The artists formerly known as LoCash Cowboys are charting higher and having more fun as LOCASH.
Back when I taught film studies courses at the University of Houston, I always shared with my screenwriting students the same words of wisdom my mentor — the late, great Tom Bell at Loyola University in New Orleans — shared with me: “Just because something really happened, either to you or anyone else, that doesn’t necessarily mean people will believe it. You still face the challenge of making it seem as plausible as any well-written work of fiction.”
So when it came time to interview Preston Brust and Chris Lucas of LOCASH, the country duo formerly known as LoCash Cowboys, I once again took Tom Bell’s words to heart and began with this:
Maybe someday they’ll make a LOCASH biopic. Well, I have often heard that you guys were in a restaurant one night, and one of you wrote a new logo on a napkin. But it didn’t have the word Cowboys on it. Still, you wanted to keep the logo, so that’s why you became LOCASH as opposed to LoCash Cowboys. Now, how much of that is true?
“About 50 percent of that is true,” Preston Brust replied with a hearty laugh. “We were sitting on the bus, actually. That’s the only part that's wrong. We were sitting on the bus one day and we said, ‘Hey, we need a new logo. We've got a new single, we’ve got a new record label, and we’ve got a new energy about it.’
“This was at the time we were releasing a song called ‘I Love This Life.’ And so there was a napkin sitting on the bus. And so we’re driving down the road and we start messing around with this logo idea. And I was getting ready to put cowboys on there when Chris said, ‘Leave it off.’ And I was like, ‘Okay.’ So we turned it in and they said, ‘Whoa, you guys changed your name.’ And we weren’t really even changing our name. We were just simplifying the logo, and everyone loved the idea that we became LOCASH instead of LoCash Cowboys, so we ran with it. It was a big talking point — and it turned out to be the right move.”
After the name change, you became even more successful as a duo, correct?
“Somehow we did,” Brust admitted. “Maybe we should’ve changed the name a long ago.”
I recently caught up with LOCASH just as they were preparing to join Trace Adkins, Clay Walker, Whey Jennings, and several other notables for the 2025 Country Cruising Cruise. (The music festival at sea, operated by Flying Dutchman Travel, will sail October 27 through November 1, launching from Fort Lauderdale with ports of call in Key West and Nassau, Bahamas.) They were eager to talk about songs from their latest album, Bet the Farm; their new record label, Galaxy Record Label; and the life they love as country music stars. Here are some highlights from our conversation.
They’re Good Ol’ “Hometown” Boys
Cowboys & Indians: I very much enjoyed your latest single, “Hometown Home.” But I have to say the thought did cross my mind: What if she had said no? I mean, the woman you guys apparently are singing the song to. What if she’d said, “No, I want to live somewhere else”? You think somebody somewhere might be writing or recording a response song to that?
Chris Lucas: [Laughs] No, I don’t think anybody’s writing that. But I do think that in the song, if you listen to it, we sing, “We’ll go wherever you want to go, or we could just stay here.” My wife wanted to move to Tampa. So I listened to her after she said that, and now it’s our hometown home. That’s why, when we were writing it, we said, “If you really want to, we can, but we could just stay here.” Like, wherever you planned on already.
That’s why I remember having that conversation with the boys while we were writing it. And we wanted to make sure, just in case, to leave it open.
Raising a Glass to the Past
C&I: Well, it’s a great song, and I love the video that goes with it, too. And more recently, “Wrong Hearts,” which takes a fairly unique approach, I think, to looking at your former girlfriends — sort of like Willie Nelson did with “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.”
Chris: We were just sitting there with Josh Thompson. Actually, it was during COVID, and so it was over Zoom — and with Matt Dregstrom. Josh had this idea — he’s such a great and unique and eccentric songwriter. It kind of follows the storyline of something like “God Bless the Broken Road” by Rascal Flatts.
We were just talking about how sometimes there are detours, and sometimes there are broken hearts along the way, but it’s all part of that journey that gets you to the right love and the true love — the one you’re with forever. So instead of being bitter about that journey, you kind of turn around and drink a toast to it. Say, “You know what? Here’s to everybody that came along before you,” and that’s the whole storyline. No reason to be bitter about it. Just move on and say, “Hey, here’s to you and not to us.”
Fan Favorites and Hidden Gems
C&I: When you are performing in concert, are you ever surprised by what people in the audience ask you to sing? Do they ever shout out titles of deep cuts from your earlier albums — and you go, “Oh, wow, I didn’t think anybody remembered that one”?
Preston Brust: Yeah, I think there’s always all that that sneaks back in over the course of your career. A lot of people talk about the song “Till the Wheels Fall Off” from our The Fighters album. People still talk about the song “Fighters.” And “Brothers” — that’s another one, man. It was the title track from the album before our current one. That hit a lot of people in the heart, too.
We have so many songs that could’ve been singles. Sometimes you look back over your career and say, “Man, I wish we would’ve gone with that song or this song.” But you can’t do that. You just have to keep striving forward. It’s fun when fans come up and say, “Man, I love that song ‘Brothers.’ It’s the theme song of me and my brother.” That warms your heart a little bit.
The Moment They Knew
C&I: Do the two of you remember a concert or a recording session or whatever when you both looked at each other and said, “Yeah, we can actually make a living at this”?
Chris: Yeah. There were a couple times when we’d written some songs and looked at each other like, “This could be a big hit. Who can we give it to?” And then some of those conversations turned back to, “Maybe we keep it ourselves, because this could be good for LOCASH.”
That’s kind of how that happened. We were like, “If this goes Top 40, we got this.” And then we’d go Top 30. We were blessed eventually, after 20-some years, to get “I Love This Life” on the charts.
Looking Ahead
C&I: Where do you see yourselves — oh, I don’t know — maybe five years from now?
Preston: On a beach. On our private island. [Laughs] No, I think we’ll be owning the record label — hopefully just as execs. Doing a couple shows here and there, but really helping out other artists, too. Signing them and watching them blossom.
Taking Control
C&I: One final question. Once you started your own record company, did you start thinking, Oh, man, all of that is involved with this?
Chris: Actually, we love running this record label. We love finding out the things that weren’t being done for us — and doing those things for us. We’re enjoying and embracing getting the answers in real time, juking when we want to juke, and just making the moves that need to happen at precise moments in our career.
We were never afforded that luxury on any label we were on because they have so many other artists. When there are 50 artists on a record label, they don’t have the bandwidth to move that quickly with you. We would beg for phone calls that took three months to get. And then you’d finally get on that phone call — and you wouldn’t get the answers that you were looking for as an artist.
Now we are able to move in a way that keeps our creative passions and spirits healthy and moving quickly. We just never had that before, so we’re enjoying it so much. And hopefully we’ll never look back and say it was a mistake — because we’ve already enjoyed our first two weeks at the Billboard No. 1 spot on our own record label. And hopefully there’s more to come.
