This week, we had the privilege of meeting up with local musician and native Austinite, Alejandro Rose-Garcia otherwise known as Shakey Graves, before he heads off on tour for the rest of the year. He has been donning our farm caps on and off the stage for a hot minute, and we thought it due time to talk hats with this world-traveling and immensely hard-working artist. We gathered on a sun-laden, scorching-hot afternoon, enjoyed some coffee, and delved into the nitty-gritty on his hat preferences, food faves, and just general Austin city livin’. Check out the full interview below.

Ale. Photo by Scott David Gordon.

Growing up in Austin, a town that has transformed into a mecca for health nuts, did you ever think about farms?

Yeah! My parents are pretty classic Austin in the sense that, I wouldn’t say that they are full on 1960s hippies, but my family has always been new-age-ish, I suppose? I grew up going to Montessori school, and I lived in a big trippy house with a bunch of modern dance people and vegans. The organic world, health food, and just kind of non-traditional nutrition was always something that was a part of my childhood and growing up. So, yeah, I was aware of it existing in Austin. I’ve tried many foods that now don’t seem strange, but when I was younger… it was more like… ‘what is going on!?’

What did you grow up eating?

My family went through a vegetarian spat for a little while. I grew up in two households. My dad is kind of a more all-American diet guy (or at least in the past he was). When I would go to his house I would eat more stuff like burgers, and he would get a kick out of making pies and stuff like that. My mother has always been a little more specific with her diet. To this day, if I could eat anything it would be rice, chicken, and vegetables. It's been in different variations throughout the years, but that’s my favorite thing in the world. I’ve sustained off of that for far too long.

It can be difficult to eat healthy while you’re touring, right? What do you usually end up eating?

Yes, definitely. Luckily now, the touring setup is different, at least in the format of how I do it. Now, we travel in a bus. So, we have a fridge and I usually have more time during the day to go and check out the places that I want to. Instead of showing up at the last minute in a van and eating on the way like we’ve done in the past. That’s helped a lot, it doesn’t really help us make better choices though, because I’ll still devour a bag of chips at 3 in the morning when I don’t need to. Now when I’m traveling, with my taste for specific foods and with restaurant culture getting bigger and wilder, when I go to a town, I try to find an amazing restaurant nearby and check something new out. Whereas, I used to not be able to do that at all.

We also get a rider these days. It’s part of your budget, where you say that you want certain things in the dressing room when you arrive. Which is a big learning curve, too. At first, you’re like ‘YEAH, get us... SKITTLES!’ My tour manager was managing a band that was on tour with Justin Bieber, and he was saying that all their food was gummy bears, troughs of breakfast cereal, a surplus of pizza and spaghetti-os.

We’re figuring it out though… we have certain days where we get a rotisserie chicken and salad fixings, some days where we get sandwich stuff. Then you have a surplus that you can kind of dive into. I’ve seen other people do incredible things that are a lot smarter, like Wednesday is taco day, Thursday is prepackaged Indian food day, and then you can have variety in your diet.

Ale, hatless. Photo by Scott David Gordon.

How much are you touring?

It feels like 60% of the year, but that’s impossible... that’s like what Elton John does. At its worst, it's around 3 weeks out of the month. Yeah, maybe six months out of the year? Something like that at it’s craziest.

Do you cook? What do you like to cook?

I like to cook whatever. I’m just trying to get more and more adventurous with cooking food in general. If I don’t know how to make something - that becomes the reason to try and make it. I made my first potato salad yesterday.

Oh man, how’d it go?

It went great. I’m proud to report that I didn’t kill anybody! I decided to use the little red russet potatoes. So instead of taking bigger potatoes, chopping them up, and boiling them down, every bite was a little half a potato. It kept potato consistency. I used a certain type of mustard that I love… I tried to go a little sideways on the recipe because I like the more vinegary-ish potato salads. I’m not really a heavy dairy person. Although, dairy rules.

What’s your favorite vegetable?

My favorite vegetable might be the shallot because I love onions so much and I love garlic equally. Shallots are the perfect blend of both.

Photo by Scott David Gordon.

If you were a vegetable, what would you be and why?

I would probably be some sort of squash. I’m kind of oddly shaped and sort of sweet in a savory kind of way.

Let’s dive into the hat questions. We’ve sent quite a few hats to you over the years, do you remember where and when you got your first JBG hat?

It was the blue one with the red label. Honestly, I don’t really remember exactly where and when. I think it was at a festival or something like that, and I met someone from JBG and they gave me a hat!

I love hats. I have a bad habit of hats… I have way too many. I don’t want to throw them away or give them away because a lot of them are tied up with memories, and then it becomes a hoarding thing.

How many hats do you have?

I would say right now, I have somewhere in the realm of 35-40 hats. But, I don’t really know… there are hats everywhere. There are hats hidden. I’m sure there’s a box in my house that if I popped it open, it would just be full of random hats. Some of them are just useless, I don’t even wear them.

What musical era of yours was your JBG hat a part of?

My JBG hat was a mainstay of my costume for SXSW 2014. That whole SX I think I wore it at every show and everywhere I went. I wore a suit and that hat. It was when my second album was coming out, which was my most commercially successful album up to that point. One of the press photos that I used was taken during that SX and I’m wearing that hat.

Shakey performing. Photos compliments of Brittany Teuber and the world wide web.

We know you like our hats, do you like our vegetables?

I do! My girlfriend has gone out to the farm before and brought home a CSA box that we tore through.

Do you have any thoughts when you see a JBG hat out in the wild on someone else’s head?

My bass player still wears one all the time, he’s kind of re-fashioned the hat though. He took the black label off of the camo hat and put it on a black hat. It’s Halloween-ed out. It’s very classy and looks really good. I feel personally engaged in the JBG hat. I was thinking about it on the way over here… it’s a very stylish hat. The colors and everything. I have 5. I like the camo, red on blue, and the kind of denim and white one.

Any tips for the kiddos out there on how to break in a JBG hat?

I prefer not to break it in too much. Once it loses its structural consistency, it kind of breaks my heart. I also have a weird-shaped head, so hats help my dome look a little more traditional. The softer the hat gets, the more folks can see my strange head.

What percentage of your waking life do you wear a hat?

First off, I never wore hats until the summer of 2007. I was going to this store to get something to grill after a night I’d had a party at my house. There was an old straw hat sitting in the back window of my friend’s car and I put it on and didn’t take it off until pretty much now. I wore a hat all the time. I wore that straw hat for a whole summer... that was my hat.

Then I found a brown falconer/kind of a fedora hat at a vintage store on Congress. I saw it sitting on a manikin and had to have it. That was the hat that I wore in New York City and that’s when I first started telling people my name was Shakey Graves. I would wear that hat exclusively when I played. When I didn’t wear that hat, no one would recognize me. The power of the hat. It’s like putting on a mask. I’ve worn hats around 70% of the time that I’ve played shows.

Is it part of your stage persona?

Yeah, I think so. I think it’s also a comfort thing for me, too. It keeps sweat out of my eyes. The hat is definitely a part of something - it definitely has some sort of power to it.

We’ve seen you in a pretty cool cowboy hat, can you tell us about it?

I have many cowboy hats. I have one that was made for me by a woman named Cate Havstad who lives in Oregon. She’s a young, incredible hatmaker who learned her art from another haberdasher. I don’t know how she did it, but somehow she found this storage unit full of old Stetson hat molds from the ‘30s on the internet. So, she bought it and now she has all these incredible old hat molds, trains horses, makes hats, and blows people’s minds.

Shakey in his Havstad hat. Photo by Eric Kucinski.

Any other favorite hats? Shapes of hats? Most meaningful hat?

Usually, I remember where I got them or where I wore them. There’s sometimes seasons where I wear one hat all the time. I remember the first big, white, straw, kind of 10-gallon-y cowboy hat that I got. I bought it from a western wear shop in Santa Fe that was going out of business. It was very cheap. I never wore a big cowboy hat here in Austin, but when I moved to LA I wore it. I could be like, “I’m a cowboy! Everyone in Texas wears one of these!” and nobody would really know. I still have that one… it’s all crunched up and messed up now, but I don’t want to throw it out.

One style that I really like is the little, super-tight, tiny Ranchero cowboy hat. Some of my South Texas relatives wear those. Real sharp and straight up. They are pretty hard to find.

Back to music. What’s the hardest part about being a musician in Austin?

Staying focused. In Austin, it’s really easy to just hang out, do nothing, and feel totally fulfilled. I have so many friends that I would just sit in a backyard under a sprinkler for 9 hours and feel like I had a really productive day. I guess that happens in a lot of places, but Austin has a je ne sais quoi about wasting time.

Music takes a lot of focus. At least for me, it takes long periods of isolation or just unbroken concentration. It can seem like it’s just all fun and games and going and playing with your friends, but that’s just one part of it. Also, no one’s jaw falls to the floor if you tell them you're a musician from Austin, you know. Folks are like, aw, that’s cute.

Besides that, it’s great. It’s hard to challenge yourself, I suppose. It’s easy to just be here. It’s also easy to just not go see shows, which sucks. It takes me effort to go and see other people play in town. It always has. I love music, and I get lazy about going downtown. Why do I expect other people to do that for me? I don’t know, I don’t get it.

Is there something fulfilling about seeing other people play music?

Oh, yeah! At the very bare minimum, you get envious. If you go and see someone and they blow your mind, you think "what am I doing?" In a lot of artistic endeavors, you have to go see other people doing great stuff to light that fire in yourself or to want to do something special or something interesting… or to be a part of a scene. It’s important to know where you are.

Ale, hatless. Photo by Scott David Gordon.

Best and worst thing about this growing/new Austin?

I guess one of the best things is the food revolution going on here. It’s kind of happening everywhere. There’s a lot of interesting new tastes, and there’s a lot of great stuff to check out. Especially in this part of town (South 1st), it's getting really crazy. That’s also the downside. There are no more dive bars in this neighborhood. Not that that is what makes a neighborhood great, but at the same time everywhere you go is kind of an event or a scene. The whole thing now… instead of just going to get some coffee and going home, it’s all a little more of a presentation. That’s kind of stressful… and expensive.

What are your go-to Austin spots when you’re home?

I go to the Alamo Drafthouse a lot. I see a lot of movies. I love watching movies and I love eating food. So eating food while watching movies is just my favorite thing to do. I hang out there a lot. I go to Sap’s Thai Food on Westgate a lot. I love Sap’s. There’s a private bowling alley over by the capitol behind Scholz’s, it’s the oldest bowling alley in Texas, I think. I like to hang out there. I’ve gotten to know the people who run it. Taqueria Aranda’s #5 is a classic. Polvo’s is great if you want to have a really intense margarita day.

Do you have any favorite places to play in town?

I like playing at the Hole in the Wall. I haven’t played there in a long time, but I always like being in there.

If you were stuck on a deserted island, what three things would you bring (food and fresh water excluded)?

• an endless supply of paper
• pencils
• another person that I like

A huge thank you to Alejandro for taking the time out of his busy schedule to hang with us, and also for donning our JBG gear around the world. 'Til next time!