Pages tagged “hayes carll”

Click above to watch a live performance of "I Got a Gig" from Hayes Carll's Trouble in Mind.

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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.”

Tucked down a street off Pittsburgh’s South Side, a little piece of Texas found its way into the lives of this melancholy Mideast town. To the ears of a hundred or so people sitting around under the dark-blue lights of Club Café, the songs of Hayes Carll were as much about their lives as they were about his trials and tribulations back in the Southwestern U.S.

Looking at life through the humble eyes of a singer/songwriter, Carll easily relates his songs to his audience, singing as if they were friends and not admirers. Although his set was only a 45-minute opener for the esteemed Joe Ely, it was concise and perfectly pitched at a low mumble, just above the humming of polite listeners.

Anecdotes and self-deprecating humor immediately brought you closer to Carll. Reflected in his songs were the humanity and humility that comes from earning your wisdom on the grizzly highways of America. From his 2004 self-released Little Rock album he sang “(Glad that I came I just) Wish I Hadn’t Stayed So Long,” a simple song about a restless traveler trying to figure where he’s suppose to be in this world: “Shooting stars and whiskey bottles all scattered ’cross the yard / I’d have stayed back home in Houston if I’d known it’d be this hard.”

He gets a giggle from his audience when he tells them “I got in the game a little too late to write songs about Texas so I’ve started writing songs about Arkansas.” It’s canned schtick (he even wrote the banter into his album’s liner notes), but it still comes off genuine.

With a hungry twang and a bluesy beat Carll poignantly captured the transition his move from Arkansas to Texas (also his journey from boy to man) in “Arkansas Blues.” It was here he accented his lyrics with an ear-catching guitar melody that just enough sad-hearted wimper to etch itself into your soul.