On the way to rehearsal at South Austin’s Space ATX, Jesse Daniel stops to check out a billboard advertising his new album, Countin’ the Miles. His look, both in the larger-than-life photo looming above and now, on the street below, is vintage seventies country—Levi’s, serious sideburns, and a pearl-snap shirt. Later, while he and his band practice playing in preparation for his album-release show at the long-standing downtown venue Antone’s the next night, Daniel channels that old-school vibe into his music. It’s stripped down and propulsive and feels authentic. In that small rehearsal room, guitar slung over his shoulder, he gets ready to face the crowd at a pivotal performance in his career.

Before Daniel and Jodi Lyford, his fiancée and bandmate, moved to San Marcos, in 2019, they called the small California town of Ben Lomond home. It’s about 75 miles south of San Francisco, nestled in the Santa Cruz Mountains and lush with blackberry vines and coast pines. Before Silicon Valley tech money started replacing working-class residents, Daniel says, it was an idyllic place to be young.

“We were the last of the generation of kids who grew up without phones and computers,” he says. “We were just kind of wild, hitchhiking everywhere and living in the river all the time, going up in the mountains, into the valleys, and down to the beach.”

Daniel’s mom taught welding. His dad worked for a paint company and played in blues, classic rock, and country bands on the side. When his dad’s drummer couldn’t make a show, Daniel would fill in. He says there’s a “big culture of music” in and around Ben Lomond, and he listened to the country and Americana radio station KPIG-FM, which exposed him to Texas musicians such as Joe Ely, Waylon Jennings, and Robert Earl Keen. “There’s a niche appreciation for Texas songwriters in my area, so guys like Robert Earl were always coming through town.”

As a teen he got into playing punk music, which he says isn’t as different from country as some might think. “They are sonically different, but they’re similar in that they’re both emotive ways of getting your story across,” Daniel explains. “A lot of the subject matter is really similar, actually. It’s about heartbreak or anger or hardship, though punk is a more youthful expression of it.”

And Daniel has seen his share of hardship. He started drinking when he was around thirteen years old. By the time he got to high school, he was “a full-blown alcoholic,” sneaking booze into school and drinking all day to maintain his buzz. He eventually became addicted to meth and heroin, which were prevalent in the area; those idyllic blackberry vines obscured some of the misery that could be found there. He was in and out of rehab and detox facilities and did a few stints in jail. Cops knew him, and at times he lived on the streets or in his truck. “Did a life’s worth of living in a short block of time,” he sang in his 2020 song “Son of the San Lorenzo,” whose title refers to the river that runs through Ben Lomond. It’s about the years he spent lost in his addictions, a period of time he says lasted about five years but felt like twenty five. Throughout it all, he held fast to one dream: To become a country musician.

Eventually, with the help of Lyford, whom he met in 2016, he got clean. “Country music was my salvation,” he says. “I could channel the things I wasn’t wanting to face into my songwriting, going back to my childhood and the hard stuff I’d gone through. It wasn’t aggressive and angry like punk rock. It’s more of a wholesome, cathartic type of music, and I loved it.”

Daniel says sobriety has profoundly shaped his music. Strangers come up to him after shows to tell him how his songs have helped them understand their own issues with addiction or given them a deeper insight into someone else’s struggle. “That’s the ultimate form of redemption,” he says. “I caused a lot of havoc in people’s lives and in my own life, and now I get to use that as a positive weapon in combating addiction and giving people a piece of hope.”

On his three previous albums, Daniel collaborated with a coproducer, but for Countin’ the Miles, he wanted to create a “one hundred percent Jesse Daniel” record. The songs are gritty and true to the country music he listened to as a kid. On “Tomorrow’s Good Ol’ Days,” a duet with Ben Haggard (Merle’s son), they sing, “They’re buying up the farmland and the dirt road’s being paved.” As someone who lives in Central Texas and is pained every time a new sign for a gas station or a master-planned development goes up in a field, that lyric hits deep. Daniel doesn’t get political, though; he wants his music to appeal to listeners who lean left, right, or somewhere in between.

When Daniel and Lyford moved to Texas five years ago, he didn’t quite grasp the depth of the “don’t California my Texas” sentiment held by many locals. “The California thing has been my cross to bear,” he says of the flack he’s gotten. He maintains that his little mountain hometown is closer to Texas in attitude and lifestyle than people might think.

“It’s not a bunch of Tesla-driving people who look down their noses at everybody,” he says. Same as here, tech money is starting to push working-class folks out there and is helping turn dirt roads into highways. “I’ve seen people getting displaced in my own home state, and I understand it and I have total sympathy for it. I’m not trying to drive the rent in Texas up or anything.”

Daniel will always be a son of the San Lorenzo, as he sings, but when he gets off the road, he now heads home to Texas. He takes pride in the fact that Texas musicians like Jon Randall, who runs the label Big Loud Texas with Miranda Lambert, are featured on the new album. Ronnie Huckaby, from George Strait’s Ace in the Hole Band, plays keys, and Gene Elders, another Ace in the Hole long timer, who passed away this spring, plays fiddle on “Comin’ Apart at the Seams.”

Daniel could have done much of what he’s doing now back in Ben Lomond, but he wanted to live in a place where he would be surrounded by people who would push him to be better, like the songwriters he idolized as a kid. “Somebody said there’s no glory to being a hero in your ow backyard,” says Daniel. “You have to go out and try and conquer the world. My whole goal is just to make good music.”

During their rehearsal for the Antone’s show, Daniel and his bandmates launch into “Countin’ the Miles,” stopping at various junctures to sort out the tempo, feeling one another out as they get ready for the show at Antone’s.

“My bad,” says Daniel after hitting an off note while running through the song a second time. “I went kinda high on that last one. Let’s do it again.”

They give it another go. After that third time, they’re ready.