It's a Friday afternoon in early February, and Sam Westhoff is about to play the opening show of his first headline tour as HAFFWAY, not coincidentally in his hometown: Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Just two and a half years ago, Westhoff was ready to throw in the towel and call it quits on making music. Suddenly, he was genuinely considering a job at Lowe's over the uncertainty as a relative newcomer in a crowded music industry.

"I think I was like, 'I don't know how to do this artist thing. I can't figure it out. 
Especially here,'" he tells me as we walk around downtown Tulsa just hours before his show at the Vanguard. "I was like, 'I don't know anybody to talk to, to help me get better, how to grow.' I just didn't know how the business works. I didn't know anything."

After years producing and writing for other artists, including bands of his own, Westhoff recalls hitting a ceiling and finding himself in a dark, rather unsettling place.

"I felt like I wasn't getting any better. I'm working 90-hour weeks to make $30,000 a year," he explains. "
I never see my wife. I never see my friends unless I'm producing them. It was like, 'This is a bad life.' 
So I talked to my wife, and I'm like, 'I'm just tapped. I'm done. 
I want to work at Lowe's.'"

His wife, Abi, initially supported the idea of pulling away from music only if that was really what Sam wanted. But right before he turned 27, she suggested, "Why don't you just try to write for yourself and see if that wakes anything back up?"

Westhoff says he immediately responded: "'Fuck that. I already tried that—hated it.' But I went for it. Wrote a bunch of bad music. And maybe about six months later, I decided, 'I'm gonna try to write one more song.' 
And that song was 'Dirty Fire,' which became the first single for HAFFWAY."

Shortly afterward, the pair picked up and moved to Nashville on a whim, having little to no connections except a few friends from the band Little Image.

"It's just been—fucking lucky, dude," says Westhoff with a sigh. "I feel very fortunate. I met the right people at the right time. And I'm not, like—you know, I'm 100,000 miles away from where I want to be, but I'm a thousand miles closer at the same time."

This past fall, Westhoff spent a run of shows opening for fellow Variance favorite Dermot Kennedy after writing and engineering for his upcoming album. Likewise with Wilder Woods, the solo project from NEEDTOBREATHE frontman Bear Rinehart.

"Dermot's one of my favorite artists in the world. He's brilliant," says Westhoff. "We played 16 shows, and he was watching from side stage every show. That's like, the most encouraging thing in the world ... that guy's championed me more than I could have ever imagined."

Westhoff says that, especially after coming so close to quitting on his musical journey, he's grateful for the organic relationships, connecting with other artists on a personal and human level, not just in the studio. He points to another such bond with Noah Kahan, whose own star has skyrocketed over the past few years.

"[Noah] and I have gotten really close," he says. 
"I engineered about half of the record. It's a big album that's coming out," he teases, referencing Kahan's recently announced The Great Divide, which arrives April 24. "Song wise, it's huge. But I got to write on three of them. We spent time down in random farms that we turned into studios, in Vermont and Nashville."

He adds: "All of last year was characterized with, 'Fuck, I really didn't see that coming!' But that's all because my team is just championing the hell out of me and pushing really hard. They're amazing."

Now, he's on the road, hitting a number of cities across 9,000 miles, including Tulsa, Dallas, Austin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, Toronto, New York, Washington, Philly, Boston, Charlotte, Nashville and Atlanta.

But even as some of his dreams start to come true, in the back of his mind, Westhoff is still calculating the next steps, ever conscious of the delicate nature of this business.

"It's this kind of this golden handcuffs thing," he explains of the touring beast. "Because you don't make money until you make a lot of money. That middle ground is really hard to crack. Vanguard's the biggest venue we're playing. 
Exit/In Nashville is about the same size. But let's say I start playing 600-caps everywhere. You can sell them out. 
The production need goes up. So the budget goes up. We break even again. There's just this point where you start hitting—you know, once you start hitting a Cain's Ballroom [1,800 capacity in Tulsa]. Then I might start making money."

He quips: "But that's not guaranteed. 
My buddies that are doing 4,000-cap tours and are still losing money. But somebody might do two nights at an arena and walk away with $14 million in their pocket. It's a lottery."

As someone only just working his way into the touring industry, Westhoff says he felt heartened by Olivia Dean's recent battle with Ticketmaster, in which the newly crowned Best New Artist at the Grammys called out the ticketing giant for "exploitative" practices, as many tickets for Dean's North American tour were listed for as much as 14 times their original face value. In November, Ticketmaster announced it would cap resale rates for Dean's tour, adding it was "refunding fans for any markup they already paid to resellers" via Ticketmaster.

With the road ahead far from uncertain, but much clearer than it was two years ago, Westhoff says now he is cheering on other acts from Tulsa. 

"I love watching my buddies here that are just so fucking good, like MORE&MORE, and Keyland, and Micah Felts," he says. "Like, relentlessly good. So I hope at some point, the city catches up and realizes how important the music here is. I mean, it's just in its DNA, you know? I'm rooting for this place."■