Tag: Country Music

Sam Outlaw through the Lens of Henry Diltz

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Henry Diltz is one of the greatest photographers alive today.

His work in rock ‘n’ roll — specifically Los Angeles rock — stands the test of time and proves how important the visual aesthetic attached to music becomes for the artist, the listener, and the culture.

I grew up listening to albums like Sweet Baby James; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; and Desperado, and it’s impossible to imagine these albums without picturing the album art and photography. When my family moved to Southern California in the early ’90s, these images were compounded by my own real-life interaction with the California aesthetic, and those experiences created emotions that ultimately shaped my own sound.

When Henry reached out, I was immediately inspired to do something special that could incorporate my connection to L.A. with Henry’s casual approach. It dawned on me that, while I’d already done photos that point to my hometown from a variety of locales (DTLA, Elysian Park, Joshua Tree, etc.), I had yet to shoot at the beach. We chose Venice Beach for its scenic waterfront juxtaposed against the eclectic boardwalk and “locals only” culture, and I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to collaborate with such a nuanced artist at the top of his game. — Sam Outlaw

Counsel of Elders: Jessi Colter on the Spiritual Journey

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Jessi Colter’s musical legacy has long been a balancing act between “the outlaw” and “the lady,” but there’s another side — a third — that informed her identity in even greater measure than those two descriptors. The daughter of a Pentecostal minister mother — that’s right, mother — Colter (whose birth name is Mirriam Johnson) grew up in the church and held faith close to her heart. But as her musical ability crystallized and caught the attention of rock ‘n’ roll guitarist Duane Eddy, who would go on to become her first husband, and later Nashville musician and producer Chet Atkins, Colter found herself in a world that didn’t always make room for those beliefs. That became doubly so when she married singer Waylon Jennings and struggled with a love that was at turns exhilarating and at others tumultuous.

Colter has proved throughout her career that identity isn’t an either/or categorization. It’s a prism refracting various aspects of a person’s many parts depending on the light. She is all the things that helped her rise to fame in the country world — a member of the Outlaw movement (along with Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Tompall Glaser), a hit single writer for candid tunes like “I’m Not Lisa,” a gold record holder — and an equally devote Christian. The lesson was not about finding a world that made room her faith, but about making sure she created that space in herself. The rest would follow. And it did. She released the spiritual album Mirriam in 1977.

Colter returns this year with another spiritual album, The Psalms. Recorded with friend and collaborative partner Lenny Kaye, the project puts music to David’s Biblical words and follows her last studio album, 2006’s Out of the Ashes. She also used that creative momentum to pen a biography with David Ritz, appropriately titled An Outlaw and a Lady. In it, she chronicles her early days in the church, her wild romance with Jennings, and how music — through it all — pulled her disparate parts together. Songs, like the blessing of breath, connected it all to something greater.

In your biography, you return again and again to your mother and the spiritual foundation she laid in your life. What does that mean to you now, reflecting back?

I realize the importance of heritage; I am so appreciative and grateful for what I was raised in. I’ve come full circle, and I don’t know exactly what to say except the most important thing that I have in my life — with all the great experiences I’ve been given — is to keep my faith. I just feel like we’re eternal beings and what we do here is certainly part of our humanity, but our humanity will decrease and our spirit will increase, so people who don’t keep one foot in this world and one in the next are not playing with a full deck.

Speaking of heritage, your parents named you Mirriam after Moses and Aaron’s sister. Did you ever view the music you wrote as containing her prophetic quality?

No, I really didn’t. When I wrote Mirriam, it was because I was returning to my faith and it was very joyous and it was working in me. I expressed it in song. None of it has been pre-determined. The way The Psalms has come and the way this book has come, I have to believe is supernaturally designed. I really do think it has been guided by God. Who would think an album we started 10 years ago would come out right before Easter, and the book would come out at Passover? The High Holy Days! Who would’ve figured that out? I have no manager; I don’t have a booking agent. Lenny Kaye and I just collaborated and here it is.

In keeping with that sentiment, your book details how much more you received once you relinquished control and gave yourself over to a higher power. How do you let it all go? That’s so difficult when we, as humans, want to have control over something.

Oh, I know. Our self-will is our greatest enemy. This wasn’t deeply discussed in the book, but when I was about 28, I had ambition. I’d been driven and drawn to music, loved it. I’d written, continued to write. When I did “I’m Not Lisa,” I had two albums ahead. I was at this point where my ambition was really frustrating me, and I don’t know what clicked in my brain or my spirit to say, “You know what? I give it up. And if this something you want me to give up, I’ll give it up.” It hurt. I could feel it in my heart.

Right, for an ambitious person that would be painful.

Yeah, and it wasn’t six months that I had a gold record, and it was a large green light. God gives us desires to fulfill them, and I think all he wants us to do is to say, “I need you to help me on this, because I can’t do it.” It doesn’t make us less, it makes us more, because we get past ourselves to get what we truly need or want or what we’re destined for.

He made us. When the breath goes out of a human being … I saw it when I lost my dearest husband Waylon. When God’s breath went out of him, it wasn’t Waylon anymore, and where we get off that we’re in charge, I don’t even know. But it’s a problem. It’s going to be His way so you may as well line up, is my theory. But I had to learn it. It’s a lifetime project.

Part of that learning, for me, involves taking attention off yourself and focusing it on other people or issues, so it’s interesting that you open with Psalm 150, which you’ve stated holds significance for you for that very reason. How did you choose what to include and how to arrange it?

You know, we didn’t have any big design. There are some that I go back to more than others. Of course, the 23rd Psalm is possibly the greatest poem ever written.

Is that your favorite?

It’s inscribed in my home, and I walk by it at different times and I’ll see different things. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” I’ve heard versions that replace it with, “The Lord is my shepherd, that’s all I want,” which is a very cool way to think. David was so universal; his perspective was so uplifting. Then I discovered in the Jerusalem museum — when Waylon took me to Israel — the most recently unearthed (what they believe to be) Psalm of David in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s David’s last Psalm and it’s a self-portrait of him. His brothers were tall and handsome, and yet the prophet came looking for him. What a story. He was a prophet, a warrior, they say a musician, a poet; he spoke priestly and he was a king. He’s very important to me because I love this man and I look forward to meeting him, but these Psalms are just magic because, if you get into them, they will read you. I’m stirred every day and I look to it for guidance. The spirit never dies — an eternal thing never dies. They’re very alive.

I think that’s language, too. That’s part of its power.

Yes, exactly.

But you’ve expressed how much writing means a great deal to you, so I found it curious that you would make an album using someone else’s words.

They will forever be David’s, but they’re in my heart, so I draw from them. It was challenging because, when I compose, I usually compose the lyrics and the words at the same time, and to have all that taken away and to try and figure … there’s no rhythm here, so it’s just free-flowing prose and very challenging for a musician, and challenging for those [musicians] Lenny added. We did it slowly. Sometimes it was two years before I’d get another song.

And it got stuck in every CD player I played! I thought, “What are these discs that Lenny was sending me?” I was forced to listen — most people don’t go around listening to themselves — and I found it would center me. I drive a lot, because I’m out from Phoenix, in horse ranch country. I thought, “You know, I’m going to try listening in different moods to see what it does,” and it does something! It will center you. It draws on your spirit and relieves your humanity. We’re a spirit man with a body and a soul, I believe. I love the way Dylan said it; he said, “Let’s strengthen the things that will remain.” The spiritual is the thing that will remain.

Moving back to some of your earlier recordings. You said “Don’t Let Him Go” represented a specific feeling for you at the time and wasn’t a feminist anthem. It does seem like women take on the work — as artists — of representing so much more than themselves. They become indicative of bigger causes. How have you tried to strike a balance between individuality and larger movements?

I’ve never thought about it. I go with the path I’m given. I’ll tell you the truth: I was born the daughter of a Pentecostal minister in a Mormon culture, and I think early on something caused my brain to understand — maybe I couldn’t interpret it with words — that I was not necessarily a part of the greater surrounding, beliefs, or whatever. All my friends were Mormon, my boyfriend was Mormon. They’re a wonderful culture to be raised in. It was a wonderfully innocent, sheltered life. It gave me more a sense of being a minority, but I never suffered from it. It only propelled me into what I was supposed to be. I don’t know how else to relate that.

You’re able to stand strong no matter the setting.

Right, but I never felt any kind of rebellion. Some of my friends were Apache Indians, most of them were Mormons, and there was never a breach between us. We didn’t go to church together, but that was about it.

So there was still a sense of community?

Right.

It feels like we’ve lost some part of that.

I know. All these differences … it’s almost like a spirit of division. Truly, if we experience each other and keep that open … I love learning about other cultures and being part of other cultures.

Right, but there are some who take that as a threat. By learning about something else or the existence of something else, it somehow waters down their own subjectivity.

I know.

We’ve seen this resurgence of independently honest female musicians in country, like Margo Price, Kacey Musgraves, Amanda Shires, and more. What do you think it is about the present moment that has lent itself to this wave?

I think things run their course and this “other thing” has run its course. It’s time for new flowers to bloom. The season is over, to me, of a lot of the mediocrity, of “Everybody can sing, and everybody can look good.” How boring does that get? It takes a freshness that I don’t know that you can keep doing the same thing with the same producers. We’re already seeing, as you say, coming over the horizon …

Yes, the candor that you’ve long expressed in your songs is front and center once again.

Well, thank you.

Squared Roots: Lindi Ortega on the Resonating Darkness of Townes Van Zandt

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Without question, the legacy of Townes Van Zandt looms large in singer/songwriter circles. Legend has it, Van Zandt all but told Bob Dylan to shove off, when Dylan came knocking on his door wanting to write together. Townes was an immense talent who struggled with depression and substance abuse, and still managed to craft some of the most timeless songs in history. Many of those tunes became immortal while he was still around to see them do so — songs like “Pancho & Lefty,” “If I Needed You,” “Tecumseh Valley,” and more have been covered by Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, Nanci Griffith, Jason Isbell, and numerous others.

Another of his most-treasured and poignant compositions is “Waiting Round to Die,” which has found yet another new life in the hands of Lindi Ortega. On her latest EP, Til the Goin’ Gets Gone, Ortega folds the cover in with her originals like it was her own. She felt compelled to do so because discovering Van Zandt’s catalog broke her through a major writer’s block and reinvigorated her passion for music.   

You didn’t grow up with his music, right? So what was your entry point into his catalog?

I read a lot of biographies and I just kept hearing his name. A lot of my country music heroes had mentioned him. I always thought, “What a cool name, Townes Van Zandt.” And it just stuck in my head. I figured, since a lot of my country music heroes were fans of his, I really should check him out. So, one day when I came back from a tour, I decided to listen to his catalog and, you know how it is when you discover music that you hadn’t known about and there’s a whole well of it to listen to. It was a really incredible experience. I fell in love with his music and his songs and his guitar playing.

There’s so much in his too-short life to latch onto.

Yeah.

Were there aspects of his life that drew you in or was it all about the music for you?

It was really more about the music. That was my definitely my entry point, listening to the words of his songs. His lyrics, specifically, spoke to me. I did watch the documentary, Be Here to Love Me, which I found so sad. I’m sure a lot of that internal darkness resonates in his words and music. And I write a lot of songs that are rather dark and lonely and sad, too, so I guess I felt like I related, in some way. But I’m sure I’ll never understand the demons that he had to deal with in his mind. But, I guess the idea is that songs that come from dark places, all of us humans go through moments that are dark and test us. I think we can all relate to songs in that way. Maybe some of us choose not to go there, but I think we can all relate.

You got a gift from him, in a way, right? Because you were ready to walk away and then you thought, “Maybe I have some more in me.”

Yeah. Definitely. I was going through writer’s block and he became a huge inspiration, songwriting-wise, to challenge myself to be a better songwriter and write more story-like songs. That sort of re-invigorated my love for writing music, in some funny way.

You did “Waiting Round to Die” on your new EP. I hear that and “Til the Goin’ Gets Gone” as sibling songs, or cousins, maybe. Do you hear that?

Absolutely. That’s why I chose to do that particular song as a cover. I was grabbling between that one and “Rake,” because I really like that song, too. But I felt exactly like what you said, that it was a sister song to the song I’d written, so it made sense to put that song on the record. I knew it was going to take the little EP to a very dark space, but … [Laughs]

[Laughs] Yeah. You out-sadded Townes Van Zandt!

I mean, it’s a dark, sad song. The lyrics are very dark. There’s no denying that, so there’s no point in me trying to make it anything other than that. [Laughs] I did: I made a very dark and sad EP, but that’s what I needed to do, at the time. I feel like there are moments for that.

In this day and age, I feel a lot of music is kind of escapist. I feel like the general population in pop music and pop-country, people are trying to escape all the horrible things that are happening in the world and all the dark things that may be happening in their own lives. I get the sense that people want to get out and party, so it’s more like a party music thing that’s happening and not very many people are into this whole idea of embracing dark, sad songs.

But I feel like they are still necessary and people still need them in life because, for me, one of the first dark songs I heard was “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” by Hank Williams. When I heard that, it wasn’t like, “Oh, God. Here’s a depressing song!” It was, “Oh, wow. Somebody else feels that same loneliness I feel.” And I felt like I wasn’t alone in my loneliness. That’s why I continue to write songs like that. And I just went there with this EP. It was necessary. I was going through a moment when I was questioning whether I could go on, musically, and I didn’t think I would. I felt sad and disappointed and a little bit devastated, so that’s what came out.

As you just said, the artist’s life is hard enough on its own, then you tack on battles with bipolar disorder and substance abuse with Townes. Was there a lesson or something you found, going into his work, that made you feel you didn’t have it so bad?

For sure. And that’s with a number of musicians I look up to and love who battled with substance abuse problems and depression. I think I read an article once that said creative people often suffer from things like panic attacks and depression and anxiety disorders. For some reason, it seems to go hand-in-hand with people who make beautiful art. Then there’s this whole other side where a lot of people are suffering greatly, but the upside is that we get beautiful songs or beautiful paintings. They help us understand life and the human condition.

So, yeah, it’s really sad to learn about his life and of course there are lessons … I don’t want to have my life end faster than it should. It sort of, in some ways, helps me understand that I need to really appreciate what I do have. There are things I don’t have that might cause me some sadness, but there are a lot of things I do have that I need to appreciate and feel happy about. So it helps me to do that. Some people have a hard time getting to those places because their brains just won’t let them. I’m just so grateful that an artist like Townes Van Zandt, with all of his internal issues, was able to create all of the music that he did. And it’s legendary and classic and will be with us forever. If there’s a ray of light in a sad story, that’s definitely it.

The Mile Markers of Music: A Conversation with Ketch Secor

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It’s not a stretch to say that Old Crow Medicine Show is intrinsically linked to Bob Dylan. The country-roots band has never shied away from voicing their admiration for the seminal singer/songwriter, and the story behind the infamous “Wagon Wheel” is common musical fodder at this point: Old Crow’s Ketch Secor filled in the verses to an incomplete track titled “Rock Me Mama” from a Bob Dylan bootleg his bandmate Critter Fuqua found during a trip to London. After Darius Rucker’s cover of “Wagon Wheel” hit number one on the Billboard chart in 2013, Dylan’s camp reached out to Old Crow. They offered another song fragment Dylan dreamed up around the same time as “Rock Me Mama,” and wanted to see what Old Crow could do with it. Old Crow cut the track and after incorporating a couple of suggestions from Dylan himself, “Sweet Amarillo” became the first single from the band’s 2014 release, Remedy.

Now, Old Crow Medicine Show is paying homage to Bob Dylan with the release of 50 Years of Blonde on Blonde, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Dylan’s first Nashville record. The live album features Old Crow’s performance of Blonde on Blonde in its entirety, recorded last May at the CMA Theater, located in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

“As somebody with such deep respect for Bob Dylan, I hope that he likes what we did with the songs,” Secor says. “We really tried to go, ‘What if the Memphis Jug Band had come up with “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat?” What if the Mississippi Sheiks had figured out how to write a song like “Visions of Johanna?” And what would it sound like if they did?’”

As Secor puts it, Blonde on Blonde was “the shot heard ‘round the world” – the record that changed the landscape of country music and split Nashville’s sound wide open.

Do you remember the first time you listened to Blonde on Blonde ?

The first time I heard Blonde on Blonde, I was probably 14, 15 years old and I was headed down a sweeping Bob Dylan kick and ingesting as much Bob as I could like it was water or wine.

Dylan has such a vast catalog. What was it about Blonde on Blonde that made the band want to take this particular record on? Why did you pick this record to celebrate for the 50th anniversary?

Well, it’s true we could have picked any of Bob’s records ’cause we’re at that point in a lot of history where we’re at milestone marks for many of the seminal musical efforts of the past 50 years and more. This one made a lot of sense because it was made in Nashville and it’s the first of Bob’s Nashville records. And this was also recorded at a time when Nashville had yet to have a rock ‘n’ roll record. This was kind of the very beginning of the ever-expanding Nashville sound, so it’s a real milestone in that regard and, with it, in the wake of Bob Dylan’s trip to Nashville, everybody from Leonard Cohen to Joan Baez to Ringo Starr and Neil Young were in Nashville in the next five years making their own records.

In recording and releasing this project, what are you hoping to communicate about the Nashville sound? Are you hoping to preserve that Dylan and post-Dylan time? Or how do you see Nashville as changing or staying the same in the last 50 years?

Well, one of the sentiments that seems active here in Nashville right now is this feeling of, “Wow, everything is changing.” You look at the skyline and there’s something new going up every day; it’s full of cranes and boom shafts and towers. So much development, so many people moving to town. So I think it’s easy for Nashvillians to think, “Wow, things sure are getting different.” My argument, with this record, is that 50 years ago is really when things started getting different, and that’s the shot heard ’round the world that the Nashville music community and its spectrum of sound became so much wider beginning with the making of Blonde on Blonde and that it’s very wide today.

Now, with country music, as it’s heard on the radio and viewed upon the charts, that has actually become very, very narrow in its scope. So I think, with a record like this, we’re hoping to kind of shine a light on a time in which that very thing was happening and somebody like Bob Dylan came in and said, “Hey, I belong to country music, too! I’m from a mining town just like Loretta Lynn. I’m the fringe of America, just like Charley Pride. And I’m an outsider.” So to make an outsider record in Nashville at that time was a really powerful turning point for our state.

Can you walk me through the prep for this project? How long did you all work on learning these songs or what did you do with the arrangements to make them your own? What was your approach?

We started this project about two months before we went in and recorded it — maybe two or three months — and just started learning the songs. That was the biggest challenge — getting all the lyrics down. This is probably Bob’s most intensely lyrical album in well over 50 years of record-making. So to be able to recite it was a real challenge. It’s such a kaleidoscopic collection of lyrics, so the real challenge is being able to differentiate at every moment in live performance whether you’re supposed to sing about the “sheet metal memories of Cannery Row” or the “sheet-like metal and the belt-like lace.” You know, it’s all this impressionistic poetry or Beat poetry or whatever it is, post-modernism or something, and trying to be able to find form and meter in it when Bob so deliberately created it to be formless and without meter.

I watched a promo video for this project — it was an interview with you in the studio where Bob recorded this album and you said something I loved: “These songs, Bob wrote them, but they belong to all of us.” I was wondering if you could expand on that sentiment?

Well, I think we all know what folk music is and I think we all know the term public domain or the idea of a statute of limitations by which copyrights run out and they become part of a common vernacular. I think it’s less obvious to apply that to something that’s so clearly Bob Dylan’s. But my argument is that “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” belongs to America, no matter who wrote it. And that’s the same … like Elizabeth Cotten wrote “Freight Train,” but I didn’t learn that song from Elizabeth Cotten. I learned it from my mother. And when music becomes the property of everybody, when it’s on everybody’s tongue and when it’s streaming out of a guitar instead of out of your little pocket telephone, computer, when the folk music muscle takes hold, that’s when songs cease to become so much about their origins and rather about them existing on their own. I really think it’s all folk music, everything — Beyonce’s Lemonade.

I think a better example of how pop music can be everybody’s is, you listen to the opening lines of “Beat It” or “Billie Jean.” “Billie Jean,” I mean, that’s basically “Knoxville Girl” without the murder. It has all the same intensity. Or like on our album, or on Blonde on Blonde, “4th Time Around,” the sort of lover’s duet. These are songs that are archetypal and they belong to whoever the singer is singing ’em. So, when you think about bluegrass music … bluegrass music is always exploring between the public domain or contemporary bluegrass songwriters. You know, Blonde on Blonde makes for pretty good bluegrass music, too.

You all also released a Best Of album earlier this year and, if I’m doing my math right, next year — 2018 — will mark 20 years as a band for Old Crow Medicine Show. What does it feel like to hit that milestone?

You know, it’s been a little while. About half of my life now, I’ve been signed up playing music for the Old Crow Medicine Show. I kind of feel like … well, the Yankees wouldn’t be a good metaphor because I don’t actually like the Yankees. I’m more of a BoSox fan. I kind of feel like Carl Yastrzemski — like a guy that has come to personify the Red Sox as much as the Red Sox themselves. You’ve gotta do things to keep it fresh and that means musical exploration can never cease. You can never get too good. Fortunately, for our band, when we started out, we could barely play our instruments. I mean, I remember when I learned to play the fiddle. I had been playing for two weeks before I was playing on the street corner with the one tune I figured out how to play. And I just played for 10 minutes and then I’d take a break, and play for another 10 minutes.

So the vista for Old Crow has been sort of endless because we started out at the very beginning of the trail. We started on street corners and we weren’t trying to get that much bigger. We were just having a good time doing it, and then the trail just kept unfolding and we just kept hiking up it. So, I think the 20-year mark, it hasn’t really sunk in yet because we’re still very much in 19, but you don’t really think about. When I think about 20 years, that kind of scares me, moreso than celebrates it. I think about this: When Blonde on Blonde was 20 years old, it was 1986, and I was a kid listening to Michael Jackson and was about to discover Bob Dylan about a year later. It’s funny the way that you find yourself being a part of the very time that you would celebrate. You know, 50 years of Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde … that’s about 38 years of my life, too.

Photo credit: Laura E. Partain

Willie Nelson, ‘Still Not Dead’

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Death: it’s no laughing matter. There’s nothing really funny about staring down the end of things, and most of us spend our entire lives — as long as we’re lucky to have them — thinking of clever ways to avoid the inevitable fact that, yeah, this wild ride is all going to end somewhere. Very few of us, however, have to be confronted with news of our own mortality on a regular basis: Our own obituaries are the one piece of journalism that none of us ever really expects to read, unless you believe in heaven and that God gets your local paper. Or, you’re Willie Nelson, and the media has obsessively reported on the fact that you may or may not be currently breathing since your hair first went gray.

But Nelson is breathing — and inhaling — as boldly as ever on God’s Problem Child, his newest LP, and he’s “Still Not Dead,” as he proclaims on a song written with his producer Buddy Cannon. Sonically, it’s like a bookend to his classic “On the Road Again,” buoyant and swinging: He’s still on the road to somewhere and he’s just as surprised as anyone that he’s alive and kicking. But shouldn’t we all be? Waking up in the morning is never a given; it’s a gift, and Nelson knows it. “Don’t bury me, I’ve got a show to play,” he sings, playing licks on his beloved guitar that bloom with both youthful vitality and aged wisdom. Nelson doesn’t value life because death is now tangible. He values life because he doesn’t live like it is. Thankfully for us, he plays music like it, too.

Sam Outlaw, ‘Trouble’

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Earlier this week, a festival called Tumbleweed — billed as “America’s Outlaw Country Music Festival” — dropped their lineup. With artists like Jamey Johnson, Cody Jinks, and Billie Joe Shaver, it’s chock full of terrific acts, with one exception: women. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Though the event’s organizers claimed they extended invitations to female performers, it makes one thing clear. And that’s how the music we consider to be “outlaw” is so often synonymous with a tough, proto-male way of doing things — scruffy bar songs, big scruffier beards, jeans as untailored as the music itself. And definitely no pink.

One of the things that’s most refreshing about Sam Outlaw is how he challenges this theory to the bone. “Outlaw” wasn’t his given name, but belonged to his mother, so it’s a moniker he chose to use himself. Thus Outlaw, who, on his second album, Tenderheart, embraces the soft, the sweet, and the gorgeous over scruffy and gruff, is almost trolling country conventions: You’re literally forced to call him an outlaw while his music veers toward the relaxed and subtle, and with more of a sense of humor than any textbook “outlaw” would ever boast. On songs like “Trouble,” you picture him driving down Sunset Boulevard in a convertible with the top down, not in a pickup truck or on a motorcycle. With a touch of Tom Petty, John Mellencamp, and the carefree spirit of ’90s pop, he’s not even the bad guy. Instead, it’s someone else who is pushing him to the dark side, and he has enough wherewithal to let them go. To add insult to macho injury, some of Tenderheart’s promo art is — gasp! — pink. That’s Outlaw, but it’s not outlaw, and that’s the magic of it.

WATCH: Jason Eady, ‘Why I Left Atlanta’

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Artist: Jason Eady
Hometown: Fort Worth, TX
Song: “Why I Left Atlanta”
Album: Jason Eady
Release Date: April 21, 2017
Label: Old Guitar Records / Thirty Tigers

In Their Words: “This song is about a relationship that ended through no one’s fault, but simply because two people grew in different directions and the aftermath of that. Casey Pierce (the director) came up with the idea of showing it from both sides, and I think it ended up capturing exactly what the song is about. The two people in this video are both handling the split in their own way, and the way that they are each handling it shows exactly how far apart they had become.” — Jason Eady

Photo credit: Anthony Barlich

Marty Stuart: Surfing the Desert Waves

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Marty Stuart’s catalog reads like an ode to the American landscape, even if that reverence arises more through sound than song title. “You’re talking to somebody who will build around a tree instead of cut it down,” Stuart says about his regard and wonder for nature. “I’ve built decks and porches around them just so they could keep living.” Ever since the early days of hillbilly music, country has been rooted in rural terrains so, for a musician with an inclination toward tradition, Stuart doesn’t have to look any further than the songs themselves to channel the land that shaped them.

His projects call — sometimes subtly, others overtly — to different regions. The styles he has worked to both preserve and play with house geographies as diverse as his native Delta, the rugged Badlands, and now the psychedelic California wilderness. His new album, Way Out West, recorded with longtime band His Fabulous Superlatives, pays homage to the rugged West — to the myths, legends, and lore hovering over that arid atmosphere. “The desert’s a funny place,” he says. To reflect that quirk, Stuart blended the twangy surf rock riffs of the California coast with the shimmering sustain of the wavering desert horizon. He calls the resulting mish-mash “hillbilly surfband” music.

While Stuart holds musical traditions in high regard, he has never treated them as fragile things liable to break at the slightest hint of playfulness. But even he wasn’t sure what to make of the sound he and the Superlatives were fusing together for what would become Way Out West, until he realized every reference fed back into country’s winding history. “If I go back and listen to recordings from the 1960s, and I hear what the Shadows and the Ventures were doing, or Merle Haggard or Buck Owens and the Buckaroos — the kind of instrumentals they were playing — I think everybody was listening to everybody back then,” he explains. “Basically, it was all Fender guitar-driven, twangy music.”

Setting that twang in the Mojave Desert culminated from two earlier projects. First came film: Billy Bob Thornton approached Stuart about scoring All the Pretty Horses (2000), which opened him up to music’s visual properties in an entirely new way. “I learned more about making cinematic songs come to life when we were doing that film,” he says. “I actually called upon Kristen Wilkinson, who was the arranger — we scored that film together — so anytime you hear an orchestral part in [Way Out West], that’s Kris Wilkinson.” Then came his 2006 album Badlands: Ballads of the Lakota. A particular field recording he made for that project stood out and provided the entry point for his new album. “I thought about this prayer that Everett Helper sang and played on his drums. Between that and a sitar and just combining all those sounds, all of a sudden [Way Out West] became a different record.”

Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives tap into the West’s living spirit — as well as the spirits that have shaped it — from the very start. “Desert Prayer 1” opens Way Out West and epitomizes the blended compositions that follow. Wind howling across the desert floor gives way to a psychedelic guitar calling, as if from the horizon, and eventually segues into Native American drumbeats and chanting. “I wanted the listener to reach out and take my hand at the edge of the Mojave Desert, and I wanted to take them on a cosmic, twangified trip through the desert,” he says. The desert, like his hometown Delta, may seem like “thousands of acres of nothing,” according to Stuart, but he knows there’s a presence in all that supposed absence. “If it’s pitch black and you can’t see anything except what’s in front of you, you start hearing things,” he says. “I’ve done this. I hear things and see things that really aren’t there.” If that sounds like the makings of a Hunter S. Thompson adventure, Stuart insists he’s been “stone cold sober” when such moments have occurred. “There’s a whole spirit world dancing around in those places, and I wanted to tap into that in Way Out West,” he says.

Working with producer and guitarist Mike Campbell (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers), who Stuart has long admired for his “band” ear, he let the songs breathe. Instrumentals like “Mojave” and instructives like “Time Don’t Wait” reflect the desert’s wide open expanse through their instrumentation and, more importantly, their arrangement. Space is a subject close to Stuart’s heart. “I heard a statistic the other day where there are generally 88 people a day moving into Nashville,” he says, balking at the drain that puts on the natural world. “They keep selling pastures and building houses on what used to be beautiful farmland.” Having recently visited London and New York, he worries about their size and the kind of toll that takes on the earth. What happens to Nashville if it grows in that direction? “As citizens, we have a responsibility to care for what’s in front of us, and we don’t do that very well sometimes, in general, as a people,” he admits.

As much as Way Out West is a love letter to the desert landscape and the music personifying it, it’s also a reminder. Stuart didn’t write a political album, but the timeliness of its arrival takes on greater significance in the current political light. With Donald Trump and his administration proposing budget cuts that would not only affect, but in some cases decimate, departments and programs established to protect the country’s more majestic manifestations, Stuart’s album, in some ways, feels like a panegyric. He brings listeners closer to the grandeur and, in turn, the importance of the land by bringing it to life track after track. “When I walk out into the desert and come in front of a saguaro cactus that’s been there for who knows how long, I respect it because I know that I’m in the presence of something that belongs there and I’m just a visitor,” he says. “I do that everywhere I go. I try to honor the land.” Stuart recalls his deep friendship with illustrator Thomas B. Allen, who drew several album covers for Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, and the important lesson Allen taught him. “He was one of my favorite people in this world that I’ve ever known. He said, ‘It’s important, as an artist, to keep something in front of you that knows more about you than you know about it. That keeps you honest, and it keeps you digging.’”

Alongside songs dealing with the natural wonder of the land — in melody, if not always in lyric — Stuart also includes a sonic tip of the hat to truck drivers. “Whole Lotta Highway (With a Million Miles to Go)” finds him waxing poetic about a blue-collar character as much a part of the American landscape’s fabric as the land itself. But with automation threatening to replace so many workers, killing some 1.7 million jobs over the course of the next decade, Stuart’s salute could one day become an artifact detailing a way of life thrown over by industrialization’s endless march forward, like the Carolina Tar Heels’ “Peg and Awl.” “I keep hearing and seeing speculation about driverless cars,” Stuart says. “It’ll be the same thing: There are driverless trains already. Truck drivers are, in my opinion, old American folk heroes. They’re the last of the concrete cowboys and they shouldn’t be forgotten. It’s not an easy job they chose.” The chatter about losing jobs to automation isn’t one to be taken lightly. “You can already say that about a caboose on a train,” he says. “The trains I knew as a kid, they had a red caboose at the end and a guy that sat up in the caboose and took care of business from that perspective. We can already say, ‘I remember the caboose on the train.’ Trucks should be concerned.”

For a historian interested in preserving musical traditions and honoring the past, Stuart’s music encapsulates the landscapes and characters that comprise the American experience. Blurring country, rockabilly, psychedelic rock, and surfer rock into some unruly thing, Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives have painted a golden- and amber-hued picture of the Wild West. At the end of the day, though, he only cares about music that means something. “I’m addicted to creating, and I’m addicted to projects that matter and say something,” he says. “The hardest thing in this world — I could write songs all day long — but songs that matter, songs that reach out and touch somebody’s heart? I never know when they’re going to come, but I always keep my radar ready for them.”

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.

How I Got to Memphis: Cory Branan in Conversation with Coco Hames

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Cory Branan and Coco Hames lived in Nashville for years, had mutual friends, moved in the same singer/songwriter circles, released records, played shows, lived life, but somehow managed never to actually meet each other. “We would have absolutely met, if I’d ever left my house for five years,” Branan says, somewhat apologetically. “I just never go out when I get off the road. I stay at home and just look at the wife and child.”

“I never go out,” says Hames. “People are always trying to get me to go to some new bar, and I’m like, ‘I live in bars! I would rather put on some soft pants and stay at home and read.’”

Their homebodiness is well-earned, even if it’s not the only thing they have in common. Both have been road warriors for the better part of the 21st century, Branan as a solo artist and Hames as the frontwoman for the garage-pop outfit the Ettes. He writes witty, roguish songs full of concrete details and wry observations, like John Prine — if he was really into vintage synths and classic rock. Hames’s songs are minimal and smart, eccentric and rambunctious, as though she’s triangulating the spot where the Ramones, Josie & the Pussycats, and Tammy Wynette overlap.

Plus, they’ve both just released what may be their best albums to date. After the Ettes made an amicable split, she went solo with a self-titled record that shows more range and acuity, toggling between a torch song like “I Do Love You” and a country lament like “Tennessee Hollow.” On Adios, Branan writes movingly about the deaths of his father and grandparents and the ongoing trials of small town heroes like the heroine of “Blacksburg” and anyone sentenced to live in “Walls, MS.”

Neither of you live in Nashville anymore. These days, you don’t leave the house in Memphis, Tennessee.

CH: I’ll just tell you: I fell in love, got married. That’s what brought me to Memphis. I left Nashville and moved here a couple years ago, and I love everything about it. I’m very happy here. Actually, in a little bit, I’m going to go see my friend Margo Price at Minglewood Hall. I don’t know if you know her, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

CB: I met Margo, yeah, just a couple times. I’ve been back in Memphis for a whopping two week altogether. Nashville priced us out. We found a cheap place in Memphis, and it was just decided. We got the truck the day we decided to move, and we loaded up. We moved the next day, returned the truck the next day. I told my wife, “Well, it’s a new place, baby. I’ll see you in two months.” She’s already painted the whole place. She’s got it on lockdown. She’s good at moving.

Memphis has great history, but Nashville is still such a big industry city. Did it feel strange to leave that behind?

CH: I have put my foot in my mouth more than once, for more than one city. I’ve lived in New York and L.A. and London and Madrid and Nashville and Austin and Memphis. I always say something stupid about one of those cities, but I don’t really mean it. Nowhere is really home for me anyway, so it’s not really hard for me to leave. I opened a record store in Nashville, but it was getting really expensive. And my husband was visiting me, and I said to him, “What do you do when you’re an adult and you fall in love with somebody and you want to be with them?” He said, “Well, you know, you move to Memphis or I could move to Nashville.” I’m like, “I’ll move to Memphis.” So it wasn’t super weird. It’s a cool place and there’s a lot going on, but nothing I miss too much, to be honest.

CB: What record store did you have?

CH: It’s called Fond Object, and it was up in Riverside Village on the east side.

CB: I didn’t know that was your place. I’ve been up there a few times. I played behind it one time.

CH: Did you get to meet my goats and my pig?

CB: Yes. My son was fascinated. He wanted to take one home.

CH: When I was leaving, I knew it was in capable hands, so I signed off on it and gave it to my bandmates. I think they lost their lease and moved downtown.

CB: I liked living there, but it’s all the same, honestly. Mainly Memphis means geographical ease. There’s a reason FedEx is in Memphis. It has access to Chicago and New Orleans, and it’s so close to Atlanta. When I lived in Austin, you can get in to Mexico before you can get out of Texas. I do well in three or four cities in Texas. L.A., you wouldn’t think it, but it’s pretty isolated. I’m spoiled from being in Memphis. It’s really easy to tour out of. You can do two-week runs in any direction, as opposed to California, where it’s an ordeal going anywhere but the West Coast.

When I lived in Memphis, there a big Memphis-Nashville competition that everybody in Memphis knew about and nobody in Nashville had any clue about.

CB: Exactly. They didn’t know they were in the fight. I’m happy to be from Memphis, but it does give you a little bit of a chip on the shoulder. There’s no scene here. It’s splintered and fractured. There are great musicians who never leave. You can go see somebody who’s amazing, but they’re not touring very much. On the other hand, there’s never anyone in the crowd that can help you. There’s never a producer, never a publisher that’s going to offer to help your career. Nashville has that element. I didn’t enjoy that element. If you’re playing to a stubborn Memphis crowd, it burns off the chaff. If you’re not alive for it or you don’t love it, they’re going to expose you.

CH: Nashville is a hard place to feel comfortable, because I don’t think they’re really interested in anything, which feels very sad and lonely. I’d rather you dislike me than try to chat me up about who we both know. That’s the worst part of what I do. I’m not very schmoozy. I’m probably the least schmoozy person. There are plenty of people to pay for that sort of thing, but I’m not crazy about it.

CB: Don’t get me wrong — there are great things about Nashville and there are shit things about Memphis. It’s a rough town, and there’s a huge gap between the haves and the have-nots. They’re refurbishing downtown, but I don’t know if they’re working a bit on education. Nashville, on the other hand, has no infrastructure for the massive number of people that are moving there, but the city itself is a little more thirsty. They’ll go out to a show: “Oh, I don’t know what it is. Let’s go check it out.” Memphis, they need to know that their buddy is going to be there. But you can be at a party and the guitar will not come out. Unlike Nashville. Some asshole’s always pulling out an acoustic guitar in Nashville. That’s the best way to kill a party right there.

CH: That’s my cue to leave.

I wanted to ask you two about Memphis and Nashville because I feel like place figures very prominently into your songwriting. There are lots of place names in your lyrics, along with a sense of travel and movement.

CH: Cory, you can go first because you’re from here. I’m from Florida, so place has always been something I was trying to get away from.

CB: Really?

CH: I don’t know. It’s more in my record collection than it is outside my window. It’s cooler to be from Mississippi.

CB: That’s the thing. I grew up in a damn suburb. I was a little hoodrat. My grandparents had a farm, but my old man worked at FedEx. He moved us up to the last town in Mississippi, so I was just as much a suburban kid as anybody else. I grew up with the music in the church. Gospel has blues roots, maybe a little more prominent than your typical Southern Baptist reading out of the hymnal. It swings a little more. It depends on where I’m playing whether people consider me country or not. When I’m out opening rock shows or something, as soon as I open my mouth and they hear the accent, they’re like, “Oh, he’s country.” You can’t wash it off. Everything I do, it’s filtered through that lens.

But my music is all over the place. I don’t really play a particular genre. I tend to stay away from a lot of things that I love — old blues, the Piedmont stuff, that’s all scripture for me. Maybe some of the finger picking works its way in, but I don’t really play the blues or anything. I just stay away from that stuff. There’s more of a white suburban thing to me, I think. My music is more about Big Star or the Replacements. That’s sort of blues music, in a way. I’ve always said there’s a reason why Johnny Cash fans are Clash fans and Clash fans are Johnny Cash fans.

Stylistically, both of your albums are all over the map. You get a lot of different sounds and genres, but they all make sense as part of this larger musical personality that you project.

CB: Probably the last record [2014’s The No-Hit Wonder] is the closest I’ve gotten to a consistent sound. I hammered it out really fast, and they just happened to be a bunch of roots-based songs. I’m always about whatever the song sort of wants, and I don’t think as an album, as a whole. I try to structure it later, as far as the pacing of it and what songs go where. I definitely play that loose. Frankly, my obscurity lets me do that. I would probably have a bit more of a career if I didn’t change it up so much. I was on tour with Lucero, and [frontman] Ben [Nichols] was listening to Adios and he said, “Why don’t you do a full album with this kind of song and then another whole album of this kind of song?” I was like, “Because it bores me, and I don’t get to do enough albums to do that.” It takes two-and-a half-years to get a new record through the red tape.

CH: That’s true. At my level, whatever that is, I can do whatever I want, so I do whatever I want. When I was in the Ettes, it was very formulaic without me really knowing it. I was writing for this specific group of people, so of course I kept doing the same thing. There are people who are very sweet and love my band, and I’m sure they want all the songs to be just like that. But with this solo record, I wrote all the songs and let them go wherever they went. It’s all over the place. The whole point was to try these new things, and hopefully I did a good job with them.

That seems most prominent on “I Do Love You,” which reminds me of Dusty Springfield. That’s a nice thing to hear between a country song and a garage song.

CB: I get that same vibe off that one.

CH: I was trying to go for something epic, because I wrote it about my husband. I wanted an epic love story and big feelings. When I was singing it in the studio, I had my arms up like Eva Perón. I’d never really sung like that before. I just assumed I could do it. No one was telling me I couldn’t, so why not?

You’re both writing songs about real people in your lives. That songs about your husband. There are some songs about your dad and your grandparents on Adios.

CB: The one about my father, I wrote that one right after he died, and I never played it out. It seemed a little too specific. I like songs to be useful for other people. I never want to be like, “Oh, look at my pain.” But my wife told me to just shut up, play it out a few times, and see if anybody responds. She was right, as always. Since it seemed to be useful for other people, I went ahead and cut it. But usually, the closer it is to me, the more I will cast it with other characters and other situations. I’ll take all that grief and mourning or even joy and cast it into another storyline. But “The Vow” was very specifically about my dad and it seemed like it worked out all right.

CH: What do you mean? You try to put that sort of emotion or experience away from yourself? You try to insert maybe like a “he” or a “she” where it might be a “me”?

CB: That’s part of it. Also, I’m just not a fan of diary writers. When he died, I did put out a record after that [The No-Hit Wonder], and there was a song on there called “All I Got and Gone.” It’s about a guy in New Orleans and a woman, and there’s a note that he found, but you don’t know if it’s a suicide note or a “Dear John” letter. I was mourning, but I put that feeling in a completely different scenario. That song for me was like, “Okay, here we go. I got this out of me.” But no one would ever connect that, you know? I don’t tend to write with any sort of precision, while I’m still in the whirlwind. I like to get perspective on things and, if I’m going to try to do the old man justice, it’s hard to get a whole human being in a three-minute song.

CH: Yeah. Especially with something like that, do you ever feel like it’s too … I’m going through something that happened recently, and it means so much to me that it feels cheap to approach it where I’m going to put it into song. A lot of people write like that. That’s part of how they get it out, but to me, it’s so precious to me that I can’t distill it.

CB: I know exactly what you’re talking about there. Added on to all of this is that I wanted to do right by the old man and not be maudlin. I didn’t want to manipulate emotions. It’s hard to earn the genuine feeling of “Okay, this was a solid person, a human being.” The second verse is talking about how he gave shit advice. It’s got humor in there, because the old man was funny. But he was also very stoic and his advice usually amounted to, “Don’t do it.”

“I Do Love You” is obviously a very different song, but the approach is similar in that you’re writing about a real person and trying to capture that complex relationship in three minutes of music.

CH: I think everybody has had the feelings in that song. I hope everybody has. But I very rarely feel ready to immediately turn my observations or my feelings about important things into a song. It’s not something that I usually need to do, and so I don’t do it. But something that affects your life so strongly, maybe it’s okay not to write about it as a way to understand it, because it’s so big that I don’t think it’s fair for me to understand it yet. So I wait. If something strikes me or I get drunk and write a bunch of stupid lines and one of them is good, maybe it will spur something useful. That’s the most I can do and, if it comes back around and still stands up, if I still know what I was talking about, then it can make me say more.

CB: I won’t mention anybody’s name, but there is an artist I really love and respect. They got successful and found a good relationship, and then they trashed it on purpose, because they thought that’s the only one they could create. It’s the whole tortured artist myth. John Prine has my favorite quote on that: “I’d rather have a hot dog than a song.” Take the joy. You can have both the joy and the song. People say to me, “You’re a relatively sane human being now that you’ve settled down and stopped acting like an asshole, and you have kids, so how do you write when you’re happy?” Well, I know it’s all fleeting. I know all the good stuff is only here for a little bit. My fears and dreams, they go deeper and darker now that I have kids and I’m living for other people. I have no problem writing sad songs, but I take the happy while it’s there.

CH: I don’t like to see somebody who’s a wreck up on stage. I’ll be there. I’ll support them, but really I’m like, “You should take a break, man.” Because I’m not that way. If everything was going wrong and I was unwell, then I couldn’t write. I’d be so depleted and sad and wouldn’t see the point of any of it. I’m a super happy camper right now, but don’t worry, sad things will keep happening — probably as soon as I hang up the phone.

Cory Branan photo by Joshua Black Wilkins. Coco Hames photo by Rachel Briggs.

The Mavericks, ‘I Wish You Well’

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Ever since I heard the Bob Dylan lyric “He not busy being born is busy dying,” from “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” I felt haunted by it: Which one was I doing at any given time? And is there a point in your years where you switch permanently from one to another? Is it a specific age? A moment? As I grew older, I realized there was no easy answer to this question. Timing of life and death is often completely trivial at best, falling in our laps when we least expect it, and the best we can do is keep being reborn, over and over again, until that hourglass runs out of sand — or just shatters.

The Mavericks know a thing or two about rebirth: Together since 1991, they’ve fought fiercely for their independence in a country climate often looking for conformity. Brand New Day is the first on their own label — Mono Mundo Recordings — and it proves that, nine albums in, the genre-blending quartet knows how to keep the cocoon spinning. But life can be long and cruel, and they know a thing or two about death, as well. Bandleader Raul Malo’s father passed away while they recording the LP, and “I Wish You Well,” a gorgeous meeting place between Tejano serenade and Roy Orbison croon, is the tribute to the legacy he left behind and the uncertainly ahead. “This is where the road divides,” sings Malo. His voice is unlike most in country or Americana — smooth, mournful, full of sunbaked soul. After two decades making music, old can be new again, even as we embrace the passage of time. Maybe the best way to keep busy being born is just to be a maverick.