Album Review – Wyatt Flores – “Welcome To The Plains”

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#550.7 (Red Dirt) on the Country DDS

It’s the time of songwriters in popular music. It’s also the time of Tik-Tok. Songwriters who can translate short-form vitality into real world resonance and sustainability are the ones who will last beyond the current moment, which in popular music and technology is always incredibly fleeting.

Wyatt Flores has proven to have the viral appeal that fills venues up with fervent fans singing every word to every song back at the stage, irrespective of the voluminous nature of his output. But he’s also proven to have a depth, a purpose of intention, and a compositional prowess that makes you believe that he’s much more than a dissolvable apparition of the immediate zeitgeist.

The best songwriters of a given time are often the ones predisposed to emotional vulnerability. Their empathy is not performative, and their expressions don’t simply rest on the surface. They feel things on a deeper level. They’re emotional conduits that have the capability of communicating what we all feel better than we do to ourselves. Wyatt Flores is definitely blessed and cursed with this quality.

With more worry on his brow than a man of his age probably should have—perhaps from the unfortunate passing of so many people in his sphere—Wyatt Flores boasts the ability to channel these roiled and unraveling emotions into coherent and confident songs that become curiously entertaining for such heavy material due to an elevated melodic component.

Though it feels like this Oklahoma-based songwriter should be on his third LP at the moment, Welcome To The Plains is officially his first after a string of singles and EPs. But not bereft of inspiration, Wyatt’s well continues to flow on Welcome To The Plains. The opening title track isn’t as much as a salutation as it is a lament for the people who inhabit the middle portions of the United States where the water tables are falling, the fickle weather predicts the fortunes of the people, and where the indigenous were forcibly moved.


From there Wyatt Flores explores the seasons of relationships that usually define young people’s lives, as well as his seeming preoccupation with death. As someone who’s openly spoken about losing ones close to him and the imposter syndrome of being a surging artist, Flores is forthright about how his grip on stability is always tenuous. But he takes advantage of the ups and downs to capture these potent moments in song.

“Oh Susannah” is about losing yourself while trying to save another, and distinguishes itself as an early favorite, even if the “oh ohs” give you Lumineers vibes. “Only Thing Missing Is You” is a reminder that without love, all success is shallow. “When I Die,” “Angels Over You,” and “The Good Ones” speak to how even in positive times, Wyatt Flores feels the fleeting and fragile nature of life.

If we’re being honest, the album begins to feel a little “one note” and reaching for engagement in the middle portions. But the song “Little Town” shakes this up with some unexpected but welcome sentimentality. This sets the table for perhaps one of the best album cuts, the explicit but true “Stillwater.” It’s less a tribute to the epicenter of Red Dirt, and more a damning assessment of the town’s shallow cycles of college life.

Welcome To The Plains is a songwriter album first, but finds very sensible country instrumentation throughout, with rock flourishes indicative of the Red Dirt influences helping to color Wyatt’s music. This isn’t a straight country record, but is more country than it is anything else, with fiddle and steel guitar prominent in the mix.

It would be ingratiating to praise Welcome To The Plains as Wyatt’s big breakout moment. But in truth that’s already happened. It’s more about establishing this young songwriter as no fleeting commodity, or one that can’t translate on tour like some others finding traction on Tik-Tok. Wyatt Flores is a songwriter that you feel will be using his heightened connection with human emotion for the benefit of audiences for many years to come.

8.2/10

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