Growing up with musical influences ranging from a touch of country radio to alternative, R&B and indie, members of the Trent Herrera Band, or THB, have found themselves thrown into the Texas country music scene that College Station has grown familiar with.
After a dorm room jam session to George Strait’s “Amarillo by Morning,” drummer and mechanical engineering senior John Waterworth and the band’s frontman, biology senior Trent Herrera, both realized they wanted to act on their shared desire to play music.
“No one in my family is musical,” Herrera said. “Like seriously, no one in the history of my family is. But I just loved it. I would play the guitar and sing in the choir in high school, but I was never in a band when I was younger, and I always wanted to be. Getting lucky enough to meet people like John and other musicians really just made me like, ‘You know what? Let’s just do it.’”
That push to pursue what he loves was also thanks to friends and family who sat through choir performances and high school Singing Valentine deliveries, Herrera said.
“I was writing little songs here and there on my guitar and the more confident I got, the more I was showing people, but I was just playing guitars in my bedroom. Nothing amazing,” Herrera said. “But so many people were like, ‘Man, you should really do something with this.’”
Even with little exposure to Texas country music before arriving in Aggieland, Herrera said his love for the genre quickly emerged after witnessing Texas A&M’s music scene through venues like Hurricane Harry’s.
“For me, I didn’t really grow up liking country so much, but over the years — playing baseball in high school and then going to Texas A&M — it was pretty much always there,” Herrera said. “I ended up just loving it. It is my favorite genre of music, but I definitely wouldn’t say that I grew up listening to it as much.”
As for Waterworth, breaking the popular stigma of disliking country music propelled his desire to play in a country music band.
“I never really liked country, but I don’t think I ever really gave it a chance until I got to college,” Waterworth said. “In high school I played in an indie band. I was someone that was like, ‘No, I don’t really like country music,’ I feel like [it] doesn’t get a lot of credit. But I started playing it and now I love it.”
When it came time to buckle down and truly form a band, write songs and book studio time, Waterworth took the lead in making the band into a brand.
“I’m always trying to think about where we want to be at the end of the semester,” Waterworth said. “The biggest thing I’ve learned since starting all of this is just to ask people. I think the more people you ask the higher chance you’re going to have at finding someone who is willing to help and is good at what you want.”
Now with their two most recent singles “Gambler” and “Heart of Austin” released on all music streaming platforms, Herrera said his experiences with multiple music genres is what he hopes will influence the band’s next few releases.
“I have a variety of musical background with growing up surrounded by multiple genres, not just one,” Herrera said. “So I want to try to incorporate that but still have that style of Texas country songwriting at its roots. I’m a lover of all things music, so we want to kind of incorporate as much as we can while still staying true to who we are and what we started with. That is what I would say the direction is for the new songs and the new album. We want to put out something fresh and unique so that people can remember the band.”
Although the hardest part has been getting THB off of the ground and maintaining momentum within one of Texas’ biggest country music scenes, Waterworth said their enthusiastic goals for the future are just getting started.
“That first goal we had was to just form a band and then release a song,” Waterworth said. “I know one of our goals for the end of this semester — it’s kind of ambitious — but we want to have at least four new songs recorded and put them on some kind of E.P. But then we have to think about what songs we want to use, how much the studio time is, what days we can go in and so on. So we’ve just started with our big goal, and then we backtrack.”
With their time at A&M coming to an end and with the start of something special on the horizon, the pair have their sights set on a bright future for THB.
“This is just the beginning I think,” Herrera said. “We’re on the rise I’d say. We’ve got a long way to go.”