4 To Watch: Hayes Carll

Hometown: Conroe, Texas (just outside of Houston)
Fun facts: The worst job he ever had was selling vacuum cleaners to suburban Austin housewives; he graduated dead last (237 out of 237) in his college class; he once dated a girl because she worked at Hooters. (“Working at Hooters was a pretty hip thing,” says Carll. “It’s gone downhill since then, but at the time it was like dating a Playmate. I was a young pup—she was a woman of the world.”)
Why he’s worth watching: His independently released second album, Little Rock, topped the Americana chart, an unheard-of feat for an unsigned artist.
For fans of: Townes Van Zandt, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Joe Ely, Steve Earle.

Hayes Carll’s throwback Texas-country sound testifies to just how little contemporary music he listened to in his formative years. Neither the quiet Houston suburb where he grew up, nor the dry Arkansas town where he went to college had much of a music scene, so his listening consisted of Kris Kristofferson and Townes Van Zandt records, rather than the latest alt.country emanating from Austin. “Essentially it just came from isolation, from living so far away from everything that I never caught on to what trends were out there or what was hip,” he explains. “I had a very select list of artists that I listened to … and none of them were born after 1960.”

A couple of those Texas legends lent their talents to Carll’s self-released sophomore album, Little Rock, a collection of 11 honky-tonk rockers and dusty ballads that firmly planted the 28-year old troubadour in the progressive-country tradition. Guy Clark co-wrote the brooding “Rivertown” and Ray Wylie Hubbard collaborated on the playful Southern-fried romp “Chickens.”

“I see so many writers these days who think that it all started with Pat Green or Ryan Adams,” says Carll. “These guys have some great things going on, but music doesn’t begin and end with them.”