TLDR
Texas-born songwriter Troy Cartwright is quietly building a three-lane career in Nashville, using his “Ten Year Town” podcast and new EP “Etc. All the Rest” to turn childhood memories and industry pressure into a long-game country narrative.
In a city obsessed with overnight success stories, Troy Cartwright is choosing the slower, stranger path. He is a full-time Nashville songwriter, an independent artist fighting for his own voice, and the host of “Ten Year Town,” a podcast that pulls back the curtain on what it really costs to chase country hits.
The Texas native’s latest chapter is “Etc. All the Rest,” an EP that arrives as his first release since the 2024 album “Bygones.” Raised in Dallas but emotionally tethered to the vastness of West Texas, Cartwright leans into that landscape. The songs are thick with open-road imagery, fading motel rooms, and the kind of distance that turns a life into a story.
Cartwright says he has always gravitated toward records that feel rooted in place. He points to Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” and Tom Petty’s “Southern Accents” as guiding lights. “A lot of records that I have always loved for years and years are ones that have a sense of place,” he explains. “This EP is a part of a larger record that’s coming out this year, but I just wanted to make something that had a sense of place.”
That instinct started early. When he was six, his great-grandfather died in Dallas after a lifetime in Lubbock. The long drive west for the funeral became his first road trip and his first encounter with those impossibly wide horizons. West Texas is flat and huge, and the sky feels oversized. Cartwright still carries that memory, and it now colors the emotional weather of “Etc. All the Rest.”
The title track plays like a heartbreak call from the edge. A man wakes up hungover in a hotel, reaching for his partner with only one phrase he can manage: “I love you, baby, et cetera, all the rest.” Cartwright wrote it on the way to a show, sparked by a friend’s story of coming to in a Palm Springs hotel room. The lyrics poured out quickly, a reminder of how often country songs start as private confessions between friends.
His road to Nashville ran through the Texas circuits of the early 2010s, where he shared stages with Wade Bowen, Randy Rogers, and Josh Abbott. A full-length LP cut with producer Wes Sharon helped him land a publishing deal and, eventually, a move to Music City in 2017. The first time he stepped into Nashville’s Red Door bar, he realized songwriters had built their own little universe there. “It was like I had crash-landed on the Island of Misfit Toys, and I was home,” he recalls. “These are my people, you know?”
Those people now shape his livelihood. Cartwright’s songs have been recorded by Ryan Hurd, Josh Abbott, and even Nickelback, proof that his writing can slip between commercial lanes. Yet he also wanted to archive the emotional grind behind that success. That impulse became “Ten Year Town,” named for the old Nashville warning that it can take a decade to break through.
With more than a hundred episodes released, the podcast has evolved into a running diary of Cartwright’s world. He brings in fellow writers to talk money, failure, small victories, and the strange math of measuring a life in cuts, streams, and tour dates. He has said that hosting those conversations is now as vital to his music as his own lived experience, because the stories around the songs keep reshaping how he writes.
There is a sense of journey in “Ten Year Town,” and it is both personal and professional. The show documents his peers as they hustle for room on playlists and radio, but it also quietly tracks Cartwright’s own pivot from promising regional act to Nashville insider who still refuses to let go of his West Texas sky. In a business that rushes artists toward the next single, he is building something slower: a body of work, a podcast archive, and a reputation as the songwriter who tells the truth about how long it really takes.
If the old rule is that Nashville is a ten-year town, Cartwright seems intent on proving that the first decade is only the prologue. “Etc. All the Rest” feels like a promise that there is more story, and more songs, still coming.
Do you connect more with Cartwright’s West Texas storytelling, his insider songwriter grind, or the candid conversations on “Ten Year Town”? Share which part of his journey speaks loudest to you.
