Dragon Resort, the new project from Houston, TX songwriter Andy Mac, has released The Last Fool Left On Earth.  Today, the band has dropped the video for “Businessman (Have To Admit).”  

In regards to the single, Mac said, “I wrote ‘Businessman (Have To Admit)’ a few years ago. I had just watched the Coens movie The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs and was thinking about powerful & succinct little vignettes as song lyrics. I just liked the idea of the verses being colorful tableaus about judgement & comeuppance, and then the choruses being the refrain of some clueless guy going ‘Well, when my number’s up, I’m sure I’ll just buy my way out of it somehow.’

I recorded the song on my own and I was playing shows at a venue in Bacliff, TX where there was an abandoned boat out on the bay. It was anchored, so every time I went back to play there it was in the same spot, sinking a little further into the water. I asked my wife to come out and shoot a few takes of me walking back and forth in front of the boat, singing the song. It was fun and I looked like a goof, because the venue was open and people were just watching me go for it… I had to tune out Bob Seger blasting from their front patio while I mimed the lyrics, which is a shame, because I fuckin love Bob Seger.”

After starting a band in high school with lifelong friend & collaborator, Grant Swift, Mac studied film production at Hofstra University, with the intent of becoming a filmmaker. There, he met his wife, and started to realize how much more his interests were aligning with music. After years of playing in bands in Brooklyn, NY and producing independent film scores, Andy & his wife moved to Houston, TX.

When Mac landed in Houston, he had one goal in mind: to make a name for himself as a performer in a new town. He went about this via the proven method of saying “yes” to every gig he could find, and in the process, clocking that coveted 10,000 hours of experience which one supposedly needs to become great. One might say he succeeded in this task; in 2021, the Houston CityBook called him “Houston’s Busiest Singer” going on to mention “…the guitarist and vocalist found his pocket in doing live shows, which you could argue he does more frequently than almost any other Houston-based artist.”

After years of hard work & personal growth, with one goalpost reached, he was ready to take on the next: to write and record his first entirely self-penned album. The writing part had already begun. Driving home one night from a particularly dreary open mic and feeling more than a little lost and out of place, some words of comfort materialized over a spiraling chord progression: “You shouldn’t feel like you have to apologize all the time… and when you freeze up inside, to try to fight alone.” They were the opening lines of “Meet Me Outside”, the first of Mac’s original compositions written after moving to Texas. There was a feeling, a theme of overcoming loneliness, outshining that 21st-century sense of isolation and, indeed, finding one’s place in a sometimes-hostile world. A fire was lit, which would ultimately inform much of the material on the forthcoming record.

“My songs are mostly mood pieces or short stories – like little novels – the theme of which, at their core, is almost always ‘I’m you, you know… and you’re me.’” explains Mac. “The weirdest thing is, I always eventually realize that I’m writing to myself. The songs are like little post it notes on the fridge: reminders, uplifting anecdotes or cautionary tales, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs about how to exist in the world.”

Photo Courtesy: Megan Allison