Adam Pitts has been playing music in North Carolina long enough to remember when rock bands mostly played to people standing politely at the back of the room. These days, as frontman of Raleigh’s The Pseudo Cowboys, he’s seeing younger crowds pushing to the front and a scene that feels electric. It’s a shift he traces back to the post-COVID return to live music, when something about the long absence seemed to reset people’s relationship with being in a room together, listening to a band play loud.
For The Pseudo Cowboys, who nearly lost their drummer to the shutdown before he ever played a single show with them, that reset felt personal. They came back hungry, and apparently so did the crowd. Their formula is deceptively simple: classic rock bones, self-aware humor, and a DIY ethic that turns cardboard props and a shoestring budget into a feature rather than a flaw. As Adam puts it, that’s just the result of having spent years figuring out that seriousness isn’t really the point.
With a standout EP, See the Sunshine, already in the rearview and a new one on the way, they’re building something worth paying attention to.
What have you been listening to lately?
Adam (vocals/guitar): I’m a fan of the band The Darkness, and their latest record [Dreams on Toast] is tremendously good.
The other thing is The Beatles’ Anthology 4 that came out recently. When I was a kid, the original anthology collections were coming out, featuring all the B-sides and recordings from across the years. It’s amazing to listen to the evolution of the songs and see how free and willing to experiment they were. This fourth installment finally includes stuff that wasn’t included before, and there are incredible string-only versions where you hear just the arrangements. As the years progress and recording technology improves, it sounds unbelievable. It’s really cool.
The Beatles get a lot of love in these interviews. What is it about them that holds up?
Adam: I think it’s the classic thing where they’re simultaneously overrated and underrated. It’s very easy to dismiss them at the surface level, but when you get deeper into it, you realize there’s a lot more complexity than you understood. The phenomenon that was the Beatles almost precedes them, so you miss a lot.
People who say they don’t like the Beatles are usually picturing only the mop-top era, but you have to understand the whole trajectory. And every one of the four members had their own songs where you’re like, “Wait, they wrote that?” The genius is easy to overlook because it’s been so absorbed into the culture.
When you were first getting into music, what made you decide to go from being a listener to wanting to be a songwriter?
Adam: My dad is a songwriter. Not a published professional, but just a person who’s artistic. He used to play out when I was really young, and I really admired how creative he was and how naturally it came to him. Around twelve or thirteen, I picked up the guitar and my body, mind, and spirit just loved it. And there was amazing music coming out at the time, and The Beatles Anthology helped me discover more than just the albums. It built this musical language in me. I was fueled by past influences from my dad and by what was current at the time, and it just set me on fire. It’s been nonstop since.
How have those influences carried with you as you’ve grown as a musician and started this project?
Adam: What you learn is that it’s not just about the sound, it’s about people being daring enough to explore and put themselves wholly into something. There’s just something really attractive about believing that if I put myself fully into this, creative things will come into being. It’s that urge that humanity has to make things.
In the best music, you see them breaking down doors. For me specifically, the late ’60s into early ’70s and the early ’90s were like a supernova of creativity and exploration that happened to reach the mainstream. People could be really free in a way that got to the masses, and that excites me.
How did the band come together?
Adam: It goes all the way back to high school. We made up an imaginary band called the Pseudo Cowboys and created a fake album cover. My dog was one of the band members. The funny thing is, the word “pseudo” messes a lot of people up because they spell it wrong based on how it’s pronounced. It’s P-S-E-U-D-O, but most people write P-S-U-E-D-O — and that’s actually how I wrote it on the cover, not knowing I was spelling it wrong. I just thought it sounded cool.
Eventually, it made sense to use it as the real band name because it allows us to be silly in a way that really makes me happy. In the beginning, you’re trying to write very serious music that you’re not really wise enough to write. And after you do that for a number of years, you realize that seriousness isn’t always the best way to reach people. Humor captures people, especially on the internet, more than seriousness. So I went back to The Pseudo Cowboys because it gives us permission to be a little funny, like some kind of weird troupe of creators.
Your music has this blend of classic rock backdrop with silly, comedy-forward lyrical themes. How do you balance that so it doesn’t just become comedy rock?
Adam: I just want more room to be silly, like I was when I was a kid. A lot of the one-off video ideas — “The Hero Song”, “Nice Guy”, “Vacation Sex” — are just fun ideas I want to see through to completion with my buddies. We have a blast making them, even when it’s hard work. I’ll never forget making “The Hero Song” video because I’ve never had that much fun as an adult. And I think if you’re genuinely feeling the spirit of what you’re creating, it comes through. Maybe not to everybody, because that’s impossible, but it reaches people like you.
We say we’re just four painfully average nerds trying to do the best we can and celebrate the music we love. And that’s really true. Maybe putting on the rock star persona is partly in jest, but it’s also just celebrating the silliness and grandiosity of rock.
What’s the process for making a music video? Does the idea come with the song, or do you pick a song and build around it?
Adam: I think it’s kind of simultaneous. If a song is ripe with visuals, it’s pretty easy to come up with something; it sort of happens in the background as you’re writing it. Part of our presentation is that we’re overly ambitious with a painfully low budget, so we try to embrace that in the videos. We just scrape together the best thing we can with very little money. We’re down here painting in the studio, making props, and leaning into it. A lot of the ideas I ask myself: Does it show our rough-around-the-edges nature, and can we cut something entertaining from it?
We also try to incorporate people we know who have creative endeavors outside of music. We’ve had friends from the Carolina Ballet participate in two videos, and another dancer friend in another one. For the next one, we’re going to use someone close to us who runs a wrestling company. It’s a way to put back into the community; they need to be recognized, too, and if we can do it together, that’s even better.
What has it been like being part of the Raleigh and greater Triangle music scene, especially over the last several years?
Adam: It’s funny because our current drummer joined in December of 2019, and we were getting ready to do a show in Chapel Hill on Friday, March 13th, when everything started shutting down. Our bass player had been in Boston at a video game conference where COVID was already spreading, so he texted like, “I think I have it, guys.” We were trying to figure out if three of us could just play, and then the whole thing fell apart. So our drummer didn’t get to play a show with us for a long time. Thankfully, we didn’t lose him.
But going back further, the culture in Raleigh has changed a lot, especially over the time I’ve been here. So many styles became popular, and so many trends came and went that I wasn’t really excited about the scene until post-COVID. I think a lot of people started searching for real value in music after that, and when we came back and started playing again, something had shifted. Young people were coming out and standing up next to the stage, whereas before COVID everybody was really shy and wouldn’t get into it.
Our first post-COVID performance was at the Lincoln Theater, opening for Zoso, and there was a whole row of late teens and early twenties just locked in. That was not what we’d been experiencing for years prior. It’s a really exciting time. There are so many new bands, people exploring all styles. And there’s room for rock now, which makes me very happy.
Is there something specific about North Carolina’s music scene more broadly that stands out to you?
Adam: The talent is everywhere, and it can come from anywhere. I’m from Hickory out west, and you wouldn’t believe the talent out there. When I started playing out after college, we were all bar bands trying to play original music because there weren’t any real original music venues, but everybody was a really high-caliber player. It’s fascinating. You wouldn’t expect it, but there are actually some really good songwriters out there.
Looking back at the past year and ahead to the rest of this one, what are some highlights and what are you working toward?
Adam: We’re so pumped about the new music video. And we’re working on a new EP right now. We released one last year called See the Sunshine, and I think it was the best thing we’ve done in the recording studio by far. Our buddy Cameron Fitzpatrick works at a studio called Soundtrax in Raleigh, and we got to really hang with him and put a lot of fun energy into it. He’s a friend, so he was really trying to see the full vision with us. I’m very proud of that record.
And as a personal highlight, my wife and I had a baby in December. She was a little early, so we spent a month in the hospital and then came home and got used to everything. It’s been this nonstop sleep deprivation miracle every day. She’s already yammering back at us in little gibberish. It’s really cool.
Any local or North Carolina musicians you want to shout out?
Adam: Definitely shout out to Halogen Lights out of Hickory. They made an album a while ago called Lemon Pine that is one of my favorite local records. Also, a friend of mine who works at a coffee shop sent me an EP called anhedonia by a songwriter named Aprilbaby. It’s a really nice, acoustic, well-sung indie EP that just came out in March. Very worth listening to.
And then on the other end of the spectrum, there’s a group called Pageant out of the Winston-Salem area that does kind of a sleaze rock, Guns N’ Roses thing. We’ve played together a good bit and I love those guys. Shout out to all the people in NC doing it right.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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