Rising country singer Keller Cox graduated from Texas A&M University with a construction science degree and a full-time job waiting for him at a construction company in Austin.
He chose music instead.
Construction ran in the family. His grandfather worked in the marble business. His father is a home builder. Cox had followed the same path through college. But, somewhere in the middle of earning his degree, he "got the music bug." The degree? It's still rolled up in the tube Texas A&M gave him.
"I just decided to finish it out," Cox said at The Tennessean, adding that instead of using his degree he is now focused on "building a music career."
For the past three and a half years, he has been taking monthly trips to Nashville to write songs and build
relationships.
"This town runs on coffees and late-night hangs," Cox said. "It's really not coffee to get something done or hangs to get something done. It's just being in proximity to other people... Showing up, I think, is half the battle."
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That time writing has also changed how Cox sees the world. His "Care To Look" project came from a pool of more than 100 songs.
Cox compares songwriting to buying a new car. Before you own it, you barely notice the model. Then suddenly you see the same one at stoplights and in parking lots.
"I'd never seen songs before," he said. "When I started writing them, I saw them everywhere, like in conversations with strangers, in a movie, in a beautiful sunset or something in nature."
In February, Cox took listeners further inside his songwriting that process with "Care To Look (Between The Lines)," an 11-track deluxe project pairing songs with commentary about how they were written.
His latest release, "Way Things Work," with The Castellows, came after Cox watched two friends end their relationship. Their breakup broke his heart, too, and writing the song became a way to process it.
"I felt like I had something to say about the situation," he said. "I needed to process it too."
Cox already knew The Castellows. In 2024, he opened for the three sisters on a 13-show tour across nine states, mostly performing solo acoustic tunes. The time on the road turned into a friendship. They began writing songs together.
The Texas singer-songwriter is already working on his next chapter, an EP with a title track called "The New Sound." After growing up "strictly on 2000s country," Cox says he's recently been discovering the music of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty.
"I've kind of just had this musical — you could call it — renaissance," Cox said. "I'm just discovering all this new music right now and it's really, really coming out in my writing."
Bryan West is a music reporter at The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network. Follow him on Instagram, TikTok and X as @BryanWestTV.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: How Keller Cox traded a construction career for country music
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