Crystal Wise
For several years now, local musician Sean Russell has taken it upon himself to preach the gospel of Fort Worth. His pulpit is anywhere he and his band, Cut Throat Finches, play and his congregation is made up of a throng of Americana music fans that span the globe. These accolades could be due to the fact that CTF draws its influences from such bands as Oasis, Big Star, and Deep Blue Something. With such a wide gambit of influences to pull from, it's no wonder CTF has its own sound that has a glint of Cowtown in every note. Besides Russell, CTF is made up of Taylor Tatsch on guitar, Eric Webb on keys, Draya Ruse on Drums, and Rob Paine on bass. Started in mid-2015, this five-piece band has three full-length albums in its repertoire, with a fourth dropping soon. But no matter how many times this band of North Texas natives tries to emulate another band’s sound, they just end up sounding like themselves.
“Once I started recording and getting to that kind of level, plus seeing these other bands and what they were doing, I just became obsessed with succeeding at it,” Russell says while explaining how he got started in the music business. “After that, I spent years working the Dallas scene.”
Just a few years down the road, Russell says he began to experience a lot of changes all at once.
“I went through a divorce and went through a job change when I decided to just revamp everything I was doing,” he says. But Russell wouldn’t be lost in the abyss of change for long. In fact, it would be Russell’s devotion to this art form that would help him realign his path. Soon after this epiphany, Russell says he met his current wife and formed CTF all within a short timeframe. “Music has been like this core thing that has been part of my closest friendships and some of my biggest moments,” he says. “I can’t imagine a world where music isn’t a part of my life. I don’t care how old I am, whether I’m blues jamming at Lola’s at 80 years old, I just can’t imagine not being a part of it.”
Crystal Wise
For now, Russell and his bandmates are in the prime of their musical lives, with a new full-length album tentatively scheduled to drop this summer. “We don’t even have a working title for the album yet,” Russell explains with a smirk. “This was originally supposed to be solo project stuff, but the songs just sounded like rock band music. It didn’t sound like the singer-songwriter stuff I’d done in the past, so that’s where the idea for the new stuff came from.”
What makes this explanation so ironic is, this was the same scenario that inspired the first CTF album, which was released in 2016. “Since then, we’ve had more than an album’s worth of material to record each year, with Taylor (Tatsch) running a studio, we were able to turn out stuff quickly.”
Unfortunately for Russell and his band, the post-pandemic blues are still bobbing and weaving with the ripple effects of any major event. “We used to work like a well-oiled machine,” he says. “We would record an album and then set up our tour dates for the road. Come back and do it again. We still haven’t gotten back to that yet.”
To shorten this gap of disconnect, Russell says it is more important now than ever to pay attention to local music and support it. “It’s the local bands who could really use that like and subscribe to keep us in the know,” he says. “Other major artists who have gotten their breaks don’t need this recognition as much as we do. But if you listen and like us on your way to work, that goes a long way to keeping us going.”
According to Russell, an area’s music is just as authentic and intrinsically linked to it as its food. “If you taste food and hear music in any city, then you immediately connect to that city in a real way,” he says. “People won’t hesitate to ask where their food was sourced from, we should also get into the habit of asking the same about our music.”
