Showing posts with label Interviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Interviews. Show all posts

Jul 27, 2018

Chasing the Sky: A Conversation With Kasey Anderson



By Kevin Broughton

Almost two years ago, Kasey Anderson opened up in depth here about his spiraling descent from artist-on-the-cusp to grifting, locked-up addict. He was then not quite a year post-prison. And while there was still a hint of an artist’s confidence about him, it was tempered by the gun-shyness you’d expect of a guy fresh from the halfway house and with a long list of pissed-off victims, many of them former friends.

Little did he know that within a couple of months he’d begin the long, cathartic and ad hoc process of recording a comeback album. In fact, he really had no clue what would come of the sessions, done virtually pro bono by a collection of generous friends and musical colleagues from the Portland indie scene.

Anderson’s voice on the telephone is stronger today. He sounds healthier, no doubt buoyed by the album-making process that was critical to his ongoing restoration as a man. The humility is still there, no doubt, but the knowledge that he’s made a really solid rock ‘n’ roll record has put a spring in his step. From A White Hotel, released today on emerging label Julian Records, is poignant, introspective and sprinkled with Anderson’s trademark irony, starting with the title, a reference to his drab lodgings for more than two years. Oh, and his name isn’t on it.

We caught up with Anderson with just a few days to go before his nuptials, and talked redemption, recovery, the virtues of not being preachy, and the inevitable Steve Earle comparisons. And the whole, stupid “outlaw country” thing.

I’m curious about the way your band is billed. I was partial to the name “Kasey Anderson and The Honkies.”  “Hawks and Doves” is the name of an underrated Neil Young album & song; why the switch? Were you worried about the local Portland anarchist community torching your pad to protest your white privilege? Sorry, I know it’s low-hanging fruit…

Ha! No. First, I decided to do it under a band name because of the way the record came together. I had written all the lyrics and had the structure of the songs, but the instrumentation came together in such a collaborative way that it felt disingenuous just to put my name on it. And The Honkies, I didn’t want to go back to that because all those guys were such strong personalities in their own right, and I just kinda wanted to leave it there with those guys because I have such fond memories of that band.

And I love that Neil Young record. The phrase “hawks and doves” is a political and military term. It seemed pretty appropriate for what’s going on now. Plus, it just sounds cool.

The first time I heard that song was on Scott Miller & The Commonwealth’s live album…

Yeah, yeah! From The V Roys!

And since it’s not “Kasey and the Hawks and Doves,” just the band name, any concern that nobody will know it’s you?

I don’t think it’s a horrible thing for me to make a clean break with the work that I did and the life that I led as a solo artist. It wasn’t a calculated move to do that; maybe it’s an added benefit? And I think that the way it’s being marketed through the press, it’s pretty clear that it’s a band I’m involved in.

This is a collection of a dozen pretty dang good songs. How long have they been percolating? Did some of these words get put to paper while you were locked up?

Yeah, about half of them were written while I was locked up, during my second year in prison. “Every Once in a While,” for instance, is about my first cellmate. That’s his story much more than mine. The other five or six songs happened around after the election, in late 2016. It took us a long time to make the record because of the way we went about it.

Tell me about this band, and how you got the record made; I imagine raising funds to get an album done might have been challenging for someone in your position.

The band is Jordan Richter (guitars,) Ben Landsverk (bass, keys, viola, background vocals) and Jesse Moffat (drums, percussion). Other folks who played are Eric “Roscoe” Ambel, Kurt Bloch, Ralph Carney, Kay Hanley and Dave Jorgensen.

Jordan engineered it and owns a recording studio in town. And I think right after you and talked last time, some folks reached out and asked if I’d like to contribute a track for a benefit record they were involved in. I told Jordan, “Hey, I’d really like to do this, but I don’t have money to pay for studio time or to pay session players.” And he said, “Are you sure you want to do a benefit record?” (Laughs)

…I wasn’t gonna say anything. It was a real thing, though, right?

(Laughs) Yeah, it was a real thing. It was to help this woman named Jennifer Holmes – who has since passed away – with her cancer treatments. So once I proved to him that it was a real thing, he said he’d get some people together. We covered this song called “Wise Blood” by the band Tender Mercies.  At the end of the session Jordan said, “Man, if you ever want to just come in the studio and roll tape, everybody gets your situation and knows that you don’t have a bunch of money to throw into making a record. There are people willing to play your songs for fun and just see where it goes.”

And that’s what we did. Jordan would text a group of us that said, “I have this day where the studio’s not in use, and you don’t have to pay me for the time.” So it took us more than a year, because we’d do a day here and there, and everybody would go back to their lives. So that’s how the record got made, and it was really generous of him to do that.

And then I sent [the album] to several of my friends and said, “I really don’t know what to do with this; I can’t put it out.” I have a friend named Nathan Earle here in Portland who’s in a band called The Get Ahead, and he told me about this new label, Julian Records. “They seem to be looking for bands,” he said. “Why don’t you send it to them?” I had planned to just try and put it out digitally, but the Julian Records folks were into it, and took it from there.

That’s certainly fortuitous.

It’s very fortuitous, and the only way it was going to come out physically. I mean it’s not really cost-prohibitive to get an album out digitally. But this was very generous. Everybody seemed to think the songs were cool, and were like, “Don’t worry about it right now, let’s just see what happens.”

When last we spoke, we touched on your being medicated for bipolar disorder, and how that can sometimes stifle creativity in artists of all stripes. There’s a line in “Lithium Blues” that says, “You took the words right out of my mouth.” Is there a balance you find yourself having to strike between mental health and creativity?

Yeah, for sure. “Lithium Blues” might have been the first thing I wrote in prison that I was really happy with. I had to go back and figure out, okay, there’s an element of magic to creativity, but there’s a much bigger element of math to it. And I know how to make a song so that the pieces fit together. If I can trust myself enough to do that, the rest will come along in time. That’s kind of what that song is about.  We talked about this a little bit before, but I had almost resigned myself that [playing music professionally] was behind me, that maybe I could do some shows for fun from time to time. But over the course of making this record it became clear to me that I still know how to make a song work. Whether this is a thing I get to do on a larger scale remains to be seen, but I was able to prove to myself that I can still put a good song together, even when I’m not up for five straight days.  

An article in Glide mentioned that you’re training to be an addiction counselor.  Is there some sense of duty there? Have you become more zealous about “the program” and living clean? Maybe a little of both?

It’s a little of both. I have certainly become more zealous about making sure that people who deal with mental health and/or addiction issues – especially younger people – have someone they can talk to without feeling judged or dictated to.

The name of your band, as you mentioned, has political overtones, and there are some references to current events on the album. But you didn’t lose your mind and start bashing people over the head with your opinions, like so many artists have done since 2016. Why do so many folks make everything about politics?

When I wrote these songs, one of the things I tried really hard to do was invite people into a conversation rather than dictate to them how they should feel about any given thing.

Thank you.

I really feel that’s a far more effective way to engage an audience, if you want to have that conversation. I have never responded to anybody – even when I agree wholeheartedly with what they have to say – addressing whatever they imagine their audience to be, by dictating what their thoughts or beliefs should be. That just doesn’t work for me, and when I wrote these songs I tried really hard to stay away from that. I wanted to ground it in narrative and open-ended conversation.

Yeah. It’s there, but it’s not preachy, and it’s open to interpretation. And believe you me it’s refreshing. Because I didn’t vote for the sumbitch, but I’ve had about a bellyful of being preached to by guys whose music I otherwise love.

Switching gears, redemption is certainly a theme running through From a White Hotel. How cathartic was this whole process, and where are you on the whole making-amends thing that started when you got out of the joint?

Well, in terms of the process being restorative, the making of the record – playing music with other people, being able to work on songs – was really, really healthy.  And it was good to do it in a way that I didn’t have to feel like my life depended on whether people liked these songs. Obviously I wouldn’t have put the record out if I didn’t want people to hear the songs, but it’s not going to ruin my life if there’s a deafening thud when it’s released. I’m still gonna be married to this wonderful woman, I’m still gonna be helping people who struggle with mental health and addiction issues. At the end of the day, the act of making a record was rewarding in and of itself.

The amends thing? Well…the second you say you’re humble, you’re not.

Ha! I guess that’s true.

(Laughs) Yeah. I’ll just say I’m really proud of the work that I’ve done. I think I’m living out amends to people to whom I can’t make direct amends. I’ve worked really hard at doing a good job of that.

By the time this article runs you’ll have been married for about a week. Was Caitlin a part of your life before you went away? How big a part of your road back to normalcy has she been?  

She was a part of my life. She wasn’t my girlfriend at that time, but she was part of a close group of friends. My girlfriend at the time was named Tracey, and she called Caitlin that night and said, “You’re not gonna believe this, but he’s gone. He’s going to prison, so can you come get his stuff out of my apartment?” So Caitlin went and got all of my stuff and took it to Goodwill in East Los Angeles. A lot of us had drastic changes in our lives around that time but we all stayed in touch for the most part. And Cait and I stayed in touch while I was locked up, and she’s been so supportive. She was never judgmental. It’s been one of the most positive things in my life – if not the most positive – to have that person with me every step of the way.

On the title cut you say, “I ain’t no kind of outlaw, and I never claimed to be.” The wit and irony are strong in you, Kasey Anderson.

(Laughs) Well, you know, that’s true. I never tried to market any of the records we ever made as any sort of “outlaw country” thing…

Oh, wait! Gosh, see, there’s so much irony I missed the irony. I was thinking in the literal sense, in that you’ve done time and technically are an outlaw.

(Laughs) I technically am an outlaw, and that’s kind of the point I wanted to make. It’s not all those artists’ fault that they’re being marketed and trumpeted that way. But a lot of times I’ll read an article about some “outlaw country” artist and think, “Man, I’ve actually been an outlaw and it sucks!”

You know, smoking weed doesn’t make someone an outlaw. My mom’s 65 and she’ll smoke weed and watch Netflix. That doesn’t make someone a badass. Figure out what you mean by “outlaw.”

Speaking of outlaws: Everybody’s favorite badass, Steve Earle, gets a nod on “Clothes Off My Back,” right down to the title of his 1996 post-prison album.  I can understand why you could maybe not resist a tip of the ol’ driver’s cap; it’s just too perfect. But aren’t you afraid he might get a big head over it?

Um…no, I’m not. Because I think Steve knows how good he is. He’s far enough along in his career that he knows he’s revered by people who write songs.

Very diplomatic, by the way.

(Laughs) But the point of that song…Steve’s been sober for a long time now, and he’s done a really good job of living his life according to that. And so it’s an acknowledgement that I’m not anywhere near where this guy is as a songwriter, and certainly not in my recovery. But I’m certainly a lot better than I was five years ago.

Yeah. I was really hoping you’d rise to the bait there.

(Laughs) I can’t.

I know.

Also, just to clarify one comment: my issue with “Outlaw Country” isn’t with any of the artists, it’s with the folks who use it as an easy/“cool” way to market and categorize artists. I don’t know too many artists who are actively seeking that label. I know Sturgill and Aaron Lee Tasjan for sure have poked fun at it in the past. That kind of marketing and categorization, to me, draw attention away from how great artists like Sturgill and Margo Price and Elizabeth Cook and those folks are individually, and makes it into this one homogenous category. It’s counterproductive. Their work is great, so let it stand on its own.



Newlywed Kasey Anderson is on tour. Check dates here.

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From a White Hotel is available everywhere today, including Kasey's site.


Apr 6, 2018

Hearing the Prairie Wind: A Conversation with Jim Miller of Western Centuries


By Kevin Broughton

Hailed upon release of their 2016 debut album Weight Of The World as “the country super group we’ve been waiting for,” Western Centuries turned heads and impressed critics with their tight musicianship and honkytonk sensibilities. Two years later, the songwriting triumvirate of Cahalen Morrison, Ethan Lawton and Jim Miller – along with bassist Nokosee Fields and new pedal steel player Leo Grassl – have followed up by bending roots genres into a mosaic so eclectic it defies any simple description.

Songs From The Deluge, released today on Free Dirt Records, was recorded in Eunice, Louisiana and produced by bayou legend Joel Savoy. There’s a Cajun feel that moves in, under and through the album -- thanks to a warm, full accordion -- yet other influences permeate as well. Because while they’re without question one of the ten country acts you need to know in 2018, Rolling Stone copped out a little by bit calling Western Centuries a “bar band.”

There’s a heaping helping of old school Rhythm and Blues, evoking Otis Redding. Or even the BoDeans, if you like. Morrison’s “Warm Guns” recaptures some of the southwestern imagery from the band’s debut record, and “Our Own Private Honkey Tonk” shows the guys still like to mix it up.

But Grassl’s pedal steel – truly the understated backbone of Western Centuries – keeps a country flavor just under the surface. Whether trading licks with Miller’s lead, or subtly echoing any one of the three lead vocalists, this is the band’s steady trademark.

Still – as is the case with so much music reviewed on these pages – a definitive genre eludes classification. What’s really counterintuitive is that Morrison, Lawton and Miller share one dominant influence – bluegrass – and it’s the one flavor that’s missing from this big, swirly bowl of music.

Except for the harmonies. Each song to one degree or another showcases some wonderful blending of three quality tenor voices – the boys’ ever present if subtle salute to the high lonesome. Quality musicianship pervades throughout, too. The fact that Lawton and Morrison swap back and forth on drums might connote an ad hoc nature; it shouldn’t. Those two are skilled multi-instrumentalists, and Miller spent the better part of two decades as Donna The Buffalo’s lead guitarist. This is a band of top-flight players; an near-unplugged version of the Texas Gentlemen, if you will.

Overall, the whole thing just…fits.

We caught up with Jim Miller, PhD – noted musician, lepidopterist and museum curator -- for a brief conversation. Topics included nervousness associated with becoming a songwriter late in life; getting an undergrad degree in banjo-building; and hand-me-down butterfly nets.

The music y’all make has so many different influences, and I think even more of them emerge on this second album. Honkytonk, Western Swing, some Parsons-era Byrds flavor, and the Band of course (a big favorite of yours.) Not surprisingly there’s a Zydeco feel, too, this record having been recorded in Louisiana. You’re a New Yorker by way of Canada; Ethan and Cahalen are Seattle guys. How does this music get synthesized?

It’s hard, actually, to put a finger on that. The three of us met at a party – I was living out in Seattle for a couple years – and we met at a bluegrass jam, like a big party.  Ethan and Cahalen were the first guys I met inside this house, and we’re talking about the music we like, and all three of us love Ralph Stanley. And we just started jamming, though not with the idea of doing anything with it.

But we kept realizing that we all three really liked the same kind of music, although we each had our own histories, which are extensive. So we started thinking about doing the band thing together. And you know, I’ve played all through Louisiana with some of the best players there because I was a side guy. And Ethan is a badass bluegrass mandolin player. So there’s that sensibility. Cahalen is unbelievable, playing with the fingerpicking style of Mississippi John Hurt. He’s killer at that.

So it all kind of just came together. But the dynamic centers on a bluegrass-ish style, and a love of three-part harmony vocals. And now [on the second album] we’re trying to explore more and push the limits.

And it’s kind of odd, but with all the stylistic influences, bluegrass – other than the harmonies – is the one thing you really don’t hear a ton of. That’s remarkable.

Yeah, because we’ve all been…well, I wouldn’t say “fanatics,” but I’ve been a Ralph Stanley fanatic since I was young. I would follow him anywhere to see him play; like a Dead Head, but for Ralph Stanley! (Laughs) And Ethan’s pretty close, too, man. He’s out of his mind. Knows all the old repertoires. He’s way into it, and Cahalen is too. It’s a funny thing: Somehow that represents the core or soul of what we’re trying to do.

Speaking of geography, how does the long-distance thing work out? Obviously y’all are together in the studio & on tours. Afterwards, do you just say, “See ya’ next album?”

We just say, “See you next tour,” and usually schedule a day toward the beginning of the next one. I dunno. We’re good players. Not tooting our own horn, but we can get on it pretty quick, you know? And actually when you look at the level of bands we’re talking about, nobody lives together. I mean, there are a few where everybody lives in Nashville, but there are only a few of those, even. So it’s not that out of the ordinary these days to have people living in different places.

And for the record what we tried to do was play a lot of the songs beforehand, so we had a pretty good idea [before we went into the studio.] Some of them though, we’d never tried before.

On Weight of the World, y’all each came in with your own respective songs you’d written, and that was the first time you’d ever written for a band before. Was it a similar approach this time, or was there any co-writing?

It was mostly the same thing, where we each brought pretty close to finished songs to the studio. And what always happens – I’m a big historian of The Band, you know, my favorite band – and what happens is the band itself always creates the song. So you come and you think, “I’ve got this finished song,” but it isn’t finished. The song is re-worked and evolved by the band as a unit. And it’s the contribution of the band that makes the song come to life, right?

I’m a songwriter, Ethan’s a songwriter, Cahallan’s a songwriter, right? But Nokosee and Leo are totally kicking in, know what I mean? Getting into who gets the songwriter credit…Oh, Robbie Robertson gets every songwriter credit? That’s what freaking tore up The Band. So, no thank you. The song is created as a living, breathing thing by these players.

Did you happen to see the documentary – I think it was on Netflix – about Levon Helm that came out a few years ago?

I did, yeah.

Man, he was bitter. He was so pissed off.

He was so pissed off. I live in upstate New York in the Hudson Valley, and I come into contact with people who kinda peripherally knew him or were around him some. And you couldn’t say Robbie Robertson’s name to him. I had friends who accidentally did, and it didn’t go well. The depth of the bad feelings, man. That’s a wild story.

But that’s not us. (Laughs.) We’re far from that.

Oh, I know. The way you’re talking about your steel and bass players, Leo and Nokosee…I’m a big Led Zeppelin fan and a big fan of The Who. Those bands would have been nothing without their respective rhythm sections…

I know, I know…

…those guys were the backbones of those bands, and it seems like y’all have that same unselfish vibe going on here. And along those lines, one of the striking characteristics of this three-headed songwriting approach is that there are some really snug harmonies on every cut. I’m curious, when you’re  writing a song for Western Centuries, do you take the other guys’ voices into account when you’re working out a melody? Is it, Ethan will sing a third here, or does that just work itself out in the studio? Or is that just a luxury of having three really solid tenors in one band?

Absolutely. Yeah. And another thing that happens, and it just happened to me last week: You know, we’ve already got a bunch of songs ready for the next album. That’s one of the luxuries of having three songwriters; I don’t have to write 14 songs, I only have to write three or four. So I was working on a song last week, and I said, “Wait a second, this one doesn’t have a strong enough chorus.” Because I really want the song to show off all three voices, you know? And I went back and re-worked the song so that we could get to do what we love to do.

But you do. You think about making it…well, chorus-y. And I’m actually trying to write a song right now where we sing the whole thing…Well, there’s a song on the new record Ethan wrote that’s a three-part the whole way through. It’s called, um…

Do you have the titles in front of you?

Yeah.

Track four, what’s track four?

“Wild You Run.”

  
“Wild You Run.” Ethan wrote that with – in the back of his mind – The Wailers. In the very beginning of The Wailers, they always sang three-part through the whole song. And that’s such a cool idea, you know?

Yeah! It does have kind of a reggae flavor to it, now that you mention it.

So that got me thinking that I want to write one that’s three-part all the way through, where we get back to that bluegrass thing a little bit. 

It was pretty ham-fisted of me to drop a moth joke on a lepidopterist.

Haha, I had already forgotten about it.

Let’s call it a rookie mistake, and you tell me how Canadian country boy gets to curate in a New York museum.

My dad was a biologist. The reason we moved to Canada was that he had a professorship at the University of Saskatchewan. So I grew up playing outside on the prairies. And my dad expected my brother and me to become biologists; it was kinda like, “This is what you’re gonna be.” So, I got my “toolkit” handed to me pretty early on. (Laughs.) A butterfly net, etcetera, because he was an outdoor field biologist.

After that he got a job at Yale, so we moved to New Haven, and that was a tough transition. But I kind of found my footing in the little entomology world, and got my own thing going there. And I lived around the New York City area from High School on.

And where did you do your schoolin’?

I did my undergraduate at a little hippie college called Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. It’s no grades, you design your own things…

Sounds Montessori.

It kind of is. You better want to do it, because nobody’s gonna push anything into you. I built banjos.

What?

Building and playing banjos was my major. (Both laugh heartily.) But I took an undergraduate class my last year in butterflies and moths, and that got me really charged up. So I went to Cornell to get my PhD, and I worked at the Smithsonian and the museum in New York.

Where were you born?

Boston, actually. If you’re born into academia, it’s like being in the military. You just move all over the place. We went from Boston to Ft. Collins, Colorado to Saskatoon to New York. I guess I’m an academic brat.

If the scientific day job is in the rearview mirror, how do you occupy your time when not doing Western Centuries stuff?

I still do the scientific stuff. I got good at it because I did it for a long time, so I still do it to support myself. We all have…well, Ethan is actually a badass electrician, so he can make some money when he’s home. We all have things we can do to stay alive, because where we’re at band-wise, it’s kind of tough.

The in-studio y’all did at KEXP will be enlightening for a lot of folks new to the band. Seems the steel and bass players are the only ones married to their instruments. How many do you feel comfortable playing? I don’t think I saw you take a turn on drums, but I bet you can.

No, I’m not. I always kinda wanted to be a drummer but I never did. I played fiddle for a very long time and can actually play banjo pretty darned well. And acoustic and electric guitar, obviously. Cahalen can play banjo mandolin…he’s getting pretty good on the fiddle. Ethan plays mandolin, piano; he can play a lot of stuff. Nokosee, our bass player, is one of the country’s top, I mean top, fiddle players. He’s becoming a little bit of a “thing.” Ha.

“Wild Birds” is layered with imagery, with Canada geese right out of the gate. It’s a great road song on the surface, but there’s more to it than that. The structure is a tad unconventional;

Ha ha! Man, I like that. (Laughing) I’m laughing because it’s a compliment and that’s the way I see it!

Well, I decided I had to learn how to play this song, so I got my guitar out…

Oh, this is so cool…

…and I like the way you resolve each verse with what might be called a mini-bridge before the chorus, in a song that doesn’t have a typical bridge.

Right, right.

So tell me about where this song comes from, and how it came about.

Each verse is kind of a page of my life story. The first verse –“Heading North” -- is when we moved from Colorado to Saskatchewan, then kinda living up there with the moths and everything. We were so outdoors, my brother and me; we were just always outdoors. So that was the first section.

The next section is moving to Connecticut, trying to “make friends with the tide,” and the whole scene there. And then the last part is kinda sad, I dunno. I dunno, [dealing with dying parents.]

(Pauses) I don’t have really good explanations for my songs –

Yeah?

I’m new to it, as you probably picked up on. I haven’t been writing, except for this band. So even though I’ve played music since I was nine, I’d never written a damned song. For about 20 years I was in a band (Donna The Buffalo) and was the backup guy. It was all original music and I didn’t contribute a single song. This is pretty new to me, so you have to bear with me a little bit.*

[Is a bit stunned]

I don’t have exact explanations. Sometimes when you write, you choose the words because they make rhythmic sense. You don’t even know what they are sometimes.

Well, for what it’s worth, I took the time to learn to play it and I think you’ve summed it up very well.

You know the hardest part – for me, when I first started writing songs – is believing in your own songs, and defending your songs to other people. That is a freaking challenge. You can write a song and not know whether it’s any good, but you still have to perform it in front of someone and go, “this is what I’ve got to say.”

(Laughs). And it’s tough, man. It’s super tough. I can’t claim to have mastered it, I tell you.”

It all comes out very naturally. The whole record’s pretty remarkable.

Well, thanks, I appreciate it. Let me ask you, does it sound like one…thing? We’re wondering whether it sounds like three cagey dudes, or does it sound like a thing?

Aw, yeah, it’s a thing. I’ll say this, too: there’s a theme, I’m just not sure what it is.

Yeah. Yeah, we’re not either.

It all just fits together so well, and you know we talked about the disparate influences stylistically –

Yeah.

--but the backbone of the whole thing is the steel guitar, and the lead instrument a lot of the time.

Exactly. Which is a funny thing because then people go, “Oh, it’s a country record!”

Well, yeah, but…you know, a couple of my songs [e.g. “Time Does the Rest” – KB] I’m trying to be Otis Redding; (laughs) but then you hear the steel and it’s a “country” record. It’s such a signature, that instrument.

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*In between the time we talked & FTM premiered “Wild Birds,” Jim opened up about the third verse:

“The last verse and the choruses talk about frequent trips back home to Connecticut as an adult, from wherever I was living at the time - New York, Seattle, Chicago - to visit my dying parents. It's a sad song, but singing it in front of audiences has taught me how to dissociate myself from personal emotions, which seems to be an important aspect of performing.”

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Songs From The Deluge is out today on Free Dirt records.

It's also available on Amazon and iTunes.


Spring and summer tour dates are up at the band’s site, and we have it on good authority Western Centuries will head Southeast in September.

Feb 27, 2018

Courtney Patton: The Farce the Music Interview



By Kevin Broughton

Courtney Patton was in a good place, a really good one. And she had been for a little while, having settled into a marriage with her songwriting soul mate, the kind and humble Jason Eady. Having received critical acclaim for her 2015 album So This Is Life, followed up by the husband-and-wife collection of duets Something Together, Patton was finally happy and content as she set about to write, record and produce her own record for the first time.

But happy ain’t country. Fortunately, though, like the scorpion catching a ride from the frog, Patton’s nature prevails on an album full of truth, three chords at a time on What It’s Like To Fly Alone. Collaborating with heavy-hitting songwriters like Micky Braun and Larry Hooper (who along with Eady helped pen “Barabbas” on Eady’s self-titled album), she captures heartbreak, hope and a dash of redemption throughout. Her vocals combine the boldness of Kim Richey and the sweet, quavering vulnerability of Kelly Willis, while telling stories of characters both real and familiar.

Patton, with her self-effacing, hearty laugh and genuine humility, is a woman comfortable in her own skin. Her gregarious wit stands in contrast to the darkness of her songs’ characters, but the common thread is a genuineness that pervades. This is a compelling album by a woman serious about her craft.

She’s between Dallas and Houston when we connect to talk about hawks, snakes, rats, cigarette smoke and Botox.

A few years back on Jack Ingram’s Songwriters Series, you said, “I think sad songs, the way they’re produced and written, are the fabric of real country music.” It seems like you’ve really put your money where your mouth is on this album. We’ll get into some specific tracks in a minute, but how did this album come about thematically?

If I’m being 100 percent truthful, I was in a rut. I was in a writer’s rut, because I was happy for the first time in a really long time. And it’s hard to be the kind of songwriter I am when you’re happy. Happy songs are so hard for me, because you’ve really got to know how to do it without being cheesy.

And I had never co-written before, so I had made a goal after So This Is Life came out in 2015 that I was going to co-write with some of my friends and really get better at it. So I’m really proud that seven out of the 12 songs on this record are co-writes.

That being said, I couldn’t go about it this time with a theme. Every other time I’ve said, “Okay, the theme for this record is this.” This album, I just wanted to write songs and have a big pot of them to choose from. But when it came down to it and I started singing these songs, I realized they all kind of centered on the idea that we have to make ourselves happy. At the end of the day, we have to choose the person we’re with; we have to choose to get over addiction. Or whatever it is. We have to decide to make the best of what we have.

What about the title track?

I was driving home from Austin, where I’d had a really bad gig. A couple of fans had gotten up and left during the first song – and asked for their money back -- because they had driven in from out of town to see someone else -- who happened to be my husband. Jason was supposed to be there but wasn't, so Josh Grider was filling in for him. It had nothing to do with me, but it threw me off. I started forgetting lyrics and doubting myself.

I was crying the whole way home. I called Jason and told him I was going to quit: “I’m gonna go back to college and get my master’s, and teach public speaking in college. That’s what I’m want to do!” He said, “Get home, go to bed and wake up tomorrow. It’ll all be okay.”

And right as I’m wiping my tears away, this hawk shoots out and flies almost into my car. It shocked me out of my stupor and forced me to say, “Okay, focus, you’re almost home.” And it was 2:00 in the morning and I got home and wrote the whole song. And the whole point of it is at the end of the day, that hawk’s out to find a snake or a rat or whatever he can to survive, and he’s gotta do it by himself. I’m out here playing songs, singing songs that come from deep inside of me, and I’ve gotta do it by myself. I have to choose; when those two couples walk out, I have to be able to say, “I’m good enough. My songs are good enough. I can do this.” I made the choice to do this; I’ve gotta play that show and not let it affect me. I’m doing what I love, and I don’t want to go back to college right now. 

You’re a big fan of waltzes. Why? (And I have a follow-up question.)

So…I don’t know why, but all my life I’ve liked slow, sadder songs. I’ve listened to Counting Crows and Carole King and they’ve been huge influences on me. Willie Nelson…I love Merle Haggard. I just love slow songs. People have told me, “You’re in a waltz rut,” and I just can’t help it. The way that I write poetry it phrases itself in a waltz meter without my trying.

That was another challenge because I thought I was gonna end up with another slew of waltzes – and again, I’m not apologizing – but some people think it’s too much.

I asked Jason this last year, and I’m curious about your take. How does one go about writing a waltz? I mean, do you have lyrics ahead of time and bend them into a One-two-three cadence? Do you write the words with a ¾ time in your head? Or is it something else entirely?

Man, for me it just really comes out that way, in a waltz meter. I’ll have a phrase in mind and I’ll write the phrase out and as the words start coming, I realize that’s just the way it’s going to be. I really don’t try, “This is a melody, let’s write a song to it,” I never do that. I guess my heart beats in the rhythm of a waltz.

On the surface one would think, you know, you & Jason have been married for going on 4 years now, and y’all are perfect for each other – you should be in a really good place in life. But so many of these songs are dark and sad. How much of this album is autobiographical? I mean, obviously “Fourteen Years” is about the sister you lost…

Yes…

…but, for instance, “Round Mountain,”



Completely fictional.

Oh it is? Good!

Yeah! This was one of the first challenges I gave myself. I drove between two towns -- I wanna say Johnson City and Fredericksburg – maybe just past Johnson City, and it was literally just a sign: “Round Mountain.” And I looked into the history and around 1900 there was a church there, and so people started settling there. And when the church closed they all went back to Johnson City.

So I just made up a fictional story of a character named Emily, and she had an affair. And I don’t know if that kind of stuff happened back then, but I kind of wanted to go for a Chris Knight-type of song. I saw a head stone that said something like “Fare the well, Emily Bell,” and just made up a story about her, and her not wanting anybody to know she’d had a bastard baby.” I’m sure she doesn’t appreciate that, if she can hear me. (Laughs)

And she had died young, I should mention that, probably of dysentery or smallpox or something that actually happened back then. I just made it way darker. (Laughs)

Yes. Dark. And fictional.

You know, I got a Face Book message from a fan who said, “I’m kind of concerned, are you and Jason okay? The title of your album concerns me, and I don’t see any pictures of y’all together.” And I said, “You know it’s actually nice to have a private life where we don’t have to share everything we’re doing! But we’re sitting here having dinner, laughing at the absurdity of your concern. It’s a song about the music business. Calm down.” (Laughs)

You mentioned dealing with addiction; speaking from any kind of experience there?

Uh, not necessarily, but I have a grandfather who struggled with alcoholism and a brother who just celebrated two years of sobriety. But it’s hard for all of us, watching him struggle with that and not knowing what to do to help. But it’s not me; there’s nothing in me that says “I’ve gotta have that,” and then I’ve gotta have it more. I can have a drink, and I can not have a drink for three months and not think about it. Luckily it wasn’t something that was passed on to me. I just think everybody struggles with their own thing.

You’re on your way to a house show to help finance this record, and as best I can tell, your albums have all been self-released. Was this a business decision on your part to forsake getting a label and do it all on your own?

I’ve never looked for one, and I’ve never had anybody approach me. So I guess it’s mutual. I enjoy having creative control over my material and I think I’d be very disheartened if anyone told me I couldn’t do it the way I wanted to. I just think we’re very fortunate to live in Texas where you can make a living touring and driving around playing guitar. I don’t even play with a band. And I make more money doing this than I did at my day job…which wasn’t much, you know, but it’s a pride thing. At the end of the day I look at my guitar and say, “Me and you: we did that.”
And nobody told me, you know, that I had to shoot Botox in my lips…

Ha!

…or lose 40 pounds. I mean, I think of all the things – I hear horror stories from my friends in Nashville…these girls in their twenties who are gorgeous, but with these ridiculously plump lips and no wrinkles on their foreheads. And that’s just not country music! Country music is supposed to have wrinkles. And cigarette smoke and beer.

And that’s just not – I would not want anything put on me that way, because it’s frightening to me. I think they’d take one look at me – I’m a curvy girl – and say, “You don’t belong here.” So it’s never anything that’s come into the realm of the possible with me. And I’m okay with that.

Drew Kennedy produced the last album, and you did this one yourself. What was the recording process like? Did y’all lay everything down live?

I was nervous about it. But I’ve been missing a lot over the last few years. I’m a mom – going to basketball games and soccer games. But I had the opportunity to make and album in my hometown and I’ve never done that before, so I jumped on it.  So two of the guys who tour with Jason – Jerry Abrams on bass and Giovanni Carnuccio on drums – we went in the studio and tracked it live. I was in the control room and they were in the main room, and what you hear is what we did. There are no overdubs on that part.

Now when you hear Lloyd Maines, he did that from home. But the basic tracks – guitar, bass drums and vocals – we did that live, in about two and a half days. But I’m just so fortunate to have Lloyd and a bunch of other friends and people I trust who helped out. I just sent them my songs. And the thing is, they – and especially Lloyd – they listen to words, and they play things that match. A lot of musicians don’t do that. But Lloyd can hear me take a deep breath, and you can hear it correspond on the steel – inhaling.

It’s just cool things like that; I don’t think I could have asked for better people to play on it. But I was very excited to try and do it myself, and it’s been a very proud moment for me. I don’t know if I’ll ever do it again, but I loved it.  

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What It's Like to Fly Alone is available through Courtney's site, on Amazon, etc.


Feb 15, 2018

Ruby Boots: The Farce the Music Interview

Photo by Cal Quinn


By Kevin Broughton

The stage name – Ruby Boots – is quite ironic, given the varied and calloused life thus far lived by the gal who thought of it (though she can’t recall exactly why.) On her own by 14, Bex Chilcott has been around. I mean, the world. Several times. As in, learned to play guitar working the high seas of the South Pacific.

Her Bloodshot Records debut, Don’t Talk About It, out last week conjures country sensibilities with an edge: Lucinda Williams meets T Rex, with a dash of – dare we say – Lone Justice. 

We caught up with the brassy, sassy, sexy, saucy Aussie and talked pearling, the (de)merits of the metric system, and checking off a huge bucket list item in the nick of time. And some other stuff, too. 

Americans generally view Australians as fascinating and a little exotic. What really grabbed my attention from your bio is that you were working on a pearling boat at age 19. That sounds both exotic and grueling. Describe that kind of labor.

Well, I guess with any kind of out-of-the-box job, there are really cool perks to it. I was out at sea for two to five weeks at a time, and I was in the sunshine 10 hours a day. It was really beautiful, seeing whales during meal breaks. It really helped my work ethic, but it was literally back-breaking work, pulling up 300 cages a day and cleaning all the oysters. It was in the most beautiful environment, though. 

It’s a complex process, and I suppose we could do the whole interview on pearling (laughs). They have these Japanese technicians who come during harvest and put a plastic bead in the oyster’s tummy. Then they hang in these cages in ocean for two years. And we had to meticulously clean each one. It was a pretty radical thing to do, off the beaten path. But I needed to get out of my hometown.

Give us a thumbnail sketch/timeline of how you wound up in the States, and Nashville particularly.

I ended up hurting my back on the boat – it’s literally back-breaking – but I also ended up learning to play guitar and writing songs while I was out at sea, so I decided to travel around the U.K. and Europe for a couple years. And I came back to Australia and started playing open mics and gigging. That was around 2008, I believe, and I was gigging a lot and ended up developing nodules on my throat because I wasn’t singing the right way.  

So I had to take two years off from singing just to get rid of these nodules on my vocal cords. And after putting my energy into recovering from that, I started gigging and recording, and started to open my eyes to what was out there, and came over to Nashville in 2012. I fell in love with the city immediately; I’d never had that feeling with any other place in the world. And I’ve seen a lot, really: Asia, India, Europe and Australia. And I just kept coming back, because it has this incredible vibe, this small-town feel with all this creative energy that it was living off of. I was coming back a couple times a year.

And then I was awarded a government grant to write my record, so I afforded myself some time in Nashville to get it done, then finished out my last album cycle touring around the country. So in May of 2016, I settled down in Nashville again to write this record. 

This is random, but have you quit thinking in the metric system since you’ve been here? Have you embraced “miles” and “pounds?”

Hell. No! (Laughs) My Siri on my phone is still in kilometers and has an Australian accent!  I’m all about assimilation, but I still need to know where I’m going, how long it’s going to take me to get there, and how far away it is. (Laughs)

Why the stage name, Bex? Going forward will “Ruby Boots” be you & whatever band is behind you at a given time, and how did you come up with the name?

Actually it’s been so long ago, and I’m trying to remember. This came up recently when I was in Australia and on this radio program. It was live-to-air, with an audience, and I was asked about it and I just honestly couldn’t remember; I’ve used other names in the past and have just used this one for the last couple of album cycles. That name’s been with me for a while now and I’ve started to make fans with it in this area. I’ve thought about changing it to something closer to my actual name, but people have grown used to it and can relate to it. 

I do remember that my real surname was not at all stage-worthy, so that was the motivation behind finding an alter-ego name.

The Texas Gentlemen – whose album I’ve worn out since last fall – backed you on this record. How did that introduction come about? 

One of the guys who had played with them a lot who had also played with me – Chase McGillis on bass – has become a very dear friend. And he told me the Gents were passing through Nashville on their way to play the Newport Folk Festival, where they were backing Kris Kristofferson. They were doing a warm up show at the American Legion Hall in Nashville, and Chase rang me about two hours before the show and said, “Do you want to come down and sing “Me and Bobby McGee?”

So, I went down there and sang “Me and Bobby McGee!”

Nice.

Yeah! So the Gents put on my old record on the bus and listened to it on the way to Newport. And when they were on the way back to Dallas, I was living in Nashville at Nikki Lane’s at the time and they were all there. (Texas Gent and producer) Beau (Bedford) was asking me what I was doing, so I started sending him songs. The rest is kind of history, I guess. 

What about the arrangements and production? Did you go into the studio with a pretty good idea of how you wanted it to sound? How collaborative was it? 

I definitely had set about to move into this record with a fuller electric sound; that was a conscious choice as I was writing the songs. I felt like on my previous tours from other albums that I was missing that extra grit, you know? My punk heart was really missing that.

Beau came out to Nashville and we went through all the songs and talked about them, and what we heard in them. And we set out to honor all the songs, I guess, but still with that electric feel. And we definitely came together chatting about old school records like T Rex, or Tom Petty – whom I’ve just always idolized as my go-to, No. 1 songwriter – and Beau definitely has a lot of the same influences.

But once we got in the studio, all those guys just have such an encyclopedia set between them of such raw musical instincts! The boys are each such great musicians and songwriters; so we did honor the songs, but in a very collective way with such a wealth of everyone’s musicality. 

Several of the songs on this record obviously come from dark places; you left home at 14 for starters, and you named the album “Don’t Talk About It.” Ignoring that title for a moment, I’d like to know where these songs come from, and how cathartic it was to record them. Did you get any kind of closure, or was that something you were even looking for? 

There are some particularly personal elements in the record, and I’m not trying to avoid...(pauses) the listener thinking they’re all songs that I’ve written from a place within myself. But a lot of them were conversational; they started conversations within myself, you know? What was going on in my life at the time, in my friends’ lives…society, and how all of those things spoke to me and came out in songs. 

It’s not a breakup album, it’s not a love album; it’s a life album to me. The introductory track, to me, is a classical example of it. 


It’s that element where…I mean, you can be on the giving end of it or the receiving end of it, but you’ve been in a situation where information is being withheld, and all of a sudden this other person informs you that they have a significant other. And it’s too late to make a moral choice; you’re already locked and loaded in that situation. (Laughs) And I think there’s an element of relate-ability there with the audience. And that’s what I wanted to do with the record and the way listeners digest it.

The great thing about coming from a tumultuous life experience in many ways is that you can always tap into it artistically. It doesn’t leave you – it gets better as time goes by – but it’s always there to tap into. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing as a songwriter. And I think there are elements of strength and vulnerability in this record, with a woman’s voice – a good bit of defiance, but with some fragility too. 

A long-winded answer, but it’s hard to wrap up the voice of my record in a sentence, you know. 

You’ve drawn comparisons to Lucinda Williams and Nikki Lane – the latter sings harmony on one cut. I’m reminded of Kasey Chambers – but that could just be my American brain making subconscious generalities. I’m also reminded of Maria McKee from Lone Justice, but that could be way before your time…

Oh my goodness! I love Lone Justice! You are the FIRST PERSON who’s ever made that comparison! I swear I was just thinking please, please, let him say Lone Justice, let him make a Lone Justice comparison!

Honest, that was the first thing I thought of. I said, “Man, this is Lone Justice.”

No sh*t? That’s awesome, and one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said. I love her! To hear you say that about someone I admire so much is a very big compliment. So thank you very much.

Who are some of your other influences?

Off the top of my head, Lucinda, Ryan Adams and Tom Petty are probably my top three songwriters that I just adore.  Anytime I feel like I’m not getting what I want from what I’m listening to, I can just go back to those three. 

I still can’t believe Tom Petty’s gone. Can’t process it. 

You know, a lot of bad sh*t happened last year, but that was the worst. I feel really lucky because I finally got to see him in Detroit last year, on the 40th Anniversary Tour. I had just fallen in love, and our first out-of-town trip was to Detroit to see Tom Petty, and that was at the top of my bucket list. I’m so glad I acted on a hunch that I might not get a chance to see them again, you know? 

What’s next for Ruby Boots? 

After the record launch on Feb. 9, I’m gonna play some shows in Kansas City, and we’ll hit South By Southwest after that. I’ll do an in-store here in Nashville. But it just means so much – it’s taken a lot of will and might – to have made my way here to America from Australia. It means so much to be able to launch this record here in America after all the tenacity and focus. It’s a really big deal for me, you know? 

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Ruby Boots' Don't Talk About It is available on Amazon, iTunes, and all the usual outlets.



Feb 1, 2018

The Farce 5: A Dumb Interview With Jaime Wyatt

by Jeremy Harris

I caught up with the very talented Jaime Wyatt after a Shooter Jennings set and during my drunkest stint of the 3rd Outlaw Country Cruise. Somehow I managed to mess up the recording by drunkenly stopping and starting the recording app on my phone but I managed to remember enough to type this up. I doubt I got it all but I’m surprised I even remembered any of it.

Farce: Are you ready for the worst five questions in music?

Jaime: Sure

Farce: If you could only pick one, what (I can’t even spell what I said here) of music would you put yourself into?

Jaime: Are you trying to say genre?

Farce: Yes but very drunk.

Jaime: Uh, American

Farce: You’ve been out touring and hanging with other singer so which artist you’ve been around takes takes the stinkiest shits?

Jaime: You know I’m a lady right?

Farce: Yeah, but I’m sure they throw you in a room with guys at shows sometimes.

Jaime: (She’s now putting serious thought into this) Well, the other day on the bus there was a smell. I’m not sure who did it with everyone in there and it’s hard to tell on a bus but I’ll say it was Ted. (bassist Ted Russell Kamp)

Farce: Have you ever pretended to remember a fan that you've encountered so they'd quit telling you why you should know them?

Jaime: No I can’t lie, I just tell them I don’t remember. I’m very honest.

Farce: Can’t fault you for that.

Farce: Can you describe your worst hotel experience?

Jaime: Oh shit, I can’t remember the name of the hotel (and I was drunk and hit the stop recording button so we are officially relying on my drunken memory) but there was a party and the management and law showed up.

Farce: Probably better off we don’t remember for lawsuit sakes. If you could make a singer or band disappear forever who would it be and why?

Jaime: I hope you wont be offended.

Farce: I don’t give a shit.

Jaime: It’s Nickelback.

Farce: Hell no that’s a great answer. I don’t think that would offend anyone on this boat. Thanks Jaime, I’ve got to go tell Shooter he’s an asshole. (He heard me)

Jaime: Thank you for doing this.


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Editor's Note: Please go purchase some music from Jaime to make this up to her somehow. 


Oct 13, 2017

Leroy Virgil of Hellbound Glory: The Farce the Music Interview

Leroy Virgil: The Farce the Music Interview

By Kevin Broughton

Americana. Roots music. Roots rock. Alt-country. Outlaw country. Interchangeable terms, when trying to classify the music we here at FTM try to promote – when we’re not busting on the mainstream “country” acts that pollute terrestrial radio airwaves. Sirius/XM has a channel dedicated to it. Number 60 on their satellite dial is “Outlaw Country,” and even in that niche you’ll find a lot of genre bending. 

Steve Earle, a bona fide second-generation pioneer of the outlaw scene, came right out with it on his most recent album. Always subtle, Earle planted the flag – one hopes to signify an emergence from a decade’s worth of political activism – and named his record So You Wanna Be An Outlaw. Because we needed to be reminded how much of an outlaw he is, one assumes. 

But if you asked Hellbound Glory’s Leroy Virgil, “Are you an outlaw?” he’d likely pause, ponder for a moment and say, “Sure!” with the happy grin of a kid about to play cowboys and Indians. And with the aid of a prodigious producer, he’s made probably the most outlaw album of the year. 

Pinball has Shooter Jennings’ fingerprints all over it. He even shot a clever tease video for pre-sales, featuring a menacing woman of Asian extraction and a masked goon in a Hawaiian shirt wielding a bat. The songs, though – excepting a couple of covers – are vintage Leroy Virgil: benders, binges, breakups and blues, with the occasional jaded comic’s view of society at large. 

“’Merica (The Good Ol’ Days)” kicks off the album in a brash, rollicking way. It’s a cynic’s state of the union – with citizens fueled by “alcohol and Adderall” – without being heavy-handed. There’s a wonderful cover of the elder Jennings’ “Six Strings Away,” but for my money the gem of this record is “Vandalism Spree,” the best white-trash love song since DBT’s “Zip City.” Somehow there’s a sweet and tender quality to the idea of burning down the Dairy Queen and maybe robbing a cash machine.  


To fully appreciate Hellbound Glory, though, you have to talk to Leroy. More accurately, ask a few questions then just take your hands off the wheel. You’re along for the ride. That’s all. More topically, the conversation is pinball-like. 

I think this is real. Let’s see where this goes.

Okay, is it pronounced “LEE-Roy” or  “L’roy?”

I don’t know, man, whichever is fine. Say it however you want to say it.

Well, how do you say it?

I say it differently every time it comes out of my mouth.

Well played. You’ve been on Shooter Jennings label for a while; is this the first record of yours he’s produced? I ask because the first time I listened to Pinball I heard echoes of his The Other Life album.

Well, a couple years ago we went out to Nashville to record some of the songs that are on this album, and it didn’t really come together. We just sat on the phones for a couple years and he finally hit me up a year ago and said, “Hey, let’s try again on this album.” And he picked the songs, put the band together and really called the shots. It’s been a lot of fun.

So the band he put together…well, let me back up. Y’all are fixin’ to kick off a tour together; will y’all be using the same band?

Yeah. They joined my band and I joined theirs.

Okay. So is Hellbound Glory kind of like Son Volt, which is Jay Farrar and whatever musicians happen to be playing with him at the time?

Well, yeah. A couple years ago, I decided to kill the band off. It was a sort of ritual on Halloween. I had a coffin. There was a guy dressed up as a priest. I didn’t want to go that far, but it was a very strange night. You know, out in the middle of nowhere, a strange, tiny bar…some burn victims…

Burn victims? 

Yeah, things got kinda crazy.

Yeah?

You know, that whole area is in this burial ground place where people came out during the Gold Rush and gave the Indians blankets that had smallpox on them so they could get to the gold faster. So they say that whole area is kind of cursed.

What could go wrong? 

Yeah. So it was kind of a heavy trip. 

I would think. Were you dosed?

(Giggles.) Well, I did some dosing, but I wasn’t dosed myself. 

For the record, what’s your birth name?

My birth name is Leon Virgil Bowers. 

Okay – and I’m jumping ahead in my questions here a little bit…I read your interview in Saving Country Music, where you talked about killing the name off. I’m curious, when you were a solo act under your birth name for a few years, was there confusion with the audiences? I ask because in the 70s when the Allman Brothers took a hiatus, Gregg and Dickey both did solo albums, but the latter billed himself on the record and tour as “Richard Betts.” Ticket and record sales underperformed as a result.

Oh, yeah. Lots of confusion, but I like to promote that kind of stuff. I just figured if I was gonna go out there with a different name, I might as well go with the name my mom gave me.  I never ended up putting out a record. The deal was I needed to do something different, because the people I was working with, they weren’t sure I could use the name “Hellbound Glory” at the time. 

Oh…okay.

So I had to change it. But it’s still up in the air. So, we’re still working on getting it worked out. 

Ah.

Well, not really working on it. I’m just playing in a band and calling it Hellbound Glory. 

You know, just in the first few minutes of this thing, I’m starting to see how you and Shooter might be drawn to each other…

Yeah, we’re like cousins.

...y’all both seem to like a little bit of chaos going on. So did y’all not even know each other at all until a couple years ago, and he reached out to you? 

Well, I was playing a gig in Reno at a place called Davidson’s, and he was playing right down the street at a Casino called Silver Legacy. So I just walked down and caught their sound check.  And we didn’t really make a connection, but then later he heard of me and heard my songs, and now he’s one of my biggest fans. 

Obviously. The characters in your songs are a collection of misfits – and that’s being kind. 

(Laughs) Yeah, degenerates!

Their attitudes range from cynical to fatalistic to carefree – and certainly aren’t shy about discussing their benders and binges.  What are they telling us about your general outlook on life?

Well…they’re just songs. They’re not me. I’d say this new album – I like the way it doesn’t end on a happy note. I guess it’s nihilistic in that way. But I’m not.

Oh, no. You did a symbolic, ritual killing-off of a band on a site where Indians got dosed with smallpox, but “nihilistic?” Nah. Please go on.

(Laughing) Well, I’m an artist. And a little bit skewed, I guess. But it’s the whole “Pinball” thing, you know? Life’s a game of pinball, where if you lose, you lose your soul. That’s kinda what I’m going for: staying in play as long as I can.  But there’s the chaos thing you mentioned. Sometimes it’s hard not to slip. You follow me?

Oh, yeah. I’ve been wearing this record out for the last three weeks. The line, “We could steal some Keystone beer from an A-rab liquor store” has made “Vandalism Spree” one of my favorite songs of the year. You’re not a politically correct fella, are you? 

Well, I didn’t realize it wasn’t politically correct. 

Come on!

I don’t even know what that song’s about. I don’t remember making it up. But there’s a lot of liquor stores run by…well, there’s a lot of liquor stores in Reno, and I’m friends with all of them. I don’t actually steal from them. (Giggles)

Do you think political correctness has taken some of the rough edges off of alt-country or outlaw music, and did you notice music being politicized in the genre last year and since? 

Huh, that’s a really good question, let me think about that one for a minute. You know, I’ve never really thought about that too much. I was told I was gonna get some backlash for that lyric when I first wrote it and started singing it. The people I was working with wanted me to change it, and I tried to change it…

What??

Yeah, I tried to change it but Shooter said he’d give me a Bitcoin if I left it the way it was…

I’m dying here…

…and now that Bitcoin is worth four thousand bucks. 

I’m gonna interview Shooter eventually and I’ll just get him to explain how that stuff works. It’s just so nebulous to me.

Yeah, I don’t know too much about it, either. I just passed it off to my ex-wife. I gave her all of it, just to hold onto for my kid. 

Well, that’s cool. If you can use it for child support it’s gotta be real, right? 

Well, I tried. I tried. But, no luck. She wanted real money.  But on the whole politics thing, I guess I’m just not smart enough to keep up with it. I’m more interested in what other people think. I guess it’s a good thing that people are venting and getting it out; maybe the pressure cooker will cool down a little bit.

Well, it’s either that or huffing spray paint and gasoline, like your guy in “Vandalism Spree.”

(Giggling) Yeah, exactly! There’s always that. But mostly I just follow what’s going on with the bands and music. 

Who are you listening to these days?

Wheeler Walker, Jr.

Of course.

I’ve been listening to him all day.

I haven’t heard his second album; the first was a work of brilliance.

It’s pretty good. It popped up – I had my music on “random,” and it popped up while I was driving my kid around and I tried to change it real fast and he was like, “What was that? Play it, play it!” So I had to.

How old is he?

My kid? He’s six.  I was hoping to get Wheeler to play his birthday party but I couldn’t make it happen. 

Maybe if you paid him in Bitcoin…

Bob Wayne. Are you familiar with Bob Wayne?

I’m not.

He’s pretty good. He’s a country artist who wrote some songs for Hank III.  You know, maybe I’ll get him to play my son’s birthday party. Seems a little more feasible. 

If you were granted one wish to change something about country music today, what would it be?

Well, I’d wish that I were at the top of it. I think I could do a lot of good for country music. 

For instance?

Well, it’s because my stuff is so real. It’s blues and it’s folk and it’s country. It’s all that…and maybe, I don’t know, maybe it’s too country.  I grew up in the country, and I can’t tell if [today’s music] is too country or not country enough. But it’s boring. Boring! Yeah, that’s what it is. 

That leads to my next question. In “That’s Just What I Am” you let folks know you aren’t from down South but still have country bona fides. No one who knows your work would dispute that. I’m curious what life was like growing up in rural Washington state, and whether you went on vandalism sprees from time to time.

(Laughs) You know, I bounced around quite a bit. By the time I was five years old, I had lived in California, Nevada, Utah and Washington. So I had lived pretty much all over the West, and I had also lived in Missouri and Arkansas by that time, too. I was all over the place.

But I grew up in Washington in the same town as Kurt Cobain, a little logging town called Aberdeen. My stepfather was an oyster farmer, so I had to spend every day after school at a farm. Just tromping around out in the woods – if I got in trouble at school I would have to go and work with him. I was always in a lot of trouble. (Laughs)

I was in so much trouble that if I was even halfway good during the week…I had to take a note to the office for them to say if I was bad or good. And if I was good, they’d give me ice cream. They chained me to my desk…

What? 

They made me make paper chains and chain myself to the desk. I’m working on a song called “Paper Chains.” It’s gonna be about divorce. Breaking paper chains. That’s country, huh? I think it’s pretty f*cking country. 

Yeah, man. You’re legit. Did you end up getting much ice cream?

Once or twice, as I remember. But the lady in the office I had to go down to with the note, she said I was her favorite student she ever taught. She told my aunt I was a good kid. So she liked me.  

When did you know that music was what you had to do for a living? 

Driving around with my stepdad and mom, going back to Aberdeen from Olympia, and Nirvana’s Nevermind had come out. My dad was playing it in the car because he knew Krist Novocelik, the bass player. And he said, “I can play this song; this is easy.” And I said, “No you can’t! You can’t play this!”

And we got back to the house and he grabbed a guitar and started playing all these Nirvana songs. And I figured if he could do it and they could do it, I could do it. 

And was that the first time you had picked up a guitar? 

Well, yeah, other than just picking up guitars around the house and d*cking around with them. 

Well, how old were you when Nevermind came out?

Let me think…I was 10.

Wow. So what are you, about 37?

I’m 36. 

Scrolling through the song titles during my first listen to Pinball, one jumped off the page. Guess which. It’s a cover

Hmmm. Let me think about the songs now…a cover. “Six Strings Away?” No, “Delta Dawn!”


Yes! I was in the second grade when Helen Reddy had a No. 1 hit with it, and had no idea until now that Tanya Tucker had done a version the year before. What in the world made you want to cut that one?

Tanya Tucker? I’d f*ck her. (Giggles for a while)

Oh my.

Someone requested it at a gig in Idaho, and we just started messing around with it. It just sounded so good that I just kept at it. But a few years ago I was married to a girl named Dawn. I’m not gonna say it was a tribute to her, but that’s how I just put my personal feelings into it. Know what I mean? I just think about her whenever I sing it. 

Do you remember the first time you heard the song? 

Right now I’m drawing a blank. 

Was it the Tanya Tucker or Helen Reddy version, if you recall?

The one that first jumped out at me was the one Waylon did.

That’s right! 

It was on a box set that, funnily enough, she (Dawn) bought me for Christmas, all those years ago. One of the best gifts I’ve ever gotten. 

Waylon covered a bunch of really good songs. 

What a great voice. 

What else you got going on? 

Right now I’m almost to Pittsburgh, on my way to a Shooter show in West Virginia. I’m not on the bill, but I am gonna get up and do a couple songs and promote my new thing. After this Pinball thing comes out I’m wanting to do a new project called Bird dog. 

Called what?

Bird Dawg – d-a-w-g. Songs about birds and dogs and p**sy and fishing.

Well, then.

I’ve got a bunch of pictures of dogs that I’m gonna autograph and sell, and all the money will go toward the album. I’ve got this song about mountain lions in Southern California. It’s…well, it’s not really a political song, but there’s a little bit of a message in it. It may be one of my most political songs ever. It’s about this mountain lion who can’t get back to his mate. 

Uh…

(Giggling)

Okay, I’ll bite. How is there a political message in that? 

Well, I’m not really…I’m just saying how it is, know what I mean?

Nope.

It’s from the perspective of the mountain lion. And he’s just talking about how all these humans have come along, and now he can’t cross the freeway. 

Can’t believe I didn’t pick up on something so obvious.

It’s my favorite song to sing right now.

Do you have a rough cut of it you could send me? For my ears only?

Sure! Be happy to. I need to demo it anyway. 

Cool. Well, before we get to the project about birds and dogs and other favorite things, what do you have lined up tour-wise?

I cannot wait. I’m so excited to get out on the road and start playing songs and seeing all my fans and hanging out. I’m really looking forward to getting back out there. 

I just landed a song in a movie, so I’m gonna take that money and get a cop car and just tour in that…

Wait. What? 

Yeah, me and Rico.

(Getting the feeling this has all been an Andy Kaufman-level put-on) Who’s…who’s Rico?

Rico…he’s not with me right now. He just moved out of my house, he was living in my spare bedroom. By the way, I’ve got an awesome house. 

Yeah?

It overlooks all of Reno. I can see the whole entire town. It sits on top of a hill. And it’s filled with pinball machines. For Rico. He’s my steel guitar player.

But he’s a real person, right? Not an imaginary friend or an alternate personality? (Serious question at this point)

No, he’s…if I’m the Lone Ranger, he’s Tonto. But he’s not here right now. He…he doesn’t have an I.D., so he can’t get on an airplane…

Is he undocumented?

(Cackling) Yeah, you know, sometimes I wish they would ship him back. But he’s worked for me for a long time, and we’ve got chemistry. He and I have some really good chemistry you just don’t find every day. I’m really not that big a fan of his playing, but you don’t mess with what works. 

:-/

But you know we’ve toured together as just a duo, playing to really big crowds. Like the White Stripes or the Black Keys.

My beef with the White Stripes was always – was it Jack White’s sister? – well, the (in air quotes) DRUMMER couldn’t really play the drums.

Yeah, I was never a big fan, either. 

Well, when you said you weren’t a huge fan of his playing, I thought, “Well, maybe the White Stripes comparison was appropriate.”

It sounds really rudimentary. But for me it’s his voice that gets really annoying. 

(Fairly certain he’s talking about Jack White, not “Rico,” but who knows at this point?)

I like something a little more pleasing to the ear.

So, you’ll be supporting Shooter, using his band for the next couple weeks, then when you do the actual Hellbound Glory tour it’ll just be you and Rico?

To be honest with you, I have no idea. I’ve got a couple gigs lined up in Reno. I play every Thursday at this place called Davidson’s Distillery. The best way I can describe it is it’s like something out of a Fellini movie. It would blow your mind. 

I’m not sure anything you tell me could now, Leroy…

It’s like Reno 911. So if you’re ever in Reno, I’m there every Thursday. I’ll be playing there for many years. If you’re ever in Reno on a Thursday you should definitely come hang out.

* * *

The whole exchange had a Reno 911 feel to it, and it’s easy to assume you’ve been clowned after such a ride – or rhetorical pinball game. Finishing up the transcript the notion nagged, so I reached out with a text.


As fate would have it, as I was texting him he was at that moment reciprocating. Turns out it was just lots of coffee. The Mountain Lion song is real, and it’s awesome. Leroy Virgil is real and adorably kooky. The goofy outlaw just made a great record. 

Even without Rico. 

----------

Pinball is available today.
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