Photo by Brooks Travers.
The Texas artist on Frank Ocean, working with Kevin Abstract, and his love of front porches.
May 11, 2026
BY Jack Lubin
Every so often, culture is visited by a disruptive event so profound that it demarcates a new generation: the moon landing, The Beatles on Carson, 9/11, the front-facing camera. When Derby was fifteen years old, his nuclear bomb took the shape of Frank Ocean’s Blonde. A high school breakup, a Texas driver’s license, and “White Ferrari” conspired to reorient his brain chemistry as profoundly as it did countless others’. “It really ruined my life,” he admits to me with a smile.
It’s not lost on me that the Houston-native, New York-based songwriter invokes Blonde within a minute of my asking him to “start from the beginning.” In Derby’s self-reported history, the only person named before Ocean is his own biological father. Derby—whose 2025 full-length Slugger ranks among the year’s most under-appreciated, exhilarating records—writes songs that bear all the aesthetic hallmarks of post-2016 indie pop. His sonic atmospherics are lush, his vocals Chipmunkian, his melodies burdened by a perceptible sense of yearning. Ten years removed from what we might call music’s Oceanic revolution, these principles of style-splicing, bedroom-inflected crooning have consolidated into something of a house style for a generation of upstart musicians trying, in Derby’s words, “to bottle what he figured out how to bottle.” At its worst, this genetic code can melt into the primordial soup of Spotify playlist-chum. At its best, it can sound like Derby’s music: raw, surprising, undeniable.
Photo by Brooks Travers.
Before ever recording music as Derby, Craig Caldwell just wanted to impress his dad. Family is on Derby’s mind as we pace around the Central Park Reservoir. He’s just returned from his younger sister’s wedding in Houston, for which he had to endure one of the three-hour security lines that on the weekend in question served as the newest manifestation of our country’s rapid deterioration. I, for my part, have not set foot on the Jackie O. trail since high school gym class; we both, it appears, have forgotten how to dress for a characteristically blustery March day in New York City. As we shiver our way toward the Guggenheim Museum, Derby tells me about copying his father. When he was twelve years old, Derby saw his father attempt to translate his love for singer-songwriter music into writing songs of his own; though Caldwell the elder only stuck with it for about two years, it was enough to set his eldest child on a lifelong obsession with songwriting. Derby’s self-described musical education reflects the disparate influences of a childhood spent splitting time between his divorced parents. At his mother’s house, it was “all country music, all the time.” At dad’s, he was exposed to a steady diet of John Mayer, Ray LaMontagne, Counting Crows, and the other usual suspects of early-aughts twang-forward pop-rock. “That was basically what I thought only existed in the world for a long period of time,” he laughs lovingly.
Derby first left Houston to study acting at the University of Oklahoma. Upon mention of his alma mater, he opens his Carhartt chore coat just long enough to show his Sooner Football shirt. After graduating, he moved to Oklahoma City, where he hung around at local shows of artists like Casper Sage—an OKC-born R&B wunderkind with whom Derby recently collaborated—before shipping out to New York City. In part, the move to New York was an intentional effort to tear himself out of his comfort zone in order to fully pursue music, yet shortly after arriving in the city he quit music altogether for a while. Instead, Derby worked humdrum jobs—a gym clerk, finance, the sort of stuff to pay rent—while secreting away demos for his and a handful of friends’ ears only. All well and good, then, until the day came when he looked himself in the mirror and asked himself whether this was it. “Do I really want to, like, fucking not give it a try? I might as well take it seriously for a little while. If I fail and embarrass myself, then, it is what it is. At least I can sleep at night knowing that I gave it a chance.”
The first result of this musical come-to-Jesus moment was 2025’s Slugger. Though Derby worked on Slugger for the better part of three years, the majority of its songs (apart from “Deer in the Belly of the Snake,” the ambling, chorus-less opener that Derby describes as the album’s thesis) came together in a frenzied two-month stretch just prior to its release date. In part, that timer was set by the success of “Gold,” the record’s lead single and perhaps clearest distillation of Derby’s songwriting sensibilities, whereby propulsive, double-timed drums, and a warped guitar line lend urgency to scenes of struggling air conditioners, dust clouds, and blow-out fights (“Is it too late to miss you like that, good God?”). Among other things, this mad dash pushed Derby out of what he described as his tendency to sit around and wait until “everything is exactly perfect before I start moving, which can stall out momentum.” The story of Slugger, then, is in part one of reality triumphing over perfectionism. “For me, it was just realizing that I couldn't make it any better with the access that I had at that given moment.”
You’d think, by that logic, that it will continue to get harder for Caldwell to finish songs as his aforementioned access continues to increase. Exhibit A being that Derby was tapped for Kevin Abstract’s Houston compilation album Blush. His contribution, “I Wasn’t There,” is perhaps the most straightforward song that Derby has released to the public, but what it trades in sonic complexity it receives in infectiousness. “I can thank Kevin and that song for pretty much anybody giving a fuck,” he reflects.
Photo by Brooks Travers.
Photo by Brooks Travers.
At this point, we’re meandering through the atrium of the Guggenheim, but Caldwell whispers even more pronouncedly than museum decorum would dictate when discussing his experience working with the Brockhampton frontman, betraying a dose of self-knowledge regarding how animated he tends to get when fanning out. Saint, a member of Blush, had come across “Gold” on TikTok. An Instagram DM later, Derby found himself tied in with one of his musical north stars. He describes the subsequent experience like an eager pupil. Abstract, per his telling, is “never not working.” One suspects, given his uncanny ear for melody and tremendous capacity for synthesizing ideas in a way that feels both current and authentic, that more high-profile collaborations are to come. Later, when I suggest that he’d be well-positioned to offer notes on the inevitable Justin Bieber country pivot, he laughingly offers to help put some twang on anything.
As we speak, Derby is preparing the rollout of Beams, a slight yet substantial two-song EP that continues to build out the relatively straightforward songwriting displayed on “I Wasn’t There.” He’s also putting the finishing touches on merchandise featuring designs by his late grandfather (a visual artist and cartoonist for a number of schools in the Houston area), prepping up his first proper tour, and completing his new full-length record, Soft Bodied Animals. Derby speaks of Beams’ two tracks as loosies from early on in his process exploring the textures that would form the upcoming album’s sonic palette. These tracks were “too on the nose” for his liking, but some enthusiastic prodding from his manager encouraged him to put them out into the world as a sort of preview of what’s to come. Both “Ambrosia” and “Stepping Stone” articulate nicely the rules that the songwriter’s imposed upon himself for the gestating full length, on which he hopes to replace Slugger’s maximalist approach with something gentler, wavelike, more dynamic and tactile. Derby has a tendency to spin out excitedly when discussing his upcoming designs, a show of enthusiasm directly reflected by his ability to jam as many ideas as possible into his songs without sacrificing character or cohesion. He apologizes at least twice during our conversation: “Sorry, my ADHD’s kicking my ass.”
A word, then, on Derby the person. With the exception of a short video interview recorded outside last year’s album release party at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, there exists up to this point almost no publicly available information about Craig Caldwell. His public imagery, aside from a handful of grainy, lo-res photographs, comprises mostly of the photographs of deer that serve as Slugger’s album artwork and paper his Instagram account. Those deer, too, are a family thing. Each image is sourced from his stepfather’s trail cam, an homage to a childhood spent filling feeders and hunting. This, and the grandfather-designed merch, speak to an intentional effort to ensure that the Derby project is sourced entirely from “real touch points” in his life.
The anonymity, such as it is, is not an act. In person, Caldwell is not the type to call much attention to himself. He speaks in hushed tones when describing his work and ambitions, possessing a self-effacing streak that belies a modesty quite out of step with his tremendous talent. His shaggy, amber beard and mustache frames the sort of inviting face that you’d gravitate to on the first day of school. Our conversation, which hops from geeking out about Jane Remover’s schizoid sonics to a postmortem on the Kevin Durant burner account saga, reveals an essentially normal dude. He describes the narrator of his songs as essentially a “glorified, more interesting” form of himself. “If I was writing about what I actually do,” he admits, “I’m just sitting in my room all day, watching college football.” He is attuned to a capacity for embarrassment that makes hacking it as a working musician in 2026 extremely difficult. He speaks with a sincere dread about the prospect of “making a fool of himself,” flogging front-facing TikToks of his music into the void in the hopes that someone would listen.
All of which—this desire for privacy, this fear of falling on his face—square interestingly with a body of music that is itself astonishingly vulnerable. Derby’s voice is almost always buried beneath reverbs, AutoTune, and modulators (“Dude, I cannot sing”), an aesthetic decision that he recognizes as empowering him to present a rawer sense of himself on his records. “There’s something that feels like I can be more vulnerable,” he admits, “if my voice isn’t my own.” It’s not, in Derby’s telling, totally dissimilar from a child staring at their feet as they fess up. The result is a body of songs that are disarmingly confessional, drenched in regret, and hopelessly yearning. On Derby songs, lovers fight more than they make up, doors slam shut, fuck-ups pray for absolution, and hearts break as reliably as clock-hands turn. Soft Bodied Animals, despite existing in relative infancy, finds him doubling-down on the track-stopping heartsickness that structures his corpus. Take standout track “Well, I’ll Be!”’s choked-out admission: “Well, I lied, I can’t stand to see you walking out with him even if he’s a good guy.”
For my money, it’s this marriage of confessionality, sincerity, and lived experience that allows Derby to so boldly wear his influences without veering into the derivative. There’s a sense of symmetry that we’re talking about the fragmentary nature of his music as we amble through Carol Bove’s knotted steel sculptures and collages of household flotsam and paperback books. On Slugger, Derby jumps from one concept to the next at a sometimes dizzying pace, both a testament to the sheer number of styles he wants to try on for size and an homage to the sort of “computer music” that energizes him for its “ability to mix genre and mash ideas together.” It’s hard not to see parallels to Bove’s work, which treats ephemeral, everyday objects as “rich, non-mechanistic evidence like holographic fragments preserving an image of the total system from which they came.” Derby’s referential palette similarly memorializes the titans of internet-inflected, contemporary guitar-driven pop music—Dijon, Alex G, Mk.gee—by instrumentalizing their sensibilities into fragments meant to constitute a whole collage.
Carol Bove - "The Night Sky Over Berlin" [2006]
Derby’s hyper-referential sensibility is also tempered by his deep, abiding commitment to his home. “I definitely have had my fair share of inauthenticity in trying to discover what was authentic about me,” he confesses. “I was so anti-country music, rural Texas stuff, and I remember rejecting that side and being like, ‘none of this is sick. There’s no way you can make it sick.’ But then, coming back to it, I realized that the coolest places, and the coolest things, are usually just in your backyard.”
He recalls returning to the music that his mother raised him on—George Strait, Shenandoah—and discovering “almost an eighties, synth-pop country bag” where he once heard his mom’s music that he couldn’t stand. The other day, he called his mother with a proposal: at the final tour stop in Houston, he wants to do “glorified karaoke” of her favorite songs for his entire family. He adds that, of course, there will be AutoTune.
This sense of place is perhaps the highest principle structuring Derby’s music. Whether he’s listening to or writing music, he associates every song he encounters with a specific physical place. Across Slugger, those places are almost all in Houston: hot parking lots, fields, front porches. Take the chorus of “Money Fight,” on which he sings: “that tin roof likes to clap for you when you’re getting loose at night.” That roof, he tells me, is the tin roof that stretched across his grandparents’ old house and garage on the outskirts of Aldine, Texas. It’s the sort of detail that helps explain the intense physicality with which Derby’s able to imbue his music. Were music not to work out, one gets the sense that Derby would make an excellent cartographer.
As a songwriter and thinker, Derby is highly attuned to the way that feelings imbue themselves into places like ghosts or curses. Perhaps, then, the best way to describe the departure he’s taking with Soft Bodied Animals is that it’s an Oklahoma record. Derby lovingly describes the shitty house his college roommate’s dad owned, which sat on stilts because of how frequently the road would flood. “The storms out in Oklahoma are serious, man. The clouds feel like they’re a hat—they just sit on you.” It was a peaceful place, short on responsibility and heavy on drinking beers with his friends. Derby looks back at Slugger as “very grating and aggressive at times, with a lot of heartsickness and longing.” The new record, he notes, is more reflective, mature, and healed.
Early demos show an album that is slower, simpler, gentler, and unafraid to look its listener in the eyes. Soft Bodied Animals is not without its genre-bending—songs are liable to explode in a band of blown-out synths, fly into the air as soon as they’ve reached a crescendo, and bounce around atop inflated-to-the-gills 808s—but it reflects Derby’s newfound patience to see an idea through to its conclusion. In its early iteration, the record demonstrates a level of patience and conviction that serves to heighten the effect of its inevitable digressions, confessional lyrics, and emotional heft. It sounds like an artist ready to take the risk of putting himself out there.
Near the end of our conversation, Derby returns to where we started, recounting the moment he decided that he would commit himself fully to his music. In so doing, he introduces me to his and his friends’ notion of “front porching.” Front porching, in essence, is the instinct to precautionarily undercut oneself: “Come inside, but like, I didn’t get a chance to vacuum, and it’s a little messy in there, blah blah blah.” Derby identifies as a front porcher—“it’s always how I’m presenting myself”—and identifies the moment he resolved to stop it as the scariest of his life. “Now, I’m going to look like an idiot. Either it’s going to work out, or I’m going to look like an idiot.”
Craig Caldwell loves porches. At one point, he identifies his main gripe with New York City as the fact that he currently does not have one: “In my mind, I’m usually on a porch somewhere.” As Derby, his goal is to let listeners in through the front door.
Photo by Brooks Travers.
