When artists release their major label debut albums, they’re often still fairly early in their careers, working towards winning over the industry, establishing their reputations and introducing themselves to the public. But Louie the Singer is dropping his first project on MCA Nashville as a nearly 20-year veteran of the grind. And perseverance has given him an unwavering sense of self-determination.
Case in point: Louie’s contribution to the storehouse of country songs proudly proclaiming country identity doesn’t conform to the familiar template.
Countless white artists have sung about where they came from, how they were raised and how they live as proof of their authenticity. There’s often an air of defiance that suggests they’re confronting imagined doubters.
Louie, who’s Mexican-American, really did write his song, “Come and Take It,” in response to being told that he didn’t belong in the genre.
“They say I ain’t country,” he sings, “but my people started this thing they call country.”
A country radio station in Louie’s hometown of Fort Worth had categorically refused to put his music on the air, insisting, “‘We don’t play country-rap, we don’t play the hip-hop stuff,’ ” he recalls. “Pretty much just dogging me out.”
Never mind that country’s white male stars have been scoring hits by leaning heavily on hip-hop and R&B for decades, as Louie’s well aware.
“I think it’s just different now that a Mexican that looks like me is doing it,” he says.
Louie the Singer speaks with Jewly Hight at the studios of Nashville Public Radio.
Louie’s heavily tattooed, and his crisp cowboy hat rests on the table next to him. He knows he’s got history on his side; the first cowboys in Texas looked like him: “Vaqueros, man! If y’all want to talk about culture and everything, they were the first ones. I’m not here to say we’re taking it back — I’m just here to remind y’all, it was meant for everybody.”
Louie, born Luis Alfonso Palacios II, grew up on country music, along with Tejano, pop, hip-hop and R&B. He went through b-boy and R&B loverman phases, and developed independent hustle in his teens, passing out mix CDs, flyering for his own shows and enlisting his mom to help him sell merch.
But he soon learned to be wary of the music industry.
When he was about to become a father at 18, the company he’d signed with pushed him to abandon the baby and focus on promotional duties. He refused. He tried other deals only to be told that he’d need to seize opportunities without expecting pay — a luxury an artist with kids, who wasn’t independently wealthy, couldn’t afford.
Louie turned to selling drugs to survive. And once he was incarcerated, the reminders of his past promise were haunting. First, a guest performer at the prison recognized him. Years back, Louie had become his source of inspiration when he played a show at the guy’s high school.
Then Louie watched the Billboard Awards and saw the heights to which Becky G, and Leon Bridges, artists once part of his circle, had risen, and how far he’d been left behind: “I see Becky [G] giving a Billboard Award to Cardi B ,and I break down like, ‘Man, I could have been there.’ And it goes to commercial and Leon Bridges is in a Target commercial. He was my backup singer.”
It may be Bridge’s Gap TV ad that Louie’s remembering. Either way, he was in despair, and made a phone call: “I’m like, ‘Mom, it’s over. I ruined it.’ “
He really did feel a sense of finality. But after his release, he began baring his soul in his songwriting and confessional social media posts, and saw his audience grow. “I would only make a little bit of money on like TikTok for the day, like maybe 80 bucks, a hundred dollars,” he remembers. “That was it. It was better than making a thousand dollars doing the other thing. I was like, ‘Man, I think this is the start.’”
It wasn’t as though Louie decided to reinvent himself as a contemporary country artist. That’s just how friends and followers began to perceive him — and how he came to see himself — once he took up heavier subject matter.
“Music has always been my language,” he explains. “And as I became a man, the things I wanted to say were only able to be said this way. I wanted a talk about my mom, wanted to talk about the trials and tribulations that we have. Or how much I love her. I want to talk about my dad, about losing him. I wanted to talk about losing the homies, want to talk about not going to work tomorrow. I wanna talk about my kids, baby mamas.
“Sounds like country to me, you know?”
When Louie sang about struggling beneath the emotional burdens of life, he was struck by the gruff expressions of gratitude he received from some of the toughest-looking members of his audience, including a “big old, tatted-up vato” who came to a meet-and-greet. “‘I lost my son six months ago and tried to take myself,’” he told Louie. ” ‘Your song came on one of those days. Thank you. You’re the reason I’m alive.’ “
Louie drew crowds to Texas honky-tonks and booked his own tours, but kept his distance from Nashville. Eventually, several record labels took note of the response he was getting. The then-CEO of one, Cindy Mabe, caught one of his sold-out shows and was impressed by how he broke up a fight between two guys flashing gang signs.
“I told them to stop and dap each other, a Black guy and Mexican guy,” he says. “[Mabe] goes, ‘Louie, they’re listening!’”
He signed a record deal with her company, on the condition that he wouldn’t have to conform to Nashville’s expectations of what a Hispanic artist should be like: “I’m not saying I’m the most country person, I’m not saying I am the most Mexican. I’m saying I’m both, and maybe I’m right in the middle. I don’t know. I just know that they’re not changin’ me.”
Louie had already embraced the role of speaking for people like him who aren’t always heard in country music or American society. And with his major label debut, “One for the Hometown,” he’s doing that from a bigger platform.
“I’ll be at places on Music Row and I’ve had young men walk up to me,” he says. “They’re like, ‘We’re Mexican country singers pursuing music. We follow you, man. You are opening it for us, bro.’ “
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