Cactus Lee’s New Phase of Folk Realism

With Perfect Middle Hall, songwriter Kevin Dehan steps out of honky-tonk confines


Kevin Dehan, aka Cactus Lee (Photo by Jackie Lee Young)

On a Thursday last June, about 20 people stood sweating and watching a man play songs at a laundromat. If the heat was oppressive outside, it was downright tyrannical inside Laundry Works on Speedway. But the audience quietly watched and swayed to the music.

The man was Kevin Dehan, who plays under the moniker Cactus Lee. He didn't use an amplifier for his performance, just his voice and a guitar. While the crowd arching around him was restrained, the laundromat was not. In the periphery, the boxes of metal shook and clanged. The folks doing their laundry talked and yelled and folded, peeled wet clothes from inside the machines, and paid no mind to the crowd or the music.

Dehan played anyway.

His stage was a bench set against the laundromat's front windows, and the backdrop, the streets and trees of Central Austin's Hyde Park neighborhood. He wore a Texas standard: cowboy boots, Wranglers, and a Western shirt. And Dehan clearly felt the moment. There was purpose to his singing, and he occasionally closed his eyes. Between songs, he took swigs of a beer wrapped in a brown paper bag that sat next to him.

The whole effort at the laundromat took about 30 minutes, and then everyone left.

In a casual moment to a passerby, Dehan was crossing a creative threshold. The acoustic renderings Dehan played that day were released about a month later on a mini-album called Perfect Middle Hall. Distinct from Cactus Lee's earlier releases, fuller production with some new instrumentation fills out Cactus Lee's hippie folk sound – more Gene Clark than Gene Autry, more Jackson C. Frank than Alan Jackson. Which is to say, the music is more inspired by the dirty realism of Seventies Americana-makers than country counterparts.

"At the beginning [of Cactus Lee] it was really important for me to go out and perform, make sure that my band was something that the crowd would be happy with. That my songs were ... you know, a whole set of music [that] would be an experience for a crowd to come out and enjoy and dance," Dehan says in a phone interview, about six months after the show.

At some point, the musician's perspective changed.

"I decided to do what I wanted to do, which is go play at a fucking laundromat, and play songs that people might not really want to hear, or that might make them sad," he continues.

"That's why, to me, the laundromat was important, because there's no booze served, there's no dancing; it's really weird. And if people want to come and hear these songs, they're going to have to go out of their way to do something awkward."

“I’m trying to write better, I’m trying to write clean – but also write true. It’s really hard to do that, and it’s really scary to do that ... but then also to have to get up and sing them.”   – Cactus Lee

Except the show wasn't awkward. Sure, it was candid and unconventional, certainly a divergence from his past performances at Austin's far-famed dives and historied honky-tonks. But the exercise laid bare the songs of Perfect Middle Hall, deprived the musician of his regular tools, and sent Cactus Lee in a new direction.

"That was a big transition for me," he says. "I wanted to look at performance in a different way, and show a different side of myself, and not have a crutch. To me, a lot of that stuff is a crutch. You go, 'Take it away, Johnny!' And then Johnny riffs a fat solo."

Leading up to Perfect Middle Hall, Dehan ‌released four full-length albums in only two years, starting with 2019's Texas Yard Sale and self-titled Cactus Lee. The Austin native followed up with Tarantula in 2020 and Texas Music Forever in 2021.

When Dehan established Cactus Lee around 2018, he only had a few aspirations, mostly involving shows at a couple of the Hill Country's infamous watering holes.

"I was trying to create a baseline. That was it. My goal when I started Cactus Lee was, I wanted to play Ginny's [Little Longhorn Saloon] or Dry Creek," he says in an interview on the patio of Donn's Depot.


A note on the photography: Cactus Lee was captured here by celebrated Austin photographer Jackie Lee Young. The two met up in December at Eastside migas institution Cisco's Restaurant Bakery & Bar, right after Young returned from months-long international ventures as Khrungabin's tour photographer. Young told the Chronicle via email: "Kevin was the very first friend I made in Austin – at college orientation at St. Edwards in the year 2000. :) I have photographed every band he's had since then, it's amazing to see him rise with his artistry."

He achieved those goals quickly, regularly playing both Sam's Town Point and the now-defunct Dry Creek Cafe with a loosely arranged, rotating cast of Austin musicians. At Dry Creek, Dehan struck up relationships with the regulars and the Mount Bonnell bar's infamous tender, Angel Altenhofel (even penning a 2021 song in her honor). There, Cactus Lee recorded a live album and acted as the house band for a period up to the establishment's final night.

Dry Creek shuttered on October 31, 2021, after longtime owner Jay "Buddy" Reynolds sold the 68-year-old dive, despite rallying by Dehan and friends.

Dehan doesn't hide his fascination with Old Austin, taking inspiration from Doug Sahm as well as historical figures like the Cedar Choppers and J. Frank Dobie. The musician even developed a friendship with the famed visual and concert poster artist Jim Franklin, who Dehan considers a mentor and calls "the prophet of Austin." Dehan was inspired to reach out to the patron saint of armadillos after viewing a microfiche at Downtown's Faulk Central Library of a 1971 New Yorker article about the artist. He then typed up a letter to send him.

“That’s why, to me, the laundromat was important, because there’s no booze served, there’s no dancing; it’s really weird. And if people want to come and hear these songs, they’re going to have to go out of their way to do something awkward.”   – Cactus Lee

"To be fair, I wanted him to do art for me. I've also now met at least a dozen people that are like, 'How do I get him to do art?' He will not do art for you or anyone else," says Dehan, softening his tone before finishing, "but I learned that really quick, he could be my friend."

Early on, Cactus Lee was mainly creative transportation, an exercise in trying to write songs fashioned by classic influences. The artist recalls: "The first four albums were like, 'I want to make an album that sounds like X, Y, or Z." The transition Dehan spoke of really sits between the content on those first few records ‌and Perfect Middle Hall, and inevitably everything after.

Where songs on debut Texas Yard Sale felt like traditional honky-tonk jaunts, Perfect Middle Hall covers fatherhood and growing older. Songs like "Adeline" live as lyrical extensions of Dehan's own hopes, fears, tender moments, and dark thoughts – still wrapped in metaphor and allegory, but biographical. There, he sings: "I might die with my boots on tonight/ I may not make it home."

In other words, songs with an existential bent.

"Oh, you caught that?" he says, speaking over a deafening Fleetwood Mac song at Donn's.

"I'm trying to write better, I'm trying to write clean – but also write true. It's really hard to do that, and it's really scary to do that ... but then also to have to get up and sing them."

Over the course of our interviews, Dehan began recording a new album with producer Kyle Crusham – a friend he's known since high school who has worked with Paul Simon, Ryan Bingham, and Edie Brickell in the past. Crusham's chops also shaped the lush Perfect Middle Hall recordings.

For his part, Crusham affirms, "These new songs really pick up where the last record left off, and it's just a continuing thought. It's a little bit different, a little more colors, but I think this is some of the best work he's done."

On Cactus Lee's new record, the producer adds his own additional instrumentation, and pairs Dehan with seasoned musicians. Crusham also brings an intangible quality that didn't exist on Dehan's early records. Something that only comes from working with old friends.

Of the producer, Dehan says: "He's made me a better father. He's shown me that it's not scary if you want to be bigger. I come from, like, a punk mentality. I never thought that I could be in a room with people that are of the caliber [of these musicians].

"He's telling me, 'You can, and you will.' And I fucking will," Dehan says, deviating from his usual lighthearted, but measured, tone.

That said, don't mistake Dehan's conviction for blind confidence. He's motivated and ready to do the heavy lifting to gain an audience's appreciation. That's true to his character, whether stomping bootheels at a legendary dive or sermonizing at your local laundromat.


Dehan was the first-ever new artist on Spanish reissue label Mapache, which released Perfect Middle Hall on vinyl in October, distributed stateside through Light in the Attic. Local ephemera-maker Hippie Scum also has tapes. Cactus Lee plays tonight, Jan. 5, at LoLo wine for “Dry Creek at LoLo” and on Jan. 26 at the 13th Floor with Little Mazarn and Garrett T. Capps.

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KEYWORDS FOR THIS STORY

Cactus Lee, Kevin Dehan, Jim Franklin, Kyle Crusham

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