Like many American teenagers, Noah Faulkner, 16, is obsessed with music. He will spend hours going down rabbit holes, listening to every note played by his favorite artists and studying new discoveries. He recently emerged from a months-long deep dive into Clarence Ashley, a banjo player who recorded during the Great Depression and “makes me feel like I’m old,” Faulkner said. Ashley’s music “feels very eerie and I imagine it’s like an abandoned place somewhere.”
Unlike most teenagers, Faulkner translated these influences into a dedicated musical career. Using the Pedal Steel Noah handle, he posts daily 80s New Wave covers and post-punk hits on Instagram and Tik Tok, performing the work of acts like the Smiths and Tears for Fears on one of the most difficult instruments to control. Along the way, he’s drawn fans of Neko Case, Big Thief, Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle and dozens more to his soulful playing and charming set-up: a large Texas flag in the background, his brother, Nate, 13, in bass and a shaggy. Aussiedoodle panting.
In March, the brothers and their father, Jay, played several showcases during the South by Southwest festival in their hometown and opened for the Black Keys’ headlining set. Dressed in a Western shirt, black cowboy hat and the colorful Crocs that have become his signature footwear, Pedal Steel Noah put a Texas stamp on songs by Duran Duran and the Cocteau Twins.
“It was amazing,” he said via video call from the dinner table, his family gathered around him, “but it was tiring. Hopefully I can give myself a reward of a party for my friends.” On Monday, he takes the next step in his young career, releasing “Texas Madness,” an EP featuring three covers and two originals.
Faulkner, who is autistic, has had an intense curiosity about music for most of his life. As a young child he spent hours every day at the piano, experimenting with the pedals and listening to the sounds each key made. Later, his mother, Christine, said: “We put him in a speech-language pathology school and he had no words at that point. One day the director runs out and says, “Noah sang a whole song!” He sang before he actually spoke. This is his first language.”
Faulkner’s interest in pedal steel stems from an early immersion in country music. “I used to listen to George Strait when I wanted to hear something that was happy and faithful,” he explained. “I love the pedal steel in his songs. I like how solid and atmospheric it sounds.” His music teacher, Bukka Allen (the son of Lone Star artist Terry Allen), introduced the Faulkners to Lloyd Maines, who is something of a Texas country king, having played with Robert Earl Keen, Joe Ely and two generations of Allens.
Maines helped the family find a good steel for beginners – a Mullen, the same brand he plays. After setting it up in their home, he gave Faulkner his first and only lesson, teaching him how to hold the bar, how to wear the buttons and what each pedal does. “I played him an old Bob Wills song called ‘Steel Guitar Rag,’ which is a hard song to play,” Maines recalled in a phone interview. “It took him a while to figure out how to hold the bow, but he played the basics of that song right back to me.”
Faulkner immersed himself in the history of the instrument, picking up techniques by imitating his favorite players and exploring the range of sounds its strings could produce. After he began recording covers and original compositions on GarageBand and uploading videos to YouTube, his parents sensed an opportunity to inject some structure into their son’s life — and possibly lead him to a stable career.
“He’s really good with programs,” said Jay, who played bass and guitar in “a bunch of unknown bands” around Austin. “So we challenged him to make a video a day for a year. It was just to help him improve his craft as a musician. He started waking up in the mornings and we’d make a song and post it. We would do it very quickly.”
These videos soon involved the whole family. Jay usually played acoustic guitar just off screen, and after football season, when Nate no longer had practice, he learned to play bass and settled into a spot just behind his brother’s left shoulder. When their dog, Kara, kept wandering into the set, Christine kept her quiet by holding a piece of bacon next to the camera. “I’m so happy to be able to do what I love with my family all the time, every day,” Nate said. “It’s the best thing ever.”
At first Faulkner played country songs for a few thousand fans, but he soon branched out into new genres. Christine, who spent her teenage years in love with 80s music, made a request. “After a lot of country covers, I said, ‘Can we play something that Mama grew up with?’ He asked the Cure for something and they finally settled on ‘Just Like Heaven’. Faulkner turned the song into a dreamy two-step honky-tonk, and his audience swelled to tens of thousands.
This song “feels like teenage life,” Faulkner said. “I like playing the synth parts. I’ve found that some minor chords can be confident, and major chords are happy and emotional. Emotional music is good for people.”
He quickly developed into a sophisticated player, balancing technical proficiency with artistic insight. Instead of simply recreating these old hits, he reinterprets them, using their familiar motifs to explore a particular mood or idea—an approach that eschews both novelty and nostalgia.
Tim DeLaughter, who invited Faulkner to open for his longtime punk band the Polyphonic Spree, sees him as a distinct Texas artist who takes the lessons as well as the liberties of the older players. “It echoes Texas,” DeLaughter said in a telephone interview. “Noah brings pop music from all over the place, but puts a Texas twist on it. That really resonates with me, because we’re a cut-throat state that produces a lot of left-field art. At the same time, Noah is doing his thing. There is joy there.”
Pedal Steel Noah’s EP, ‘Texas Madness’, cements him as an artist in that Lone Star legacy, even if his original material comes from thousands of miles away. It turns Joy Division’s emotionally intense ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ into a dreamy Texas hillbilly road trip. His two originals, “Cleopatra” and especially “Lucy & Dixie”, have the brand-new sentimentality of local post-rock veterans Explosions in the Sky.
The family recorded the EP in a studio in nearby Dripping Springs, Texas, with Nate and Jay reprising their usual roles and Brian Beadle, a family friend, on drums. Despite never having worked in a studio, Pedal Steel Noah took direct control of the sessions. “When he gets in the studio,” Jay said, “he’s like a machine. He directed everything, told me what to do, told the engineer what he wanted. He did 10 or 15 songs in three days. He is very driven.”
His eldest son agreed that making music is hard work. “My hands are really exhausted. The best thing to do is exercise. I do a lot of push-ups,” he said. “When it was over, I was definitely proud of myself.”
“Texas Madness,” named after an episode of the Faulkner-written reality TV series, will be released by Lightning Rod Records, a Nashville label run by a childhood friend of Jay’s. The label has given the Faulkners a unique record deal, which ensures that all profits from Pedal Steel Noah’s releases — including the EP and a full-length album slated for late 2024 or early 2025 — go directly to the by Noah Faulkner.
“Once you turn 18, services for people with disabilities almost fall off a cliff and adults with disabilities suddenly have very few options,” his mother said. “When we started all of this, we were just hoping that maybe Noah could become a studio musician. Maybe he could make a living. Maybe he could avoid the cliff. Now I hope she can give him a social circle. As a mom, that’s all I wanted was someone to play with.”