After many past visits to Chicago, Brandon Lancaster has a favorite activity to do in the city.
“I’d say definitely my favorite thing that we’ve done there is going to Second City and just laughing,” he told TPM earlier this month. “Other than that, just hanging out. I love Chicago!”
Lancaster and his band LANCO will be returning to the city on Friday, February 28, when they play Joe’s Live in Rosemont on the second night of their tour in support of their new record We’re Gonna Make It. The new record was released via Riser House on January 17.
The band has played Joe’s Live a handful of times, but have also made appearances at Lollapalooza and Windy City Smokeout.
“It was early, early in our career. It was cool,” said Lancaster of Lollapalooza. “There’s a really great energy about it. It’s also fun to go to a multi-genre festival to kind of represent country. It’s kind of a lot of responsibility because there aren’t many country acts at those festivals so you kind of feel you’re representing home base.”
Other than comedy clubs, Lancaster said he also enjoys the local museums and the food, especially the pizza.
“Obviously get some pizza, some deep-dish pizza,” he said. “I don’t even love deep dish pizza anywhere except Chicago. I’ve learned my lesson with that. If you get it anywhere else, it’s kind of a no go but in Chicago, as cliché as it is, it’s a real thing.”
LANCO’s beginnings
It was 2016 that the band made their Lollapalooza debut, roughly a year after they formed.
Despite going to different colleges, Lancaster and his bandmates met through the Nashville music community and quickly became friends. The band was officially formed in 2015. In the beginning, LANCO performed in a carpet warehouse where drummer Tripp Howell worked.
“We became friends first really, but I was trying to put a band together,” Lancaster said. “We were just buddies who started playing music. It was a real organic start.”
It was 2016 when the band released their first four-song EP called Extended Play and 2018 saw their first full-length record in Hallelujah Nights, both released via Arista Nashville. Hallelujah Nights debuted atop Billboard’s country charts and LANCO has seven different award nominations, winning the Academy of Country Music Awards’ New Duo or Group of the Year award.
“You start a band with your friends, you know, and it was organic,” Lancaster said. “And when you do that and come from such an honest place, just your friends hanging out and starting a band, then a few years down the road there are things that are unfathomable – like a number one Billboard album and these nominations and you’re on the red carpet next to Taylor Swift and you’re like ‘What is our life?!’
“I think the biggest takeaway that you learn is that success and all those metrics – number ones and charts – those aren’t real things. They are representative of people listening to you.”
LANCO toured alongside country legends and active stars like Miranda Lambert, Luke Combs and Dierks Bentley.
“The first time I saw Luke, he was playing to eight people and we were both kind of just on the up and coming,” Lancaster said about the tour with Combs. “So, that tour with him, just a couple years earlier we were both playing in bars and then we’re out playing arenas with him. It’s just wild.”
LANCO released the Lessons Learned EP in 2019, their last with Arista Nashville. In 2021, they self-released Honky-Tonk Hippies before joining Riser House in 2023 and releasing their fourth EP – Run, Run, Baby – that October.
We’re Gonna Make It
The band has seen many ups and downs since their debut record in 2018, and those experiences are explored on their sophomore album We’re Gonna Make.
“As far as writing goes, we just have more and more lived experiences that we can draw from as opposed to being in your early 20’s,” Lancaster said. “Just year after year, different circumstances and different battles that you face – being able to write about that and put it into song.”
The song “Honey, I Lost My Job Today” is loosely about the band facing unemployment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world in 2020 while “Low Class Lovers” is about celebrating where you are in life. The title track is about making it past the hard times and becoming better for going through those experiences
Members of LANCO experienced major life changes in between records, with the biggest perhaps being everybody in the band becoming fathers. The song “We Grew Up Together” explores the group and their children.
“As your teaching your kids lessons, you’re also learning lessons,” Lancaster said. “As you’re trying to teach them patience, your patience is also being tested. As they’re learning to talk, you’re learning certain ways to not talk anymore. There’s this aspect of growth.
“And even if you don’t have kids this song can make you think about your parents. At a certain point in your adult life, you look back and realize your parents weren’t these perfect people that had it all together. They were just people that had me and they were young and doing the best hey could to figure it out. They were growing up as I was growing up.”
Reception to We’re Gonna Make It has been positive according to Lancaster. As the band has grown, so have their fans and the new record is reflective of that.
“I think the coolest thing immediately releasing these songs from the album is these fans also have grown up and gone through a lot of the same things since then that we’ve gone through,” he said. “Being able to write that soundtrack to people’s lives when its our soundtrack as well has been really, really cool to watch with this album.”
Tour and more
Lancaster said he didn’t watch the Grammy’s this year and had little to say about the show overall, but he did praise Chappell Roan for her performance.
“I thought it was awesome to hear an entire room of musicians singing her song,” he said before mentioning her 2024 Lollapalooza appearance. “I heard of her forever ago, you know, your favorite artist’s favorite artist kind of thing, but that Lolla performance was one that really kind of made a statement. I saw that performance too and was like, ‘Oh my gosh – she did it.'”
As for the tour, LANCO is hitting 11 cities through the end of March, with stops as far west as Montana but most east of the Mississippi River. In 2024, LANCO played some shows but no headlining dates or tours as the band was mostly focused on finishing the new record.
“This is really the first time we’ve been out on a headlining tour in like a year and half,” said Lancaster. “We’re just excited to get out there and visit some of those markets like Chicago, like Minneapolis, where we haven’t been in a couple years. We have really great fanbases there. So just getting to go back and it’s like seeing an old friend when you go to some of these places.”
Read the full transcript of our interview with Lancaster here.
