When Riley Holtz was a teenager, he ran the backroads of Neosho, the "City of Springs" or the "Gateway to the Ozarks," as Neoshoans like to call it, deep in southwest Missouri, a few clicks below Joplin. Neosho is best known for its La-Z-Boy manufacturing plant and its proximity to the fabled Spooklight, a floating ghost light that, legend has it, floats supernaturally at the end of a gravel road out in the sticks, although Holtz himself never saw the Spooklight despite his teenage attempts to spot it.
This was back in the mid-aughts when Holtz was just a high school choir kid with a smooth tenor who had no ambitions of playing a guitar or writing songs or forging a musical career at all. Little did he know that about 20 years later, he would be releasing his debut album, the terrific Illegal Before Noon, the first great St. Louis album of 2024, and would be prepping to headline an album release concert at Old Rock House fronting a nine-piece band, Riley Holtz & the Lost Cause.
"At the time, I loved it," Holtz says of his time in Neosho. "I liked living in the country. I made a lot of lifelong friends from down there. But there's no way in hell I'd move down there again." Holtz graduated from high school in 2008 and turned down a vocal music scholarship in favor of enlisting in the Navy, a Holtz family tradition. "I walked past a Navy recruiter's booth and was like, 'I'm going to join the Navy,'" he says with a laugh. "It was not very well thought out, very spur of the moment. I figured it would give me time to figure things out."
It turns out that time in the Navy was short. Holtz forgot to tell them about his bad case of asthma and had an attack during basic training, leading to a quick discharge. He never made it out of boot camp, never saw a boat. It was back to Neosho, where Holtz got a job driving a forklift in a feed mill and started to find his way back into singing, discovering that somewhere within him was a songwriter trying to get out.
Music, after all, was in his blood. Before his parents' divorce, Holtz had lived in the Ballwin area where his dad reveled in classic soul music and high-end home audio. "We never had a big house or nice car, but we had the nicest sound system," Holtz says. His dad, a recreational drummer, fed young Riley a steady dose of Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. Today, Holtz has a tattoo on his arm that reads, "Just an old sweet song keeps Georgia on my mind" in honor of both the classic Ray Charles hit and Holtz's mother, Georgia.
Back in the feed mill days, Holtz would get off work at midnight and sit up until five in the morning playing a five-string guitar ("The E string was broken," Holtz says), teaching himself to strum along to Jason Mraz and John Mayer songs. "I would play for hours," he says. "I just wanted to keep singing."
Holtz enrolled at Missouri State in Springfield, where he sang with the Beartones, MSU's a cappella group. There, he met drummer and beatboxer Cam Branson, who plays drums for Holtz's Lost Cause today. Holtz left the school in 2010 and moved back to the St. Louis area, banged around on a plastic mail-order guitar and learned piles of covers with his buddies, eventually forming a cover band called Will Play For Beer, a moniker they meant literally.
"We were learning anything from Nelly to classic rock to country, just the bar bangers," Holtz says, as the band landed a steady gig at the Haus in Chesterfield circa 2011. "We were degenerate 21-year-olds. We had a bunch of degenerate 21-year-old friends who had nothing better to do than to come see us on a Saturday, so the bar kept bringing us back."
And Holtz kept getting better. A vocal chameleon, Holtz can sing anything, and his knack for getting popular covers over with crowds led to solo acoustic shows around town and eventually a career performing on cruise ships, an ironic twist on his old Navy aspiration of working on a boat. Holtz's time on cruise ships scratched an itch for both world travel and live performance, and served as the inspiration for the autobiographical "Home," the first single on Illegal Before Noon.
It wasn't until COVID-19 hit, however, that Holtz really came into his own as a songwriter. "I wrote sparingly until the pandemic," Holtz says. "Then at that point, I sat down and said, 'I want to do this.'" During the shutdown, Holtz would take requests during marathon six-hour sessions on Facebook, picking up new tunesmithing tips by learning other writers' songs. "Playing all these songs — that's when things started clicking with songwriting," he says.
It was also during this time that Holtz leaned into his signature look: namely, his voluptuous gnome-like beard. I ask him how long he's been this well-bearded. "Not that long!" he says. "It was super patchy, but then I thought, 'It looks like it's growing in, so maybe I'll just let it go.' My brothers are insanely jealous."
Most of the songs on Illegal Before Noon were written in 2021 and 2022, although one of the album's best songs, "Giving Up on Love," goes back to the old feed mill days. With its fingerpicking intro, time-shifting and sonic variance, the song feels quite sophisticated for a writer's first-ever song. "Credit that to ignorance," he jokes. "Everything I knew was put into one thing. It's a snapshot of myself at 19."
The rest of the album could be said to be snapshots of Holtz throughout his 34 years. The record is filled with memoir-like vignettes about coming of age, living it up and experiencing heartache, across vocal and musical stylings that at turns call to mind Zac Brown, Ray LaMontagne, Chris Stapleton and Nathaniel Rateliff, among others.
"I love storytellers. I really love when songwriters make up a story about a fictional character. Dylan, Prine, all the greats have done it," Holtz says before adding with a laugh, "I found out that I'm not good at that. So almost all of these songs are me having to come back into myself to find whatever story I was trying to tell. It's about me, but others can relate to that too."
Recorded at Kalinga Production Studios in Maplewood, what started as a planned five-song EP kept expanding as Holtz got on a songwriting roll. "We started with eight songs and were going to pick the best five, but then I wrote three more," he says. "Being in the studio, I just wanted to keep going." Beyond the ten songs that made the album, Holtz and his band recorded eight more, which he hopes to release later this year. Crucially, many of the musicians who were brought in to play on the album have stuck around to form the Lost Cause, a group that swells to nine members at full strength.
Holtz credits his bandmates, including Branson, bassist Kevin Neumann and multi-instrumentalist Nathan Sickmeier, with helping to broaden his songs stylistically. "I've got to give it to the guys, because the music would sound entirely different without them," he says. "I came in with a scratch track and said, 'What do you guys hear?'" As a result, the album is tour of diverse Americana styles: the slow-building country soul of "Movin' On"; the gospel handclapper "Passin' the Plate"; the swampy, syncopated, horn-abetted "Locked Up"; the organ-drenched beer-and-cocaine country ballad "430"; the falsetto-inflected jazzy soul of "Bad Bitch"; the muscular guitar-driven "Father I Have Sinned"; the wordy-versed bluegrass-adjacent "Josey's Ring." ("That was me trying to write a Jim Croce song," he says of that last one.)
Holtz and the full Lost Cause band, complete with a three-piece horn section, will perform these songs at the album release show on Friday, January 12, at Old Rock House with opening acts John Henry and Matt Jordan. At the show, Holtz says folks can expect to hear the new album, a brand-new original the band has yet to record and a few covers, too.
Those covers, as Holtz says, continue to "pay the bills," and Holtz can be found playing out three or four times a week all year — solo, in duos, in trios, and as the full cover band Riley & the Groove — everywhere from the Foundry to Fast Eddie's in Alton to wineries in Defiance. "I'm all over the place," he says.
With the new album, more Riley Holtz & the Lost Cause shows booked, some regional touring in the works, a home studio being built in his basement and his recent engagement to a gal he's known since they were teens, Holtz is living the good life, singing songs that he loves. "Man, I think, 'What do you have to do today? Have a rehearsal, go to the studio, play a gig that night,'" he says. "It's pretty sweet. I really try to step back and realize it."
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