Stewart Mann Bio

With a smile on his face and his grandpa’s lizard skin boots on his feet, Stewart Mann sits down next to me wearing what can best be described as someone else’s clothes from another time. He has this swagger about him, and the clothes perfectly match his laid-back, “I refuse to pay more for jeans than I pay for groceries” attitude. He’s drinking a dos-equis, his beer of choice, and I’m beginning to wonder if we’re ever going to get this interview off and running. “I’m so shy I just need a few drinks to loosen me up,” Mann sarcastically says from across the room. He proceeds to entertain a couple he met just minutes prior to our introduction, and he talks to them as if they had known each other for years. It is this likeability factor that Mann prides himself on. “My mom used to tell me when I was 2 we would go out to dinner and I would go around talking to all the tables in the room."
A self-described entertainer from birth, Stewart began singing before he could walk. “My dad always tells this story of me walking around in a diaper and cowboy boots carrying a little cheap gas station guitar singing “Elvira.” I was too young to pronounce my V’s so it came out sounding like Eldira, and I like to think of that as my first attempt at songwriting, it sure sounded better with a d in it. My great grandpa had a band in San Antonio in the 60s and 70s called Amel Mann and The Bluebonnet Ramblers, and he owned this dancehall aptly named Mann’s Hoedown. I used to run around there when I was little, before it closed, and I guess I got the bug. It just took me a long while to realize it.”
After moving to Nashville and recording a solid traditional country album with the help of Tracy Lawrence’s longtime producer Flip Anderson, I moved back to Texas to finish school like I had promised my mom. I settled on Austin, and enrolled at St. Edwards University, where I graduated two years later. I put together a band, called us Stewart Mann and The Ramblin Band(after grandpa’s band) and we started playing around the state. One of the songs on the album, “I’ll Go Around,” garnered a Just Plain Folks nomination for country song of the year. After about 2 years of playing, my taste in music had begun to change, and I started re-listening to a lot of bands I had grown up on, like old southern rock and some blues guys. Along with that, the Texas Country movement, as I would call it, started getting my attention. That’s what led me to the 5 Mile band. Doing a country/rock thing, we combined great country songwriting with a powerhouse rock live show, and we hit the ground running. Playing over 180 shows a year for the next 3 years, we obtained a great sponsor in Lone Star Beer, and recorded two very successful albums. But all good things must come to an end, and 5 Mile broke up in October of 2005. My old bass player however, J. Blake Hendrix, and myself had begun writing together prior to the band breaking up. There was no way I was giving up on music, so we decided to go into the studio and lay down some of the songs we had been working on. We fell into a great opportunity to work with one of the hottest up and coming engineers in town, Jacob Sciba, and settled into Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Studios to record the album. Stuck in Here is the result, an album that crosses genres and really touches on all of my influences I had growing up in South Texas. I couldn’t be any more proud of the way it turned out, and now I want the world to hear it, one person at a time. I just want to live my life, make great music, meet good people, and most importantly be happy. I’ve been fortunate enough to overcome some very steep obstacles in my life, and with those I’ve realized that happiness is success. So I define my success by my happiness, and right now, I’m pretty damn happy. Now take this drink.” Who am I to argue with that?


-Kris Johnson
The Austin Chronicle