Koe Wetzel Is Damn Near Normal
How Hunting Keeps Country Rock's Last Real Bad Boy Connected
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Koe Wetzel can give the party a night off.
Just so we’re clear, last night was definitely not that night. It’s past noon and he’s wearing a baseball hat and sunglasses, speaking with the tired, raspy remnants of last night’s voice. I’m not saying he was hungover, but there were signs.
“Those Mavericks, man, they’re killing me,” the East Texas native says shaking his head. The Dallas Mavericks had lost Game 3 of the NBA Finals two nights earlier. Apparently, he’d been drinking the pain away ever since.
“They drive me to drink, man,” he says. “People say, ‘Why do you drink so much, Koe?’ Because the sports teams aren’t doing it!”
This basketball-induced binge drinking is part of the Koe Wetzel persona. He’s a rock star who actually lives like a rock star, preferring Yukon Jack to yoga and singing about it over three-chord guitar riffs. But behind his outrageous tales of bar fights, booze, and next-morning loneliness, Koe is, at his heart, a real Texas outdoorsman. One look at his Instagram shows the rising star decked out in camo, posing with dead bears and 10-point bucks. Hunting and fishing keep him connected to the people he loves and the place he came from, no matter how crazy his rockstar lifestyle gets. And when it comes to the hunt, his partying can sometimes go on (a brief) pause.
A Bow & A Double-Wide
Koe Wetzel was born in Pittsburg, Texas, the son of a construction worker father and a bank teller mother who sang in Opry houses on the weekend. He grew up in a double-wide trailer and spent most of his formative years with his grandparents, much of it with a bow in his hand.
“I grew up in the woods, a long way from town,” he reminisces. “My grandparents had like a hundred acres that pretty much the whole family lived on. All the guys, we’d hunt and that’s how we ate. What they kill in the summertime they eat during the wintertime.”
Koe got his first bow at age 8 and didn’t get his first kill until he was 11. While he’s shot rifles in the years between, the 31-year-old still prefers the intimacy and precision of a bow.
“With a rifle, you get out there 300, 400 yards away and smack one, but with a bow, it takes a lot of patience,” he says. “It takes a lot of skill, there’s so many factors that come into bowhunting—wind direction, being quiet, drawing back on the animal, shot placement.”
Bowhunting, he says, always teaches him something new. And that thirst for knowledge is why, despite his meteoric rise, he still schedules tours around deer season.
“We can tour all the way up to October, then October hits and we’re done for the rest of the year,” he says.
This year, his summer and fall tour will have him traveling through mid-November, missing most of the Midwestern rut he relishes on his property in southern Illinois. But being on the road doesn’t necessarily mean Koe is missing the hunt completely. He keeps bows in his tour bus, just in case he passes through somewhere where the hunting is good. Also, it helps him keep his shooting skills sharp.
“I practice pretty much all year round, even if it’s just like 20 arrows,” he says. “I’m no Cam Hanes or anything, but if it’s a big deer probably 50 yards is going to be my max. We keep bows on the bus so if we have downtime we’re always out shooting. Something to keep us busy while we’re on the road.”
Koe On The Hunting Circuit
Koe’s summer tour is called “Damn Near Normal,” named after a track on his latest album “9 Lives” whose lyrics lament how his booze-and-groupies lifestyle feels empty compared to the family-man existence of his childhood friends. Whether he really does envy their suburban simplicity is anyone’s guess, but when they all get together for hunting season, none of it matters.
“I still got all my duck hunting buddies that I grew up with back home, and we try and take one big trip every year,” he says. “It’s exactly the same as it was back then. We’re giving this guy the same (grief) about the same stuff. Telling old stories. We’re just catching up with each other, you know, having a good time.
“We might kill two or three birds the whole time but that’s not what it’s about. It’s about catching up with each other, telling those stories a lot of us had forgotten about. Nothing’s really changed, we’re just older and a little fatter now.”
Despite Koe’s tequila-for-breakfast reputation, hunts for larger animals are sacred.
“For bigger game, we take it pretty seriously,” he says. “Rut doesn’t last very long, so during rut season we eat dinner, soon as we’re done we get a full eight, nine hours. Wake up, get some coffee, then hit the treestand and we’re back at it all day.”
Not that he doesn’t bring the party to the deer camp, he just makes sure he gets his buck before the craziness ensues.
“There’s nothing quite like getting your first kill then popping that first beer after you get him on the ground. That one leads to 20 more, then you find yourself still at it at 4 in the morning,” he says. “I try to get my kill on the first or second day of the trip. After we get that first one, watch the f*** out, because here we come.”
Koe and his cadre of hunters/drinkers will stay up until 6 a.m., just as some other hunters in their group—chasing bigger bucks—are waking up to get back in a treestand.
Bear Caves & Catfish Holes
While duck and deer hunts are about connecting with old friends, Koe’s gotten into more extreme outdoor sports to keep his onstage adrenaline going when he’s not on tour. In 2023, he ventured to Utah to hunt black bears, tracking through the woods with dogs and ultimately pinning one inside a cave.
“We look inside this cave and I kinda see it in the back and I’m like, ‘Ain’t no way I’m going in there,’” he says. “But (my guide) was just like, ‘C’mon man, let’s go!’ So, we go in and kinda wiggle ourselves in and get a good shot on him. It was insane, but it was a beautiful black bear.”
He has also become an avid noodler, as recent posts show Koe shirtless, hoisting massive catfish over his shoulder. Noodling, he says, brings him the same kind of excitement he finds onstage, but in the water.
“I was never the guy who was like, ‘Yeah, let’s go stick our hands in some holes and get bit by catfish,’” he says. “But my guitar player, he’s a cool dude and he’s been doing it for years and I was like, ‘Ya know what? F*** it!’ It’s one of those adrenaline deals. And I fell in love with it. And, man, I just caught one, she was close to 60…look at my arm.”
He holds up his right arm, and red bite marks stick out among the sea of tattoos covering his elbow. His hungover haze seems to momentarily lift as he becomes animated showing his battle wounds. His eyes may have even lit up talking about it, but they’re still hidden behind sunglasses.
Somehow, though, the friend and family bonds that come in the deer stand haven’t yet translated to noodling expeditions.
“I try to get my dad to go with me and he’s like, ‘Y’all are ignorant. What’s wrong with you?’” he says. “He was with me when I caught that big fish and I’m sitting there still shaking, adrenaline pumping. My arm’s bleeding and he looks at me and says, ‘So is that still fun?’”
No Slowdown In Sight
Koe’s love for the outdoors is obvious, but the topic never makes it into his music. Mexican prostitutes, dysfunctional relationships, and public intoxication arrests? Sure. The simple pleasures of fishing? Not so much.
“I just feel like there’s too many folks right now that are writing about it,” he says. “I mean what’s country music? It is hunting, fishing, loving every day, you know?
“I like to keep it separate, although I get a lot of my inspiration from it. Especially deer hunting, I’m writing songs, I’m thinking about older stuff. Maybe I should write one about it, I don’t know.”
For now, Koe is content entertaining audiences across the U.S. and Europe with his trademark brand of bad-behavior country rock. He’s wrapping up his fall tour in November, and the instant the plane touches down he’ll be back in a deer stand.
“As soon as we get back, we’ll go straight up to my place in Illinois for the end of the rut,” he says. “Hopefully I’ll get another nice Illinois deer, then come back and hunt Texas for the rest of the year.”
While music is his passion, the outdoors is where Koe Wetzel finds peace. And if that means occasionally going to bed early and sober, he’s happy to make that sacrifice.