Fastball guitarist talks about longevity ahead of 30th anniversary tour, ever-changing Austin scene

AUSTIN (KXAN) — Austin band Fastball is about to hit the road for their 30th anniversary tour. The band will kick off the tour at a solar eclipse festival in Fredericksburg next month before traveling to several different cities and doing a hometown show at Parish in May.

Ahead of the tour, Miles Zuniga, the band's guitarist, talked about their key to longevity, the ever-changing scene of Austin, and what's next for the group.

Fastball is an Austin hallmark and a staple in the city called the "Live Music Capital of the World." The band has been around longer than the Austin City Limits Music Festival, with the same lineup as when they started in '94.

And if you've been in Austin very long, you'll know how rare it is for anything to stay the same for more than a few years, Zuniga himself attested to that.

"It's remarkable that the music just continues to go, you know, despite very real challenges, you know, it's so expensive to live here," he noted. "And when I moved here, my rent was 150 bucks a month. So I could play three shows, and my rent was covered. Oh, it was like so cheap. Life was so easy. If you're a musician now, it's just, it's a lot harder."

He also said, though, that it's "still fun," and Austin is a great music town with "so much music here." He pointed out how rare that is, having traveled to other places and witnessed the scenes elsewhere.

When asked about his take on "the Old Austin," Zuniga said each person will experience the city as "their own movie."

"It's natural for people to get nostalgic, and I think it's important on some level not to buy into that too much," Zuniga said. "Because someone somewhere is having their first kiss somewhere in town, and it's going to mean the world to them. You know, it's going to be like, 'ah, I was on that bridge and a beautiful skyline that didn't exist when I was growing up.'"

"Everyone has their own movie. And so whatever stage that movie is at, that's their movie. My movie though, it was very different. It was easy to live here, it was cheap, it was beautiful. You could park right downtown and it was no problem at all. There was no such thing as traffic jams. We did not have traffic, it was incredible."

Even with the challenges of constant change in Austin over the last three decades, Fastball has remained, and they've stayed consistent. The trio has released eight albums to date, with a ninth soon to come out.

Zuniga credits their longevity to the "love of doing it for its own sake, and not for any outcome and not for any ulterior thing," he said. "We've been very lucky, we've had amazing things happen to us. And we've had hit songs been played all over the world. And then we've had other people record our music and so we've been really blessed with that kind of thing. But it's a dangerous trap to get into to start to expect something out of it."

"It sounds corny, but it's true, playing music is its own reward. It's kind of like taking a bike ride - you don't take a bike ride, because you need to get somewhere. I mean, maybe sometimes you do, but a lot of people just love to go out on a beautiful, sunny day and ride their bicycle. There's no end in mind. It's for the sheer pleasure of riding the bicycle. And that's the same way with music," Zuniga explained. "It's the sheer pleasure of playing something and creating something in your head that only exists in your head. And then you actually pick up a guitar and try to give birth to it, make it become a real thing in the world. And then you take it to your bandmates, and then if they like it, you can turn it into this thing. And then you record it. And then someone from Tokyo walks up to you one day, and goes, 'I love that song, I listen to it all the time.' We go, this is such a trip, man, to be able to just dream something up. And it travels all the way across the world. It's fantastic."

Zuniga said of the upcoming tour, he's most excited to just play the music. He said the Eclipse Festival at the Arch Ray Resort in Fredericksburg is also exciting, though he's nervous about logistics since potentially hundreds of thousands of people are expected to visit Central Texas for the Solar Eclipse. The festival itself, however, had a limited number of tickets available to allow an “intimate, exceptional experience,” according to the resort.

"But aside from logistics, I am excited about it. And I'm always most excited about just getting to play the music and getting to see who shows up, and all the things that I just described before," he said. "One time, we played in Los Angeles and some guy from -- I can't remember -- Uruguay or, Panama, or maybe he was from Croatia... I know he was from very, very far away, and he was like, 'it's been my dream to get to see you guys,' and it all lined up because he was in LA and we were too, and so he got to see us. And so it's stories like that. And just, there's a lot of people that have been with us for the whole ride that have stuck around, so it's always great to see them, and it's just a blast. I really do love playing music. I always say that I play music for free, I just charge for the travel."

Zuniga said after the tour, he expects Fastball will do another record and then do another tour. However, he did say he thinks of this year as a "giant chapter closing."

"2024, for me anyways, feels like a big year. I don't know, we got this big election coming up, and my band is turning 30, and there's other stuff coming along," he said. "And I just don't take anything for granted. I don't know. You know, hopefully I could say we'll keep going. We'll go for another 10 years. But you never know. You never know."

Fastball's ninth studio album, "Desert Songs" will be released in June, and the first single from the record, called "I'd Rather Be Me Than You" will come out in April along with a music video that was filmed at Sagebrush in Austin.

The band also releases exclusive, otherwise un-released music on their Patreon. "There's all kinds of rarities and demos and stuff like that. Like stuff we don't show anybody except our true fans like the real, diehard Patreon fans," Zuniga noted.