How Losing the Farm at 13 Became Southall's Greatest Blessing

Sometimes the worst thing that happens to you turns out to be exactly what you needed. That’s the unexpected wisdom frontman Read Southall discovered while writing“Southwestern Son,”a gut-wrenching track on the band’s new album Kinfolk—and it’s a perspective that cuts against everything we’re taught about hardship and success.

Growing up in a small Oklahoma town, Southall’s identity was rooted in his father’s farm. But at thirteen, that foundation crumbled. Cotton crops burned, the family went broke, and a teenager who’d built his whole sense of self around that land suddenly had to figure out who he was without it. The song doesn’t shy away from the pain:“Worst thing that ever really happened to me/ We lost the farm when I was just thirteen/ Turns out burnt up cotton ain’t worth nothing at all.”Recorded at 115 Recording in Norman, Oklahoma with producer Wes Sharon (known for his work with Turnpike Troubadours),“Southwestern Son”wraps those painful lyrics in electric twang that somehow transforms loss into something worth celebrating.

What makes Southall’s reflection remarkable is the clarity it reveals. Looking back now, he’s come to see the farm’s collapse not as a tragedy that derailed him, but as the force that kept him from becoming someone else entirely. His friends whose parents prospered? Many of them spiraled into addiction and couldn’t pull themselves together. Southall credits the hardship—the hunger, the fight, the necessity to become someone other than just a farmer’s kid—as the thing that saved his future.

That thematic thread of home and identity runs through the entire nine-track Kinfolk, which marks a deliberate shift from the band’s self-titled 2023 record. For that album, Southall says they had guardrails: if a song didn’t fit the room-filling rock direction, it got shelved. Here, the philosophy flipped entirely.“Let’s just do everything,”became the studio mantra. Whether it’s the hilarious ode“Okie Pokin’Out”(celebrating Oklahoma football and onion-fried burgers) or the haunting“Worse Things”(written by drummer Reid Barber, who left the band in March after a decade), Kinfolk captures the full spectrum of what Southall can do.

Producer Wes Sharon leaned into that freedom. He understood that trying to contain everything would mean losing it all.“I don’t like things that are easy,”he explained.“Pop music is that way to me, in the worst way…But I like challenges, and I also think the listeners are looking for something other than the obvious.”From the funeral-march strings on“Worse Things”to the casino-floor percussion on“House Money,”every production choice serves the song’s emotional core rather than some predetermined sonic box.

With Kinfolk now out, Southall are headlining the biggest stages of their career. Starting mid-May, they’ll open the Southern Hospitality Tour, co-headlined by the Black Crowes and Whiskey Myers, running through August. It’s the kind of trajectory that doesn’t happen by accident—and it certainly doesn’t happen to kids who had everything handed to them. Sometimes you need to lose the farm to find yourself.