This is the fantasy: The Red Clay Strays sit on a tour bus, a throng waiting outside for an increasingly rare show on home turf, talking about how far they’ve come. They reminisce about dues paid, talk about the way they can now fly home between tour legs, reveal the big-label deal they’re going to announce the next day.

A little while later, they’re deep into a triumphant set that’s part of the Live at Five series in Fairhope’s Halstead Amphitheater. A few songs in comes “Disaster,” and lead singer Brandon Coleman is belting out some of the heaven-and-hell imagery that runs through the band’s catalog:

Lookin’ for a prophet? I’ll tell you I ain’t. But I know when it’s gonna rain.

These guys from Mobile have been working a long time to make it rain. Nowadays you don’t have to be a prophet to sense that a flood is coming.

In December, Billboard.com noted that the Strays’ “are officially Billboard Hot 100-charting artists” thanks to the slow-burn song “Wondering Why.” Billboard said the No. 93 song had 5.7 million U.S. streams, 418,000 radio airplay audience impressions and 1,000 downloads sold in the Dec. 15-21 tracking week, and noted that it also had registered at No. 7 on Hot Rock Songs and No. 18 on Hot Country Songs.

The mix of charts cited by Billboard – rock, country, alternative, Adult Alternative Airplay – gives a sense of the way the Red Clay Strays stand at a musical crossroads. If you had to pigeonhole them in one genre, it would be rock. But it’s a throwback strain of rock that draws on country, rockabilly, blues and tent-revival fervor.

In January, Billboard followed with a full “chartbreaker” profile predicting that the group was on track for a breakout year in 2024. In February, a Rolling Stone article painted much the same picture, tallying up highlights that include a sold-out three-night stand coming up this fall at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium.

At this moment in time, the Red Clay Strays embody the old gag about working for years to become an overnight success. Aside from the appreciative notice from two of the nation’s biggest music industry publications, they’ve got a new album coming with star producer Dave Cobb and the backing of RCA to promote it.

It didn’t come easy, and that affects the way they hold it all.

“We’re thankful for it,” says Coleman, sitting on the bus. “I said this a couple of weeks ago, everybody’s asking like, ‘How does it feel to have finally made it?’ And I think we’ve always felt like we’ve made it in a sense. We’ve been playing music and paying our bills, other than COVID, which screwed everybody up.

“So this is just extra,” he says. “This is icing on the cake and we’re, we’re just as thankful for this as we were when, you know, we were driving ourselves around in our shuttle bus playing to empty barrooms. Just being able to do it is, is what we enjoy and is what we’re thankful for and take pride in.”

“Every day,” says drummer John Hall. “Every day is a blessing, for real. We get to do this and do it together.”

“I also think it could be taken away, and just so quickly,” says Coleman.

The journey started around 2016 for the band. Early supporters included film producer D. Scott Lumpkin, who included its song “Good Godly Woman” in his 2019 Stephen King adaptation “Doctor Sleep,” and who signed the group to his Skate Mountain Records label. In 2022, the Red Clay Strays independently recorded “Moment of Truth,” in the north Alabama studio of Noel Webster.

It was a watershed moment in more ways than one. After a lot of struggle, they had an album that they felt was representative of their true sound. More importantly, they had fresh fuel to feed the growing fan base that already had given them so much.

“They have always come through for us,” says Coleman. “We crowdfunded our shuttle bus and we crowdfunded our first album. And at the time when we did do that crowdfund for the first album, you know, the engine had just blown up in the bus, so we had to pay like 12 grand to get that fixed. And then our album was another 10 grand and we were 25 grand in debt and fresh out of COVID and didn’t know what we were going to do.

“And we started that crowdfunding campaign and raised 60 grand in the first week,” he says. “And it’s like, you know, our fans have always came through for us and we’ll always be thankful for that and that’s why I’ll never tell somebody no. I’ll always take a picture or sign something because they’re the reasons we’re here.”

Here and now, sitting on a much larger and nicer bus than that early one, the vibe reflects dues paid. The five members there since the beginning – Coleman and Hall plus bassist Andy Bishop and guitarists Drew Nix and Zach Rishel – complete each others’ sentences and bat in-jokes back and forth.

A year ago they’d push hard through a tour leg lasting three to four weeks, then have a few days off – but they didn’t have the means to spend those few days at home, as they do now.

“We’d have three to five days off on the road,” says Coleman. “Well, we’d just be stuck on the road because we’re in Montana somewhere. So you couldn’t drive home. Now, we’ll just jump on a plane and fly home and be home for a couple of days and then leave again.”

“By the end of last year, I started to realize why musicians have, why you see them take mental breaks,” says Bishop. “And why drugs are used. It’s not for everybody. You have to find a healthy balance of not slaving yourself to your own craft.”

“And I think a lot of people romanticize it too, being a touring musician, being a rock star or whatever,” says Coleman. “But I don’t think they really know what goes into it and how demanding it is.”

“Especially on your partner,” says Nix. “You’re leaving them alone for three weeks, a month. You know, you just try to be the best you can when you’re back home.”

They joke for a while about the lonely phone calls, hearing about problems they can’t deal with until they get back home. One band member wonders if it might be better for such issues to be filed in a complaint box, pending his return. Others observe that the box might end up being the size of a trash can.

They feel good about the system they’ve come up with for working up new material. It’s 95% democratic, they say. They want whoever wrote the song to be happy with it, and they want Coleman to be satisfied with the emotionality of it. The important thing is that if they’re struggling with an arrangement, they’re confident there is a solution and that they can find it.

“A big part of that is also us going in open-minded to those things,” says Bishop. “Like, you can’t really get your feelings hurt if someone doesn’t like what you, I mean, that’s a big because that can easily screw up a lot of things. You throw the vibe off completely.”

“Yeah, if you’re just sitting there pissed off while everybody else is trying to work up music,” adds Coleman.

Bishop jokes that with the recent addition of organist/keyboardist Sevans Henderson, the band has entered dangerous territory: There’s now the potential for a tie vote. Henderson shoots back that he counts as half a vote.

The experience with Cobb seems to have validated and honed the band’s methodology.

“We have gotten better at working up our music, I think,” says Coleman. “And then, working with a producer like Dave Cobb really helped that. Because I think we’re all guilty of thinking about it too hard or overthinking it.”

“He just makes it a free flow,” says Hall, “and It makes it just so simple and easy, like it’s not like it’s not a thing.”

“It’s a free flow and he’ll kind of rein it in and he’ll have ideas and it’s awesome working with him,” says Nix.

Since the band confirmed last September that it was working with Cobb – whose credits include projects with Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, Brandi Carlile and Greta Van Fleet – fans have been wondering when they’ll hear the results.

“Our record’s coming out this year,” says Bishop.

“We don’t have a date nailed down yet but we’re shooting for the end of the summer, early fall, hopefully,” says Coleman.

This one won’t be an independent release. Not by a long shot. But band members say a major-label deal was never a given.

“Just a year ago, we shopped around for potential labels and nobody batted an eye,” says Coleman. “So we decided we were gonna just wait and have a bigger bat to swing with. We signed with a record label service company called Thirty Tigers and they helped the Dave Cobb thing happen. And international demand started coming up. That’s what was getting hard to keep up with and we could clearly see down the road that it’s gonna be way bigger than what we can handle all on our own. And so that’s when we reopened the idea of a record label.”

“There was label guys sneaking into the backstage of our shows to meet with us,” says Bishop.

The band picked RCA because the label offered “a super artist-friendly deal,” Coleman says. “We’re making the calls and we decide what we do.”

“That was our number one thing going in, that they can’t tell us what to do,” says Bishop. “And their whole thing was like, ‘We don’t want to tell you what to do.’”

If they do have the breakthrough year predicted by Billboard and Rolling Stone, it’ll probably bring fresh challenges as well. The thought doesn’t seem to faze the band. They’ve paid their dues and they know better than to take anything for granted.

“Tomorrow we could lose everything,” says Bishop. “We’re very thankful for what we have and where we’re at.”

“Especially the way the way things are,” says Coleman. “Like, people are viral for a month or so and then a few months go by and nobody knows who they are anymore. Everybody’s talking about Red Clay Strays and ‘Wondering Why’ right now. Who’s to say they’ll still be talking about us six months from now? Just try to take it as it comes and just be thankful for it.”

“We did do it, no matter what,” says Bishop. “We were breaking down and repairing the bus trying to make it to the next show for five years.”

“We didn’t have a safety net,” says Coleman. “We were determined to make music our safety net.”

“We bet on ourselves every time, man,” says Nix. “Because God’s right behind us. We have nothing to worry about.”

An hour-and-a-half later, the group is tearing through a homecoming show for several thousand people, what Coleman calls “probably the biggest crowd we’ve played for in Baldwin County.”

As others have noted, there’s some Johnny Cash and some Elvis Presley and some Jerry Lee Lewis in Coleman’s stage presence. One song might sound like something those gentlemen might have done, back in the day, while the next might sound akin to a Lynyrd Skynyrd fast boogie.

But the Red Clay Strays are not simply a retro jukebox. It’s the way they bring all that stuff into the present that makes them interesting. Periodically during this show Coleman reminds onlookers that this is no nostalgia trip.

“I want to play y’all our first song to go viral on TikTok,” he says, introducing “Devil in My Ear.” “This song is about mental health. Y’all be sure to reach out if you need somebody.”

The band opens with “Doin’ Time,” a twangy rocker about a man serving out his sentence for armed robbery. It follows with “Moment of Truth,” a slow-fire stomp that leans even more heavily into repentance. “Why do I do all of these things I shouldn’t do” moans Coleman. “Why do I stumble when I’m somewhere close to you/ If I can’t be righteous/ If I can’t see temptation through/ I will face my judgment in the moment of truth.”

But on this night, at this moment, for this hometown crowd, nothing sets them on fire like “Stone’s Throw.” They recognize the slinky bass line from the first notes Bishop plays; they sing along from the first words Coleman chants.

If you can call what we got last night sleep/

Well, we got a few hours/

Blurred lines, I’m fighting like hell, to try and keep my eyes wide open/

We’re always running from, running to, running late, or running out of/

It’s the return that keeps us going

The crowd keeps singing as the band kicks in. This is the story so far, and this is exactly where the Red Clay Strays are at.

We’ve been gone for way too long/

Can’t count all the roads we’ve been down/

Try to keep it between the ditches til the Dolly Parton Bridge is in the front window/

We’ve been gone for way too long/

Can’t count all the roads we’ve been down/

But now we’re a stone’s throw/

A stone’s throw from home