Buckshot Princess On Staying Authentic and Not Being Tied Down
From rockabilly riffs to gothic jams, Little Rock, Arkansas’ Buckshot Princess has it all. The southern set consisting of Payton Marshall (lead singer), Evan Peck (guitar), Katie Hooten (bass), Autumn Tomeš (guitar), and Ivey Swint (drums) has been on a roll since first getting together in 2023, amassing over 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and songs with millions of streams.
On stages across the nation, the quintet has exhibited their authentic southern charm, adorning themselves in fringes, cowboy hats, and bolo ties. However, the group reaches beyond traditional country audiences. Marketing themselves as “outlaw goth,” they use low bass lines, twangy delivery, and grungy riffs to keep themselves unapologetically out of the box.
How did you guys get together originally?
Payton: Evan and our drummer, Ivey, who is here but just in another room, we all went to college and majored in English together. What do people do who major in English other than be in a band?
Evan: With no stable career prospects or life plans or goals or anything. The three of us sort of kicked around and lived with each other and decided to form a band. Then, after starting that, we met Autumn pretty early.
Payton: Autumn and I actually met because she was the first person to ever interview us about the band. I left the coffee shop and was like, "We have to be friends." Our original bassists, the three of us, needed an outside motivating factor. I don't think we would have ever started the band if we didn't have someone who didn't live in the house.
Evan: Our original bassist had to step out for family reasons. We picked up Katie, our current bassist.
Payton: Katie, I had followed her online for years just because you've seen her. She looks amazing. I always followed her and thought she was cool. She was like, "Maybe I would like to do it. It was more important to us to have someone who had a good vibe than maybe someone who knew everything right off the rip.
Evan: It turns out we were wrong, she's a terrible vibe. Now stuck with her!
What was the moment, if there was one, where you guys were playing together, and you were like, this is going to go somewhere, this works?
Evan: Immediately. First time we ever played together. It was me and Payton and our founding bassists in a bedroom. We started off with one song that Payton had written when she was 16. She had sent it to me years ago, before Buckshot, but I sort of reworked the chords a little bit and shifted around. Just being able to hear her song with some dedicated musicianship under it. It's always a privilege to hear that come together.
Payton: From the beginning, it was like, I don't want to sound any type of way, but it was like no one's doing this, what we were doing. That’s how it felt.
I feel like your music sticks out. It's definitely a vibe that's very interesting. On that note, where did the name come from?
Payton: I wish it were a more interesting story. Our drummer had a notes app list of band names for in case he ever joined the band. We were originally going to be something way worse. It was like Midnight Mary or something, which is way lame. We heard Buckshot Princess, and we were like, that's the one.
It's very punchy!
Evan: It's an aggressive little name.
Payton: For an aggressive little band.
In the past, the words “country” and “goth” have not really gone together. I'm curious how you make that combination work in your music.
Payton: Completely on accident.
Autumn: We're all obviously weird, and our interests bring a lot of different things to the table. I would say Evan is the goth. He brings the goth. And Payton, a lot of the lyrics tend to feel more country over the top of what the rest of us are doing.
Evan: There's nothing that I can do that isn't going to be goth. I like some really death-rock-y, abrasive guitar tones. There's nothing Payton can do that won't be country because you've heard her talk.
I feel like you hear both in the music! They blend really well, which is very fun to listen to. Staying on this topic, what is your songwriting process like? Does the instrumentation come first or the lyrics? How does that all come together?
Payton: We have a few different modes of writing songs. The preferred way is where we get to come together, maybe someone has the bones for something, and we get to work on the entire song together. That's when it feels best. That's when we get our more impressive songs, in my opinion. Then we have another mode, which is not to shit on the songs that we write this way. We call it the “Buckshot Factory,” which is where we know that we need to write a song. Normally, Evan ends up writing most of the song, and then we'll come in with our parts after that. The “Buckshot Factory” is a lot of Evan's legwork.
Evan: I'll get the bones of the music for a song, but I don’t want to sound like I write any lyrics. The process is that about 80 times a week, I record a voice memo on my phone, I send it to the group chat, and then maybe once every three weeks, someone will respond to one of those voice memos.
Autumn: Sometimes it needs to be resent a few times before it grabs someone's attention.
Reading your website and about us page, you talk about how you have influences without emulating anybody. In what ways are you doing that? And how do you use your inspirations to create something fresh, new, and not heard before?
Payton: I feel like, in general, I'm just an inspired person.
Autumn: Okay..
Evan: Get a load of this guy!
Payton: No! I just mean, I feel like I'm constantly looking for meaning in things. Obviously, the things that we like are going to shape us forever.
Evan: We also just like too many things to sound too much like one thing.
Autumn: I feel like all the things that we do like and accidentally piecing these things together just creates something new on its own.
Evan: There are bands I've heard where I'm like, okay, you listen to a lot of Blink-182. Anything else? Whereas any song of ours is going to be, let's take a little bit of Lana. Let's take a little bit of Johnny Cash, a little of The Gun Club, a bit of Paul McCartney. It's going to be such a stupid and wide mixture of stuff.
Payton: The overlap that is between us is strong when it's there. But in general, I feel like we all have such extremely different tastes from one another. Autumn is really our classic rock.
Autumn: That makes me sound lame.
Payton: No, it's not lame! I listen to a lot of rap and hip hop almost primarily which people are not normally expecting for me. Ivey listens to sad lesbian music.
Autumn: Katie and Evan are the weird ones.
Payton: Katie and Evan are not leading us to fame.
Autumn: They are leading us to infamy, though! We're not trying to do these things on purpose; it just happens, and we have no idea why it works, basically.
Evan: When we try to do something on purpose, it's all wrong. When we did “Dog's Watch TV,” I sat down trying to write a rockabilly song that initially had a Chuck Berry opening. I was like, I have to cut this off before I send this.
Payton: Sometimes we feel bad that we make such eclectic music because we have a huge goth fan base because of “Animal Cannibal” being the one that, you know, really kind of put us on the map. And so I have all these people, and they're in awesome, you know, traditional goth makeup being like, when will we get another goth song? I’m like, as soon as Evan sends me an amazing voice memo!
You're staying very true to yourselves, which I think is very admirable! This does lead me into my next question. You guys say you hold a DIY ethos, and I'm wondering: as you get bigger, how do you plan to keep that ethos and in what ways?
Payton: We're a pretty stubborn group of people. I don't think it would really go well for someone who tried to really crack the whip on us.
Autumn: We're unfortunately totally self-sufficient.
Payton: We are totally ornery, and we make our merch.
Autumn: We say we, but we have a group of people that we trust with our content.
Payton: Our Buck Shit-os!
Autumn: They do the graphic design stuff, and I mean, Ivey wrote the bio.
Payton: Everything that is public for us, either one of us or someone that we love a lot, did.
Autumn: We have Grace, who sells our merch. She books our show. She drives the car. She takes our pictures. She helps film videos. Grace is Evan's wife and our manager.
Evan: When I was a kid, I couldn't advance in Boy Scouts because they would want me to stand in front of a group of guys and just explain why they should let me advance. That would always piss me off so bad. So basically, I think we all kind of have that impulse of just like...
Autumn: We can't be told what to do.
Payton: We have a problem with authority, but we also want money. So, at the end of the day, if the person that's trying to crack the whip is writing me a big, enormous check, I might be a little more flexible. But I don't think we could ever “sell out,” as they say, because…
Evan: No one who could let us sell out would ever want us.
Staying on this track with growth and how you've had a lot of growth since you first started, what is it like to have so many people listen to your music and engage with you?
Payton: Our most beloved songs are not the ones with the highest numbers, but it's fucking awesome to get messages from people from all over the world. Like, that's crazy. Evan barely went to school, and Autumn and I went to school with like 12 people. It doesn't even feel real sometimes.
Autumn: I mean, even just to go to shows on a local scale, you know, you're playing these shows, and you're standing up there in front of these people, they're just your peers, you know? And they're singing the words. Then they come back and wear your merch. I mean, I went to a Pierce The Veil concert three hours away from here, and I saw someone wearing our merch at the show.
Evan: It's surreal. In our maybe fourth or fifth show, before we really had anything released, we would play shows, and I would see kids, young people, singing along to songs they really shouldn't have known at that point. Every time we get, I don't know, come to Brazil or come to Warsaw, it's all an extension of that feeling of just, whoa.
Payton: It's also that feeling that you could be someone's role model. I get messages from girls who are 12 and 13 that want me to look at lyrics that they've written, or they just wanna tell me how much it means to them and how I've inspired them. I was totally like that when I was their age, too. To be on the receiving end of that is scary because you think about the freaks that get those messages, but it's just like, there's eyes on you, so that can feel weird, but it's also like, wow, it matters. What I do matters.
Being able to be a role model to people is really cool, especially when you've had that experience. That would be an awesome feeling.
Evan: It’s humbling.
Autumn: For every good comment, though, there are five to seven negative comments.
Payton: The thing is, we didn't know what we were doing at all sound-wise when we first hopped in the studio.
Evan: Now we know a little bit, but you can kind of hear the difference. I mean, between “Dogs Watch TV,” “Animal Cannibal,” and “Arkansas Conjure,” and “Joan of Arc” as far as a textured recording, or even just a mixed balanced recording.
Payton: We would just go in there, play the song live, as is. The first recordings should just be labeled “live” because we would do barely any takes, not layer anything. My vocals are just sitting on top of the song. No effects. We just were like, yeah, I guess that's what a song sounds like!
Autumn: Recorded one day, released the very next day.
Evan: Every single success or good thing we've had really has come from just a million mistakes. I mean, all of us grew up very rural. We were not really part of anything growing up, so it's all just a bunch of trial and error and error and error and error.
Autumn: None of us have ever been in a different band before, either.
Payton: One of the funniest things that I think that ever happened was we had an article published in KARK, the Arkansas station, and this dude, I don't remember his name exactly, he commented, “Who are her parents?” My parents?! I lived in a trailer my whole life. Not a little bit of it, but the whole time. My mom, a cosmetologist; my father, a cable guy. He's like, "I would like to know who her parents are and how this happened." And he was like, “It sounds like the Monster Mash.” And I was like, okay, well, that's pretty cool to me. I love Monster Mash! I never in my life could have imagined getting a nepotism allegation.
To wrap things up, what do you hope that people get out of your music, and what is your goal for the future of Buckshot Princess?
Evan: Fear. Intimidation.
Autumn: To be amazing and evil.
Payton: We are a good representation of what is an underrepresented group of people. Everything we do, just because of who the band members are, like primarily women, all grew up in less than ideal circumstances, I think that we do a pretty good job of creating both a raw image of that, but then also showing people that you can still be glamorous. Even though a lot of my lyrics may be violent and dark, I think more than that, it's just real. I write about my life, everything that I write, if not directly about my own life, is about people that I know very dearly. So I want to represent them in a way that doesn't make them feel the way that we were kind of brought up to feel—ashamed of who they are.
Evan: I'd like to make a million dollars!
Autumn: That's the main goal. Forget everything that she just said; that's the main goal.
Evan: I saw this guitar today that costs $10,000. An Elvis Presley Gibson, like the SJ200 and the inlays across the fretboard, reads “Elvis Presley,” and I'd like to have enough money to buy that one day.
Autumn: We'll speak on a smaller scale. We are kind of taking a break from doing shows this spring, and we're going to get in the studio. We're going to just try to bang out some songs for a full-length and then…
Payton: …have promo.
Autumn: Have a lot of promo! We want to get better at posting things and staying relevant. We don't want to fall off.
Payton: We want to ride the wave that we do have.
Autumn: We're working on that and hopefully will get better at touring as well.
Payton: We need a bus.
Autumn: We need some sort of mode of transportation where we can stretch out, because right now it's Evan and Katie usually in Evan's van with all of the equipment. And then it's me, Payton, Ivey, and Grace in Grace's Prius, and there's no room to stretch out.
Payton: The reason that we hate Dallas so much is just because we almost killed each other from being around each other in horrible, uncomfortable circumstances. It was really violent.
Autumn: They might be scared of us there. I think, really, they might not want us back.
Payton: I threw a drink at Evan.
Evan: You threw a chair!
Payton: I ran away. I turned off my phone so no one could find me because I was being dramatic. I was crying.
Autumn: In the middle of this, honestly, I had sat down at this table, and I had a large slice of pizza. I had all of this chaos around me, and I was just eating this pizza. At the end of the day, we played a great show.
Evan: It was a really good set!
Payton: It was such a good show that we stayed a band.
Well, I'm happy you made it out!
Payton: Me too!
Autumn: So hopefully no more of that, and that's future Buckshot!
Buckshot Princess plans to release a concept record later in the year, keeping up their reputation as beautiful, a little spooky, and most definitely evil.
Follow Buckshot Princess on Instagram for updates, and stream their latest release, “Joan of Arc.”
