that toward things that aren't really expressive, that's when you get into a weird zone, in my opinion. That's part of why the guiding and fishing side matters to me too — making sure I maintain that balance and stay grounded in why I do music and why I write songs. I'm really fortunate with my band members and the people around me in Austin's music scene to feel comfortable being myself, instead of feeling pressured to dress or act a certain way on stage because that's what people expect. It's more about being expressive in the way I actually want to be.

Tom Rowland: That's one of the things I like most about what I'm hearing — it's truly original, it doesn't have that Nashville flare to it. I really like it.

Bonnaroo Camping and Festival Life

Tom Rowland: What was your favorite show so far?

Calder Allen: Probably that first one — I always like Bonnaroo for finding new music, things I've never been exposed to. You hear some stuff you really like, and some stuff other people are clearly into that's just not your scene, and you get this wide variety of music.

Tom Rowland: I go to Bonnaroo because my daughter likes it — this is our third time, would have been our fifth if it hadn't been canceled a couple of times. We go with a friend and his daughter, since our girls were best friends growing up before they moved away, so it's kind of a reunion, and it's a special time. It's a great time to find new music. Honestly, I think you were probably one of my favorite shows this year, and it was cool because we got to see you twice. This year they put the stages differently — the night before your set, the Turnpike Troubadours played that little stage about four hundred yards from our RV, and it was really cool.

Calder Allen: I have to ask — I didn't camp at the festival, though my drummer did. My whole band and I were laughing when we pulled up to the campgrounds, like, "Oh, this doesn't look comfortable at all."

Tom Rowland: No, it isn't. There are a lot of ways to do it. What you were looking at is people your age camping in the no-power, no-water, dry camp spots. There's that whole scene, and it's hot — Manchester, Tennessee in June can be extremely hot, so I don't have a lot of interest in that. Then there are the RV spots with power but no water, which is where we were. Next year we're going to the VIP section, finally, because the general admission ticket lets you stand in line for the pit — even on the biggest stages there's a pit that only lets about 250 people in, out of a spot that could hold a thousand, so if you're willing to wait in that line you can be right up front. We were front row for Post Malone, front row for Sturgill Simpson — all the acts my daughter wants to see — and it's actually one of the most comfortable places to watch a show, way more room than the massive crowd behind you. Backstage, behind the VIP section, isn't necessarily a better way to watch the music.

Calder Allen: Watching from backstage is pretty difficult to get a good mix, too, because some bands don't even have monitors back there — it's all in their headphones, and you can barely hear it. Everything's projecting outward, so out front you can hear it hundreds of yards away like you're standing right next to it, but backstage isn't as good.

Tom Rowland: So we've stuck with general admission and RV camping, since there's a shower, air conditioning, food. We spend a good amount of time there, picking the shows we want to see, and then coming back to eat and rest before the next ones we want to catch. What we noticed this year is the VIP section is actually inside the gate now, so you don't have to wait in line to get back to the concerts — they have their own showers and bathrooms. It's a little more expensive, but at this stage of my life it's worth it. I'm surprised more people don't get into serious trouble with dehydration out there.

Calder Allen: That's what I was thinking, because even at that first show, I was in jeans and long sleeves, kind of covered up, since I refuse to wear shorts on stage. The first thing my uncle told me when I started playing was, "I'll tell you the only rules you should probably follow" — don't wear a tank top, and don't wear shorts on stage. I said okay, I'll honor that. But it was hot, and I couldn't imagine not being able to get back to somewhere with water — it seemed like a real health risk out there.

Tom Rowland: People are camping and sleeping in tents, staying up at an EDM show until four in the morning, then waking up with the sun blaring down at ten. I'm really surprised more people don't get in trouble, but they don't seem to. Or people sleeping in cars — you know how hot a car can get. But we don't have anything to do with that side of it.

Calder Allen: I heard a story about a photographer shooting Bonnaroo a few years back who cut his toe, walked around the campsites, got a staph infection from the bacteria there, and ended up having to get his toe amputated.

Tom Rowland: Oh, that's the worst thing ever. That'll make you wear boots and pants for sure. So what do they do with the artists — how do they get you there, and where do you go afterward?

Calder Allen: We stayed at the Holiday Inn right outside the festival, and they'd shuttle us in on what's called artist transportation — a bus that drops you in a dirt lot right behind the main stage, and then you're at the fest and have to be in the right place at the right time for your set. On the day of the show, they have people move your gear, so that part's pretty easy.

Tom Rowland: So you bring everything yourself? I've watched in transitions between sets how they set up the next drum kit off to the side and then move it in — how does that work with the sound equipment when some acts bring their own amps and their own light shows? It's like, how do they do all that so fast, since you've only got about twenty minutes?

Calder Allen: It's really stressful, especially figuring out how to get your gear there — we drove up to Tennessee because it's a scary feeling flying with guitars and amps. I feel a lot better having it in the bed of a truck than worrying about it in an airplane cargo hold, but it is stressful, and honestly loading up the gear and making sure it doesn't get ruined is the biggest stress of a show. What it looks like day-of is you bring your gear, people on stage help you set it up, you do a sound check, and then after your set it gets stripped right back down. If you ask people for help they'll help you, but it's mostly on you to keep everything organized and get it back to where it won't get ruined.

Life on Tour and Moving Gear

Tom Rowland: You're playing around Texas, you played Austin City Limits, plenty of bars — you're moving your own equipment there too. Is festival touring just that on a bigger scale, more people around, more to move?

Calder Allen: It's actually harder to move gear in small nightclubs, because everyone's crowding you — everyone talks to the band members right before a show, asking questions about your gear, and it's stressful trying to set up and carry on a conversation at the same time. I mostly play at the Continental Club in Austin, and I love that venue, but you get a lot of questions about your gear while you're trying to set up. It's fun, though.

Tom Rowland: It'll make you an expert at doing that, because at one point it takes all your concentration just to put everything together right, and then eventually you're doing it while carrying on a conversation. It's not unlike being a fishing guide — you pull up to the ramp, your clients are already there thirty minutes early, and you've got to get the boat off the trailer and up to the dock while people are standing right on your shoulder asking what you're fishing for and what the weather's like. Eventually it becomes second nature.

Calder Allen: That's kind of what it's like now, which is a good feeling — it's all fun. I've grown to love the whole live-show experience. It used to be really stressful, but now it's pretty comfortable.

Upcoming Tour Dates

Tom Rowland: Between now and October you've got quite a schedule — July 15th you've got the Avett Brothers.

Calder Allen: Yes, and that one's going to be stressful travel-wise, since we're flying up there with gear. I have to figure that out today, because we fly out tomorrow, and I need to make sure everything's locked down.

Tom Rowland: That's a commercial flight? What do you do about baggage — most people get hit with a fifty-pound overage, and you're carrying all that gear.

Calder Allen: I was looking at it this morning, and I think what I'll have to do is request to carry on a guitar myself and have my brother carry on my second guitar. I probably won't bring an amp and hope there's a backline one I can use — if not, I can just plug in with my acoustic and play the whole set. It's all pretty stressful, since I just don't want anything to break.

Tom Rowland: Seems like you could go with something like the Pelican cases we use for cameras. I've never seen it done, but they make gun cases — seems like you could fit a guitar in one of those.

Calder Allen: I do have hard cases for my guitars, but the problem is I need a lock on them, and I don't want—

Tom Rowland: Then TSA is going to think it's a gun and want to open it up. So then you've got the Wood Brothers a few days after that, two big shows — one in Boulder, one in Washington — and then Lollapalooza. Are you going to do what Adrian Smith did on my podcast — he's the guitarist for Iron Maiden and a very passionate fisherman, and every tour stop he'd plan an extra couple of days to find the nearest river and fish it. If you haven't heard that episode, you should go listen to it. He'd plan around fishing the Frying Pan near Aspen and places like that.

Calder Allen: That's a little ways off from Boulder — I'll probably just end up fishing Boulder Creek right in town with a three-weight, since my brother knows it well. There's also the South Platte and Deckers, or the Blue, but Boulder Creek sounds like plenty of fun.

Tom Rowland: Nice — so now you need a case that can carry a guitar and a fly rod.

Calder Allen: I'm going to start making those cases — the market size is probably about two people.

Tom Rowland: Maybe YETI will make one for you. And then Lollapalooza — that's a big one. What do you know about that lineup?

Calder Allen: I've never been. My brother had a band growing up that played it and said it was nuts, but the only festival I'd been to before Bonnaroo was ACL, and after Bonnaroo I realized ACL was pretty low-maintenance by comparison — Bonnaroo is on a whole different level as a festival, its own beast.

Tom Rowland: There's quite a lineup at Lollapalooza this year.

Calder Allen: I'm really excited — it's going to be a lot of fun. And then there's a few more festivals, and the Turnpike Troubadours show October 22nd in Texas.

Tom Rowland: How far is that from you?

Calder Allen: New Braunfels — twenty-five minutes. It's right by a fishing hole on the Guadalupe River called White Water, right next to White Water Amphitheater — it's basically where me and my buddies used to fish in high school.

Tom Rowland: Do you float that river?

Calder Allen: I have, but I usually just wade it. It's a little strange for me fishing for trout in a river like that — it doesn't feel totally natural to me, since I like fishing for wild fish. I mostly fish for Guadalupe bass on the Lower Colorado River just east of Austin.

Tom Rowland: Isn't there a Guadalupe bass that's native to that area?

Calder Allen: Yeah — Guadalupe bass is Texas's state fish, and they're awesome, they fight a little harder than a largemouth pound for pound.

Tom Rowland: Are they more of a river and stream fish than a lake fish, like a largemouth?

Calder Allen: They do both — in still water, if there's a rock outline creating a little lull in the current, they'll sit behind it, but they do like current.

Tom Rowland: Have you fished for smallmouth much?

Calder Allen: I actually caught a smallmouth once on the Guadalupe River, which is super rare. The Devil's River is where I really want to go fish for smallmouth.

Tom Rowland: Isn't that where Alvin guides — that YETI film with our host Miles Berghoff? He said that river was really cool. Is there a motor allowance there, or is it a total float?

Calder Allen: I think it's total float — there are a lot of shallow spots, so it'd probably be pretty hard to run a motor anyway.

Conservation and Water Issues in Texas

Tom Rowland: As far as conservation and your music go, what kind of tie do you see between yourself, your message, and conservation on your website? You've got Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation, Coastal Conservation Association, Bonefish and Tarpon Trust, and Project Healing Waters, which is a super cool organization — we've done a couple of TV shows with them. What kind of connection do you see with those groups, and what's your mission on the conservation side?

Calder Allen: The real point of having conservation on the website is that the only one I've worked directly with is the Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation — I've done some things with Bonefish and Tarpon Trust too, but nothing as extensive as the people who actually work for them. For me, it's more that I want those organizations out there and visible. I don't need any formal affiliation, though of course if an opportunity came up to do an event with them, I'd love to help.

Tom Rowland: I didn't know if you were already working with them. I'd love to get you connected with Captains for Clean Water too — they do some incredible things in Florida.

Calder Allen: For sure — Texas needs a chapter of something like that right now.

Tom Rowland: What kind of water issues are you facing there?

Calder Allen: A lot of oyster over-harvesting — it's no good. There's a lot of misinformation, and people not understanding what's actually happening on the Texas coast, so they think everything's fine when it isn't.

Tom Rowland: In my experience with Captains for Clean Water, education is the first and most effective step in letting people know what's happening in a way they can understand without feeling like an idiot for not knowing it already — having a warm, inviting approach instead of outrage. I think that's why they've been so effective explaining water issues to fishermen and non-fishermen alike, gaining a following from people connected to real estate, restaurants, tourism — anyone tied to the water. Texas has this beautiful coast, and if the water isn't good, eventually people stop wanting to go there, whether they're fishermen, birdwatchers, or just people who like the coast.

Calder Allen: The real problem now, with social media and my generation's attention span, is that it's so hard to push any narrative, good or bad — easier to push a bad one, honestly. If you post something like "here's over-harvesting of oysters on the Texas coast," you'll get twenty other posts saying that's not what's going on, and the algorithm pushes people toward whichever version is more negative, because that's usually how it works. It's a mess of misinformation, and it's hard to rally people around an issue for more than a week. I can't speak to what it was like growing up without social media, but it seems harder now to keep people on the same page.

Tom Rowland: The attention span for everyone has shrunk. Things weren't necessarily different, but they moved much more slowly — when there were only three channels and a couple of news networks, the news cycle was much slower, and a newspaper only published once a day, so you weren't getting another opinion until the next morning. Now you get an opinion every millisecond.

Calder Allen: And then you end up not really absorbing any of the opinions, and you can't form your own. It's just weird.

Tom Rowland: It is a weird time. I don't know if we're capable of handling that much information available to us twenty-four seven. I think that's part of why attention spans are shrinking — you're not capable of absorbing that much, so you just keep scrolling until something outrageous makes you stop for a bit.

Musical Influences

Tom Rowland: We'd love to get you down to the Keys to fish sometime — I passed your name along to the general manager at Hawks Cay about the Keys to Country event. They've had Lee Brice down there and a couple of other people I know and like — you'd be perfect for that. If we can get you hooked up with it, I'll come down and take you fishing myself. Your new album is called The Game — where do people get it?

Calder Allen: It's on all streaming platforms, and I'm trying to figure out how to do a vinyl pressing right now, which would be really cool.

Tom Rowland: One more question — who did you listen to growing up, say from twelve to seventeen?

Calder Allen: Honestly, fishing films got me into listening to what I'd call actual music. Watching Costa and all those insane fishing hype films, I loved that, and I got into that kind of music through them — imagining a bass drop, doing fake hook-sets with my friends in the car on the drops. It's hilarious. Then I started watching other films that used more acoustic music, and it clicked for me the same way — I'm watching fish films with some cool acoustic song playing. That's how I started listening to a band called Camp, and Ryan Bingham, and a few others. Camp was the biggest inspiration for me to start writing songs directly, since I never took vocal lessons — I'd just listen to their records and start singing. There were plenty of other inspirations and bands too, but that's the one I remember thinking, wow.

Tom Rowland: My daughter loves that band.

Calder Allen: She loves Camp? Yeah, they're really good, I think.

Tom Rowland: No, they really are. So with that inspiration, when you're writing a song, do you hear the melody in your head first, or build it around the words later?

Calder Allen: When I started, it had to be guitar-dependent on what I could actually play, because I couldn't hear a melody in my head and then translate it — and honestly I'm still not great at guitar, I kind of fake it. So I'd work out the melody on the guitar and then sing to that, which ended up being great for writing, because you're writing to what that melody wants to say. It makes you think about what the song should be, rather than deciding what you're going to say first and then writing a melody to fit it.

Tom Rowland: That's really cool. That's how I do it too, starting with the guitar rhythm. You've come a long way in a very short amount of time, and I really look forward to seeing what you do in the next year.

Closing Thoughts

Calder Allen: Thank you so much, I really appreciate that. Thanks for having me on — I was really excited when you called me.

Tom Rowland: Great, man, well, thanks, I appreciate it. And the connection to fishing is awesome — everyone listening should definitely check out the new album, The Game, it's fantastic. He's one of us, a fisherman, and he wants to be a guide someday. I really look forward to staying in touch and seeing what you do — good luck between now and October, and I know some big things are going to happen for you.

Calder Allen: I appreciate that so much. Thanks for having me on this — I was really excited you called.

Tom Rowland: Great, man, well, thanks. Go get the game — and we'll see you next week.