On Friday, local Americana singer-songwriter Dustin Brown is dropping a new single to digital platforms, co-releasing it with collaborators Billy Hartman and Rachel Cole. “Ballerina” is a beautifully world-weary rumination on wandering hearts and roads that never end. I caught up with Brown over the phone the other night. He had just flown in from Denver and was recuperating from a snowboarding shoulder injury suffered the day before. While minor — but enough to complicate his day job as an industrial mechanic, not to mention playing guitar — it was the kind that made him reconsider his hobby, especially since the snowpack wasn’t that great.
“They didn’t have a whole lot of trails open, but that was the day they opened up a few more,” Brown recalled. “That’s when [my injury] happened. I went out there trying to get as much done as I could … but I don’t know. Maybe my snowboarding days are done if I can’t really hold my arm up to play guitar.”
Brown, 33, has good reason to think of his guitar playing. The self-titled album he put out in March 2025 landed in the Americana Music Chart’s Top 40, and since then, he’s steadily bridged the gap from hours-long, covers-forward, uninterested-listener brewpub gigs to the ones where he gets to play his own songs for people who have actually paid a cover to come see him. Still, even with momentum and the right trajectory, there’s a lot of grind and opportunity costs between where you are and where you hope to be. Sometimes the cost is a snowboarding hobby.
I don’t know how good Brown is at snowboarding, but “Ballerina” suggests that his real talent lies in writing sad songs and haunting melodies — his self-titled album has a lot of these misty-eyed gems, in particular “Burn” — and “Ballerina,” bolstered by the words and voices of Hartman and Cole, is a great showcase for his ability to put a lot of emotional weight inside a few lines. The song spun from Brown’s own observations about life on the road and came to be out of his friendship with Hartman.
“Billy and I have been friends for years and played dozens of shows together, but we’d never collaborated on anything,” Brown said. “It was just one of those things, like we should’ve written a song together by now.”
A couple of years ago, at a post-show hang following a gig in Temple, a friend at the house threw out a line that inspired Brown and Hartman to write around it. “I picked up the guitar, made up a melody, made up some more lines.”
Brown and Hartman traded verses back and forth over text for about two years, but after the back-and-forth, they finally booked some studio time this past summer at Melody Mountain Ranch in Stephenville, working with producer Ben Hussey (American Aquarium, Six Market Blvd.), who had recorded Brown’s self-titled album, as well as Hartman’s Divine Town album. The way Brown describes the song’s genesis, it was in a perpetual state of “almost there” until the inclusion of Rachel Cole, an Austin-based songwriter mentored by the late Todd Snider (and signed to his indie label, Aimless Records), who sang the second verse’s vocals.
Photo by Katie Langley
“We brought Rachel in to have a third perspective in this song,” Brown said, “and the song really came together from there.”
Along with Hunter Napier on drums, Gus Miller on mandolin, and lead guitarist Joel Allen, Brown, Cole, and Hartman all contributed guitar.
“Ballerina” is spare but sumptuous, just three verses and four chords, a little over two minutes long, the lyrics borne on the doleful washes of Allen’s slide guitar, drifting over the characters like late-night headlights on a lonesome country road. Three people, each staring down roads with no end in sight, look at the pasts that brought them to these moments of debilitating ennui. In Brown’s verse, “Tomorrow is a tightrope I’m over / And if you’re already going down / I’ll be waiting on the shoulder / For you and spring to come around.”
As Cole sings, “Mama always said that I was tough / Made a promise, then I broke it / Now, all I need is a little luck,” Hartman “went and ran off with the circus / Making up for what I lack / The carousel with no purpose / As the train runs out of track.”
Waves of regret swell inside each voice, deepening in the subtext between each line. Miller’s mandolin limns the shadows of Hussey’s baroque production like a candle flickering against the raindrop-patter of Napier’s brushes. The song is as atmospheric and gorgeous as it is sad. And, sadly, Dustin Brown might have to sideline his snowboarding hobby if he and his friends keep making music like this — sometimes the bad times sound too good.
