When he made his Opry debut this April, William Beckmann followed "Bourbon Whiskey" — a smoky, straight country track — with a soaring rendition of mariachi classic "Volver, Volver." Nashville's a long way from Beckmann's home in South Texas, and singing Spanish on that stage felt vulnerable and daunting, but his rendition lifted the crowd to their feet, welcoming his debut with a standing ovation.
"It was everything I wanted it to be. Looking back on it, I was surprisingly very relaxed and calm," Beckmann says of stepping into the Opry's wooden circle for the first time. "Something about it just felt right. I felt like everything that I've been working hard at was paying off."
Growing up in a border town, Beckmann absorbed culture and music from both sides of the Rio Grande. As a result, the 28-year-old Del Rio, Texas native creates captivating country music that seamlessly weaves together mariachi-inspired tracks and pedal steel-heavy numbers — and now, he's winning over audiences as diverse as where he grew up.
On August 4, Beckmann released his third project, Here's To You. Here's To Me. For his latest release, he penned a set of seven self-effacing, personal songs about regret, redemption and growth. The set sees Beckmann stepping onto newer ground; whereas his earlier two albums — 2018's Outskirts of Town and 2022's Faded Memories — are heavy on love, his latest is a self-described heartbreak and breakup album.
"I've always been a big fan of sad boy songs," Beckmann says. "I don't think I intentionally made it that way. But the songs that I was the most excited about happened to happen to be in that vein… I wouldn't consider myself in that spot right now in my life, it's just the songs kind of came together and in that way. But, you know, heartbreak, it's always going to be a relevant thing."
Drawing the album title from its second track, "Leaving Kansas," Beckmann bids good riddance to the past. "I can't go back without thinkin' bout you/ Yeah everything I loved went up in smoke/ Now I'm living off of whiskey and a little bit of hope," he sings, leading into the song's chorus: "So here's to you / And here's to me/ Here's to everything that wasn't quite meant to be."
The album opens with "Damn this Heart of Mine," Beckmann's personification of a broken heart, simultaneously blaming and thanking it for keeping him alive in the midst of a painful breakup. From there, he leaves Kansas, headed for Tennessee, spends time out on the open road in "Bad Dreams and Amphetamines" and wallows in the depths of the breakups we can't quite get over with "It's Still January" and "Tennessee Drinking." Beckmann finishes the album searching for a woman who's left him in "Can't Be Found," and ends by catching a glimpse of her, frustrated at how he handled things in "The Party."
Here's to You. Here's to Me. may be an album of breakup songs, but they don't so much represent Beckmann's life at the moment as they do a new leaf in his career. For the first time, Beckmann co-wrote most of the songs on the album, and he's proud of the network he's built of people he trusts to get a song over the finish line with him. Co-writing and sharing your personal feelings with someone, he says, is both vulnerable and rewarding — and when the writing works out just right, "that's the best feeling in the world."
"My favorite part about writing songs is the fact that there's not a real formula — at least I haven't found it yet," he says. "It's cool because it keeps you on your toes and you never know when the next one's gonna hit you."
Beyond his knack for a turn of phrase, Beckmann's songs thrive on his resonant baritone, which lends his music a vintage quality, evoking Nashville's country crooners of the 1960s and '70s. He's also as comfortable singing in Spanish as English — and as he proved on his previous project, he covers Bruce Springsteen as easily as he performs his own songs.
Beckmann's voice is what first caught the attention of Ryan Beuschel, former VP of A&R at Warner Chappell Music, who has worked with Beckmann in an A&R capacity for years. Upon their first meeting, Beckmann played Beuschel a short acoustic set that started with "Bourbon Whiskey" — he was hooked.
"It just kind of blew me away how different it was and how amazing his voice was," Beuschel recalls. "[He's] like 21, 22, skinny, short, little kid and just this big voice comes out, sounds like it's from a generation 50 years ago, but it has a current feel to it."
That ability to evoke Nashville's early country crooners in a relevant way captured the attention of audiences and Nashville execs alike. "I think he has a lot of Nashville watching him," Beuschel asserts.
Beckmann was born and raised in Del Rio, Texas on the border between Texas and Mexico; directly on the other side of the Rio Grande river, Acuna, Mexico, picks up where Del Rio leaves off, he says. Growing up bilingual with relatives on both sides of the border (his grandparents are from Chihuahua, Mexico), Beckmann counts both towns as home. Although he grew up on his family's cattle ranch — "I tell people that they're real cowboys, and I just sing about cowboy things," he jokes — Beckmann has always been more interested in music.
The singer/songwriter learned piano and guitar as a child, and when he started teaching himself to play songs (both popular songs he heard on the radio and Texas country classics), his parents noticed how good he sounded and encouraged him to perform for their friends. In high school, he joined a classic rock cover band and played until he graduated.
As a teenager, Beckmann also found a lifelong love of harmonica music. He taught himself to play Neil Young's "Heart of Gold," by taping a harmonica to a bookshelf in lieu of a neck holder. Since then, he's played harmonica on stage and in the studio frequently; the instrument dips in and out of Here's To You. Here's To Me. almost like another character.
Now as a professional musician, Beckmann's enthusiasm for performing and tackling new challenges has served him well. In the last year, he has sold out three shows at the legendary Gruene Hall, played a show at John T. Floore's Country Store, and headlined a tour supporting victims of the Uvalde shooting, the proceeds of which went to Matthew McConaughey's Just Keep Livin' Foundation.
Perhaps the most meaningful performance for Beckmann so far is one near to his heart and his upbringing: he played the first country show in nearly two decades at the Corona Club in Acuna, Mexico, just over the border from Del Rio. In recent years, crossing the border to perform at the club has gotten harder, but in its heyday, playing the club was a right of passage for up and coming musicians.
The club inspired one of Beckmann's most popular songs, "Danced All Night Long," a bilingual cantina music-infused love ballad in which Beckmann perfected his knack for weaving together the music and cultures he grew up knowing dually. To return that song to where it all started — at one of the venue's biggest shows in recent memory, drawing in a crowd of more than 1,000 — showed Beckmann just how far he's come.
While he's proud to pull influence from both sides of the border, Beckmann doesn't want to be viewed as anything but a country singer. He's been careful to honor his heritage without letting it define his music. It's a delicate balancing act, but one he's excited to keep fine-tuning.
In Beuschel's eyes, what Beckmann brings to country music is special — and it may help expand the genre's traditionally rigid standards.
"I gather it's no different than the way someone feels if they're a Black country artist. They're like, 'why can I just be a country artist' or female country artists, 'why can't I just be a country artist,'" Beuschel says. "We're just trying to create great country music that can live wherever it needs to live. It doesn't need to be put in a box."
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