How Good Looks finally got a break

For this band, there is no plan b. And as they keep building, they seem to have faith that the right people will come — all in good time.

Conveniently, when I talk to the band's frontman Tyler Jordan, I learn that he's just come from laying the foundations of a new shed. “It’s been days of fucking digging and laying down gravel and all these cement blocks,” he tells me, bringing his camera outside to show me the finished beginnings of the structure. “It feels pretty good.” It’s not, I think to myself, all that dissimilar from the way Jordan built Good Looks either.

The Austin-based indie-rock outfit formed around one of those beautiful amalgamations of worlds that tend to create the very best type of artistic projects. For Jordan, music was always “the path.” “I wanted to be a musician since I was a teenager," he explains. "Since I was 16, I had laid out my plan, and I never got off the ride." Bouncing around the Texas and indie music scenes in the time following his graduation, he wandered in and out of bands and circles over the years. At times, he tells me, he thought about leaving the industry, but years kept going by and he could never quite quit.

At a pilgrimage to the Kerrville Folk Festival in 2015 — one of many stints he’d had at the event — Jordan met his now-bandmate Jake Ames. A close friendship grew out of casual playing sessions, and by 2017, a formal project was put into motion. As bands do, they went through several iterations before arriving at the formation of Good Looks that exists today. The early years of the project mostly consisted of getting the basics right. Jordan and Ames tried on different names and sounds for size and they tinkered with the band's membership — all of them have kept their day jobs, causing one early bassist to leave given his schedule as a lawyer was too restrictive – before finally settling on their current lineup up back in 2018.

That year, the group also went into the studio to cut their first record, Bummer Year. It’s a record of tried-and-true indie fare done at its absolute best. It deals with high-flying themes like politics and societal anxieties through mundane vignettes, a feature of Good Looks’ writing that persists as the band’s strong suit. Those angsty undercurrents weren’t just for show, though. Rather, they were, at the time, perhaps the most vulnerable representation of Jordan’s frame of mind that he had put on tape to date.

“I was so down in it,” Jordan tells me of the Bummer Year. “When I was writing those songs, I was playing in three bands and just really burned out. You’re just banging your head against the wall trying to make it happen. You’re like, ‘I believe in what I’m doing. I think this is good, but it’s not going anywhere. I don’t know what steps to take.’”

That disaffection with the slow churn of the music industry was captured stunningly on “Vision Boards,” a track from Bummer Year that reads as much like a warped prayer as anything else: “If the answer’s in yourself, well, the failure is your fault / I’ve got my vision board, no, it’s just not working out / Try to manifest it more, no, it’s just not working out.” Jordan flip flops between an endless cycle of disaffection, dissatisfaction, and hope, a combination that is perhaps the most apt emotional description of life in the modern music industry that there is.

For all the hard work and hoping, for many of the band’s early years, Good Looks couldn’t ever quite catch a break. While the production of Bummer Year was in full swing by 2018, its release plan got derailed by Covid. In 2022, when the project finally came to fruition, Ames was caught in a freak accident crossing the street outside the venue where the band hosted their album release party. The accident left him with a fractured skull and tailbone and had him sent to the ICU, where he spent months recovering, bandmates in tow.

After Ames’ accident, Good Looks went into hibernation. Their first tour was cancelled, and all musical projects got put on pause in service of caring for their friend. “Jake’s accident was really intense,” Jordan reflects. The recovery process, he remembers, was long and nonlinear. “He probably wasn’t totally himself for like six months maybe. Even when we started playing and we were out there again, he was still saying crazy stuff. It never affected the playing, but it was the speech and the emotions. That one was hard to go through.”

But just as Ames seemed to be on the mend and the group started to find its footing, disaster struck again. In 2023, on their first day back on the road for a short run of the American South and Midwest, their tour van was rear ended on the highway and went up in flames. Though the accident was tragic, the group refused to be deterred. Rather than cancelling another leg, they stayed the course. “We immediately got out there again and faced the fear of being back on the road,” Jordan explains. In doing so, they found themselves uplifted not only by their own resilience, but by their community as well.

“That one was really beautiful in a lot of ways because — and I know the guys won’t agree with me on this — we lost everything but then got to replace it in this really intentional way,” Jordan says. “When you play music for years, you just gather gear, and you just have what you have based on trial and error and picking up what’s cheap along the way. But this time it was a total reset. You got to really think about every piece — and we even had friends donate some stuff.”

“It’s a really challenging scene,” Jordan confesses. “I think it can be really difficult to go from playing there on a local level and getting to the top of that pile and then to transition into national territory. It’s hard to get out of there. A lot of people don’t tour, a lot of people get stuck. They call it the velvet rut.”

The “velvet rut” adage is, today, ironic, not bearing quite the same weight it used to. While Austin may once have been — and, musically, still is in some ways — an undercurrent of New York, Chicago, Nashville, and LA, big tech migrations and tax breaks have started to alter the socioeconomic fabric of the city at a rapid rate. As Jordan says: “Everything got so bougie.”

Jordan has now left the city for greener pastures, namely those of dive bars, open spaces, and cheap Mexican food. He spends his days in Lockhart, an hour outside the Austin bustle, enjoying the simplicity. And yet, he assures me, Good Looks is still an Austin band at heart and in practice.

These are dichotomies Good Looks faces head-on with Lived Here For A While, the long-awaited follow up to Bummer Year that dropped this summer on quality Austin label Keeled Scales. Written even before Bummer Year was released, the record chronicles Jordan — who is credited as the group’s main lyricist, with Ames and Dan Duszynski taking on production roles — continuing to grapple with the complexities of the places he calls home, the people he’s loved in those places, and even his own frame of reference.

“White Out,” for example, deals with the changing façade of Austin most explicitly, meditating unabashedly on rapid gentrification. Other tracks are more subtle. On “If It’s Gone” — and on many other tracks across Good Looks’ discography — Jordan wrestles his own spirituality, a theme I almost miss on first listen but pick up once I realise the droning vocals that fade out with the track are not, in fact, ad-libs but “oms.”

In much of the South, faith runs strong. The faith of Jordan’s youth ran stronger than most. His early entanglement with Church culture came by way of his mother, who, he says, was deeply fundamentalist. “It’s really hard to talk about my family without talking about religion,” he says. “I know a lot of people grew up in Christian settings, but I don’t want to undersell it. It was really weird.” Church for Jordan happened twice a week until he moved out of the house. Its rules were everywhere. And even after he moved out, he explains, spirituality still filled his subconscious. To process youth and family, then, he also had to process his faith.

“These days it’s very different,” he says of his spiritual practices now. As “If It’s Gone” indicates, his flirtations with alternative powers have been directed towards the teaches of Zen Buddhism. “That’s where most of my spirituality is. It’s very focused on this life and happiness in this life and not as much about the afterlife, which I don’t think I could ever do again because of what I went through as a kid.”

For Good Looks to have persisted through all they have and still come out kicking, there must be something to it. There’s little else that could explain their ability to rise from ashes than sheer grit and, well, faith. Lived Here For A While contains, after all, as many moments of budding joy as it does moments of discord and disgruntlement — a new turn for the group. “Vaughn,” for example, sees Jordan embrace a new romantic beginning with his now-partner, for whom the track is named. Rather than forcing a declaration of romantic grandeur, the track is a celebration of being happy, just happy, and that being enough.

That contentedness — combined with a little bit of faith and a little bit of, hopefully, good luck — is what is keeping Jordan fuelled now. And as he and the band set out to promote Lived Here For A While, he seems fairly confident that if they keep building brick by brick, the rest will come.