Hayes Carll shoots toward stardom with new CD “KMAG YOYO,” plays two Oklahoma shows this week
A version of this story appears in Wednesday’s Life section of The Oklahoman.
Songwriter Hayes Carll shoots toward stardom
Hayes Carll spins an array of twangy tall tales on his latest album, “KMAG YOYO (& Other American Stories),” but none get higher than the rapid-fire narrative of a hapless soldier who takes a drug-induced rocket trip to the moon.
The celebrated Texas singer-songwriter is riding his own upward trajectory, and his career recent blast-off has boasted its share of surreal moments, too. Carll, 35, just charted his first album on the Billboard 200, recently made his first appearance on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” and this summer will play the prestigious Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. Last fall, he earned the new/emerging artist of the year honor at the Americana Music Awards — “Yeah, “I’d been nominated five years earlier for the same award,” he said with a laugh — the same outfit that in 2008 awarded him the song of the year prize for his uproarious yarn “She Left Me for Jesus.”
Plus, he got to dance with Gwyneth Paltrow.
“Things have picked up for sure, and it’s been a gradual process. I mean, I put out my first record in ’02 and I’ve been gigging since ’98. But it’s been fun for me; you know, I’ve always been grateful that I didn’t have a lot of success early on ‘cause I think it would have been terrible for my songwriting and probably my personal life,” Carll said in a phone interview from his home in Austin.
“I went out and paid my dues and have built kind of a solid foundation for my career and fan base … And when the times were bad, I still loved what I did so much that I didn’t care that I was sleeping in my van or playing for two people or all the miserable stuff I was doing, it was all I wanted to be doing so it was great for me.” And then each step along the way, with each record, it’s gotten better and exposed me to a wider audience. And I just keep touring and it’s picked up. This one, it’s definitely so far gotten off to the best start of anything, and it’s coming together a lot of ways careerwise. So it feels good.”
Carll has earned rave reviews for his new album “KMAG YOYO” — the 12-song record and the amped-up title track both are named for the military acronym for “Kiss My A- – Guys, You’re on Your Own” — which debuted last month at No. 63 on the Billboard 200.
“My first SoundScan of my first record, I remember getting it back and it had sold 56 copies in the first week. And I didn’t know anything about the record industry but I imagined that probably wasn’t very good. And then I think we did like 10,000 in the first week of this record, which was more than my entire first record. So it was a pretty excellent kind of reminder that I’ve come a long way since the start of it,” he said.
The Houston-born troubadour and his five-piece band The Poor Choices, which includes Chickasha guitarist Travis Linville, are coming off a club tour of Carll’s home state that wrapped with a show at Austin’s South By Southwest Conference and Festival, and they are headed for Oklahoma, with shows Thursday at historic Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa and Friday at the Wormy Dog Saloon in Oklahoma City.
“Oklahoma, I haven’t hit as much as I should but we’re gonna correct that this year,” Carll said. “Travis has done his own thing in Oklahoma … so he’s been lobbying for me to get back that over there. But it’s odd, I’ve played I think 46 of the 50 states and like 11 countries, and I’ve only played Louisiana once in my life and I lived an hour from there.”
Raised a sixth-generation Texan in a Houston suburb, Carll received his first guitar when he was 15 and immediately began penning songs, inspired by Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan. After earning his history degree at Hendrix College in Conway, Ark., he honed his craft playing Texas coastal towns like Crystal Beach and Galveston. His first two indie albums, 2002’s “Flowers and Liquor” and 2004’s “Little Rock,” along with his engaging live shows, earned him a fan following and his deal with Lost Highway, which released his acclaimed national debut “Trouble in Mind” in 2008. He has written with his songwriting role models Guy Clark and Ray Wylie and has often been likened to his musical hero the late, great Townes Van Zandt, a comparison that makes him somewhat uncomfortable.
“You know, I have mixed feelings about it. I mean, I think for the most part they’re intended as compliments, and I think sometimes they’re just something that people use to describe me and I don’t think they’re necessarily always accurate,” he said. “You know, the Townes thing I’ve been getting since my first record, which Townes was a huge role model or hero of mine musically. But I don’t really find what I do to be particularly similar to Townes; you know, I think there’s other people that that comparison would be better suited. … But it’s awkward for me because I consider Townes to be one of the two greatest songwriters that ever lived and such a profound artist that I always feel like it’s sort of unfair to him and to me. Like I’m not worthy of that comparison,” he said.
“Again, I know why people do it. But I used to run around town pulling down posters that would say ‘Hayes Carll: the next Townes Van Zandt.’ It was embarrassing to me because I was not. There’s not and there never will be another Townes. And if there is, it’s not gonna be me. But I think everybody has somebody people compare ‘em to; you know, there’s been a hundred of the next Bob Dylans whether it was John Prine or whoever. That’s just something you have to go through until I guess you establish your voice enough to just call you by your name.”
Carll’s first album on Lost Highway,” Trouble in Mind,” made strides toward establishing Carll as an exciting new voice on the Texas country scene. It landed on “year end” lists at Esquire, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and more.
“I was fairly nervous for ‘Trouble in Mind’ because … I’ve been touring for a long time and had staked out some kind of career going into that. It was sort of my first, debut record on national label, and I knew a lot more eyes were going to be on me than had previously been. So I felt some pressure with that. With this record, I didn’t really feel the same at all, I just kind of wanted to make a record that I felt good about and that I enjoyed doing and something that I’d want to listen to,” he said.
“I took my road band at the time — you know, we’d been out for a couple of years going pretty hard — and I took them into the studio, and we just worked up most of the songs, or at least the music for ‘em, and went in and recorded all that in four, five days. And then I sat down and wrote to that, or at least for a good part of the record. On some of them I had finished writing, but a lot of it I just had kind of ideas and melodies in my head, and so I kind of fleshed ‘em out with the band and went in and approached it that way. But it was fun.
“You know, I cut this record in Austin so I could sleep in my own bed at night. And using my own (road) band for the first time was a different experience. I don’t know, I just went about it as something that should be fun and enjoyable and not something to get, you know, wrecked about.”
Some country fans heard two of his new songs before the album even dropped. “Hard Out Here” and “Hide Me,” along with three of his previous tunes, were featured in the music-driven drama “Country Strong.” starring Oscar winner Paltrow, Tim McGraw, Leighton Meester and Garrett Hedlund. Hedlund played an aspiring singer-songwriter who gets involved with an alcoholic country star (Paltrow) and sang Carll’s in the film, which is due on DVD and Blu-ray April 12.
“If things had gone differently and the movie was better received or it had stayed out longer, it could have done a lot of big things for me, I think. But as it was, it was just a fun experience and I maybe made a few new fans out of the deal,” he said.
“I was actually recording my record when they were filming the movie, and they invited me to the wrap party,” he added said. “And I met Garrett Hedlund, who does all the singing on my songs, and Tim McGraw and Faith Hill and Leighton Meester and then met Gwyneth. So she came up and asked me to dance and then we were dancing and Garrett was singing ‘Hard Out Here,’ one of my songs. So it was this really surreal thing: I’d been in Nashville like an hour and next thing I know I was dancing with Gwyneth Paltrow while Garrett Hedlund sings my songs. So it was a fun night.”
Carll apparently likes to keep his work a bit weird and wild.
“What can they expect from my live show? A lot of nudity, drunkenness, bad behavior,” he deadpanned. “We kind of run the gamut, really. I mean, a lot of stuff is singer-songwriter story songs, but we’ve got a big band that can cover a lot of ground. It’s definitely got a country vibe to it. But we rock out fairly hard as well. You know, it’s good time, fun music with some lyrics that’ll make you laugh and cry. And lots of nudity.”
In concert
Hayes Carll
With: Shovels and Rope.
When: 8 p.m. Thursday. Doors open at 7 p.m.
Where: Cain’s Ballroom, 423 N Main, Tulsa.
Information: (918) 584-2306 or www.cainsballroom.com.
When: 8 p.m. Friday. Doors open at 6 p.m.
Where: Wormy Dog Saloon, 311 E Sheridan.
Information: 601-6276 or www.wormydog.com.
-BAM
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment