Sam Canty never thought Treaty Oak Revival was going to make it

For Treaty Oak Revival singer/guitarist Sam Canty, the journey didn’t begin in a childhood bedroom, a suburban garage, or a high school auditorium; it started in the cab of a work truck long before sunrise.

Back then, Canty was building gas plants in the West Texas desert, living in a single-bedroom apartment — or bouncing between friends’ guest bedrooms — and waking up before dawn to face another shift of hard labor.

“I remember when I was working out there, it’d be like 5:30 in the morning,” recalled the Treaty Oak Revival frontman in a recent interview. “I’d get in that truck, I’d look at myself in the mirror, and I’d say, ‘One day, I’m never going to have to do this ever again.’”

At that point, it was as much a question of survival as it was ambition.

“I’d say, ‘I’m not going to have to work another nine to five. I’m never going to have to sacrifice spending time with my family,’” Canty said. “The day I put in those two weeks, I was like, ‘Holy s***, I manifested it.’ I guess I’d said it enough times something finally heard me and gave me a shot.”

That shot came in the unlikely form of a vacuum repair shop owned by a friend’s uncle, a place Canty describes as the band’s “petri dish.” There in 2018 he was joined by guitarist/singer Lance Vanley, lead guitarist Jeremiah Vanley, drummer Cody Holloway and bassist Andrew Carey (since replaced by Dakota Hernandez) and Treaty Oak Revival’s story began.

“It smelled like whatever we smelled like, dirty dusty filters, moldy vacuum cleaners, and spilled liquor,” he said of the backroom where the band would practice. “He let us in every Monday after we got out of work. We’d go back there and we’d play until it was time for everybody to go home, or we got too drunk to play, or just got too tired.”

Despite the grit, those sessions were sacred. “To us, it didn’t matter if we got super huge and famous,” Canty said. “We love playing music with each other, and it was one of the things we most looked forward to every day when we got off our jobs at work.”

For a long time, the ceiling of their ambition was “playing some VFW somewhere in Odessa.” But the first real break came in the form of an offer to play two-and-a-half hours away in San Angelo, Texas.

“I didn’t think we were ever going to make it out of our hometown,” Canty admitted. “But once we went out there and saw that people showed up and that people knew who we were, that’s when I figured, ‘All right, this is something.’”

That show changed the trajectory of Treaty Oak Revival.

“That’s when I knew, if we can do this and get recognized in a place like San Angelo, we can do this anywhere. We just have to get our names out there,” Canty said.

For Treaty Oak Revival, “anywhere” would go on to include a bucket-list debut at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, selling out the legendary Billy Bob’s Texas in Fort Worth and playing this year’s Stagecoach Country Music Festival. Along the way, they have amassed over 7.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify, with their breakout hit “No Vacancy” surpassing 100 million streams, while earning praise from tastemakers like “Wide Open Country,” which hailed the band as leading “the next wave of Texas country with a punk-rock edge.”

The band’s recently released third album, “West Texas Degenerate” has debuted at No.1 on “Billboard” magazine’s Top Rock Albums and Americana/Folk Albums charts, and Treaty Oak Revival are headlining arenas and amphitheaters on their current tour, including a stop at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on July 24.

Yet through it all, they’ve maintained the blue-collar authenticity of their roots while refusing to be boxed in by genre. While Canty describes their sound as rock music with country lyrics and country vocals, the band’s musical DNA includes a hefty dose of 2000s emo.

In fact, given the choice of playing My Chemical Romance’s “Welcome to the Black Parade” or Garth Brooks’ “Friends in Low Places” to save a show, Canty opts for emo without hesitation.

“Oh man, even though we never covered ‘Welcome to the Black Parade,’ I would much rather play that one to get the crowd back than ‘Friends in Low Places,’ where there’s really only one way to play it. We used to cover Blink-182 songs at honky tonk bars. We busted it out and people loved it,” he said. “We even covered a Kanye West song at one point back in the day, a song called ‘Runaway’ from one of his older records.”

The band also does a bit of genre-bending on “West Texas Degenerate,” especially on tracks like the complex “S*** Hill” and the aggressive “Naders.’”

“‘Naders’ is our first song ever that we had a metal breakdown in,” Canty said with a laugh. “I never thought I would hear a country rock song have a heavy metal breakdown.”

He also never imagined he would ever be able to collaborate on a song with Red Dirt legend William Clark Green. “William Clark Green is one of my Texas songwriter heroes,” said Canty. “It was awesome, man.”

Looking back at the band’s rise, Canty says his younger self would be shocked by how far the journey has come.

“If I would have played those songs for the younger version of me, the younger version of me would probably be like, ‘Holy s***, man. What did we do? Who did we drink with? Whose hand did we shake to get all this?’” he said.

The real answer, he says, is no one’s.

“We all just did it. That’s a recurring theme in our story. You never think it’s going to be you. A lot of us never got a whole lot of breaks in life, so to get one now, especially this far into our life, is a huge blessing.”