Dylan Earl Is Reclaiming Country Music’s Working-Class Heritage
Exclusive: The Fayetteville musician speaks with Paste about his new album, Level-Headed Even Smile, why 9/11 ruined country music, writing about his “debaucherous twenties” before it’s too late, and how his stint in a Texas jail inspired the year’s best anti-fascist song.
At the White Horse in Austin, Dylan Earl is three sheets to the wind, having just played a sweaty set to a bunch of line-dancing, shit-kicking Texans at the Gar Hole Records x Western AF party. South by Southwest is happening, which means the attending crowd is a blend of people who wear cowboy boots all the time and people who wear cowboy boots one week a year. But everyone—city slickers and outskirt outlaws alike—cut it up when Earl broke out an unreleased song called “Lawn Chair.” He was especially hard to find after exiting the stage—making conversation with every mouth flashing a grin back at him, in the most unlikely pockets of a dark and oddly spacious honky tonk—but I eventually found him in his usual getup: a stained cowboy hat and fist-sized belt buckle, with pit vipers clipped to the drooping, damp collar of a white, Toronto tank-top. If you’ve ever mistaken Earl and his scene-stealing mustache/mullet combo for an amateur hockey player, I wouldn’t blame you. The chatter surrounding us is deafening, but not enough to overwhelm our brief talk about Blaze Foley, whom Earl’s appreciation for has not gone unnoticed, thanks to this cover of “If I Could Only Fly” from three years ago. In this half-decade alone, no single performance has floored me more, and no single performance has healed me quite the same.
Before the half-Cajun Earl became one of country music’s most vital voices, he was raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana. After his parents’ divorce, he convinced his dad to send him away to a school in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Two weeks later, Hurricane Katrina hit and he was shipped back to Lake Charles. It wasn’t long before Katrina would reach Louisiana and, to prevent Earl from missing the school year, he wound up in Subiaco, Arkansas—a priory with a population of about 600, founded as a monk-missionary settlement in the 1800s and named by Pope Leo XIII after an Italian city where St. Benedict started his first monastery. It’s a place Earl wants to protect in his music, making mention of it for a select group of people. “I get so much joy when someone from Subiaco says, ‘Yo, that line about the monks on the hill, I totally know you’re talking about St. Benedict Cemetery where Frank Stanford’s buried,’” he elaborates. “I’m like, ‘That’s exactly what I’m talking about.’ I was 15 years old, and I just needed to get out of the quarrel.”
“I didn’t realize that I was a depressed child until I got to Arkansas,” Earl admits. The Natural State offered him a new beginning—or, as he puts it, “the real birth of me.” When he lived in Lake Charles, he befriended kids he despised, “the type of folks that I was subject to and the churches I was being forced to go to, those people knew something was different about me. I tried every which way to assimilate, because I thought that was the only option.” He pauses for a moment, then sighs: “Looking back on it, I’m like, ‘Man, they knew I was just weird to them.’ I was slightly queer and wasn’t soaking up what they were trying to fucking pour down my throat.” By the time he got to Subiaco, he’d lived in three different places in the span of a month. But then he found “birds sing[ing] to hoofbeats” and “monks of a hard day’s prayer.” He dreamt of lying beside a creek for “eternal sleep,” and he watched himself “drift on away.” He sang about rebirth on I Saw the Arkansas, life-affirming anecdotes kindled by hill country vastness and Arkansas’ western palette of milkweed and indigos. Earl’s new album, Level-Headed Even Smile, is not only an effort to close the book on that part of his life, but a conscious discovery of his own mid-twenties mythos: “I get to discover who I am when I write a record.”
Earl owes the roots of his music taste to his mom, thanks to the voices of Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, and Merle Haggard tumbling out of the tape deck in her 1989 Econoline van. She’d take him on trips every summer break, starting when he was five or six years old. “Mom would put an atlas in my lap and I would be the navigator,” Earl remembers. They’d head west to Austin, Texas, where his uncle was living and waiting tables. “He would take what little precious time he could off. I’ve grown to appreciate it even more, because he was in his late-thirties and was like, ‘Alright, I guess I’m gonna go camping with my sister and her kids.’”
To this day, Earl still uses paper maps to get himself to each tour date (“I like to touch it with my finger and trace a line”), though he’s not strictly old-time, cross-referencing his own knowledge with Google Maps. But he and his mom had a motto, which he lives by even now: “You never know where you’re going ‘till you get there.” It came from an old Looney Tunes cartoon, where Sylvester the Cat (whom Earl lovingly calls “that old cat”) hums, “Oh, you never know where you go until you get there. You might be off to Topeka, you never know!” Earl and his mom sang it together every day. “We would plan our trips the night before we would leave,” he says. “Mom couldn’t put us in fancy hotels, but we’d get a mom-and-pop once, maybe twice a week to clean up after we’d been out camping and exploring. We’d sit down and have our meal that night, and Mom would get out the map with a flashlight and say, ‘Alright, where are we going tomorrow?’ We’d pick out a direction to start out in and pick an idea, knowing that that idea could very well change the next day.”
“On our way,” Earl continues, “we’d see a roadside attraction and turn that way, and then you kind of just get somewhere. We’d laugh and say, ‘You never know where you’re going ‘till you get there.’ That mindset of adventure and wonder and awe, it created such a lust for life and exploration in my mind as a child. I live with it every day. I live for spontaneity and exploration. It just makes me breathe in a different way, and it makes me really appreciate the fact that my biology is able to traverse this planet and get to see things.”
After Subiaco, Earl went to Hendrix College, a private institution in Conway, Arkansas. “It’s a weird fucking town,” he says, “because it’s one of the most conservative towns in the South, but Hendrix is one of the most liberal colleges in the country, and then right around that is all these little punk and squat houses and shit.” In 2009, a sophomore Earl met freshman Kurt DeLashmet. A year later, they started hanging out. “He was that dude that came in and was obviously one of the coolest guys on campus,” Earl remembers. “Everyone was like, ‘Who’s this hot, cool, new freshman guy?’” He had formed a band called Swampbird with a few friends and needed a drummer. Kurt, who was already drumming in May a Piece of the Sea Be With You, answered the call.
Conway and its surrounding towns became something of a DIY hotbed at the turn of the 2010s, hosting house parties and punk gigs featuring local talent and some bands from Mississippi DeLashmet had connections to. “We were really fortunate,” Earl admits. “When I look back on it, I’m amazed that they existed. Sometimes there were as many as two or three shows going on in a single night—kids would walk from house to house and see a show.” 15 years later, Level-Headed Even Smile marks Earl’s second release on DeLashmet’s label, Gar Hole Records. “It’s been amazing to see those efforts that we made as kids, when we were 19, 20 years old playing these fucking bloody, sweaty house shows, translate into something that’s applicable in this business.”
On every album he’s made, including 2017’s New Country To Be and 2020’s Squirrel In the Garden, Earl is mining his “shithead years.” Level-Headed Even Smile is about his debaucherous twenties—when he moved to Little Rock after college and traveled to Fayetteville to play boozy gigs. That’s when he met a young Nick Shoulders, whose bands the Thunderlizards and Dumptruck Boyz shared bills with Swampbird. Cut to a decade later and Earl and Shoulders are labelmates and neighbors in Fayetteville. “I changed his laundry over for him yesterday,” Earl laughs. “We watch each other’s houses and get to commiserate and wax about the touring job and all that. Our schedules are so crazy, I hardly ever get to see the dude very much. We laugh about how we’re constantly ships in the night, just checking on each other’s houses.” Earl is actually working on a song called “Ships In the Night,” inspired by being “so fucking lonely I never get to see my friends” and then, while putting gas in the van on his way out west, seeing a buddy three pumps over about to head east.
Level-Headed Even Smile was introduced by two singles, “High On Ouachita” and “Outlaw Country.” The former, which Earl penned while making I Saw the Arkansas but sat on for two years, is a honky tonk-hued rabble-rouser recorded in a snowstorm, arriving with a heart on every sleeve in sight. His baritone croons sweetly about the mountains in his backyard, a range touching Arkansas and Oklahoma, and is accompanied by the voices of Meredith Kimbrough and Jude Brothers. Earl’s band—Hamilton Belk, Chris Wood, Dick Darden, Lee Zodrow, and Grady Philip Drugg—fall around his verses. “I’m used to livin’ on the edge of decisions,” he sings. “I’m pretty good in poor conditions, where I don’t ever have to ask permission to be.” A blissed-out, levee-breaking afternoon ready to be wasted, “High On Ouachita” asks its listeners to let Earl’s words be their compass: “The further I drift, the more frequent I dream.” Now, who couldn’t use a slice of that?
But it’s “Outlaw Country” that’s gotten the most traction in the weeks leading up to Level-Headed Even Smile. Folks gravitated to the tune on Instagram, dropping 30,000 likes on its video alone. In the song, Earl reckons with white privilege, moral hypocrisy, alt-right worship, and religious dogma—ideas he landed on after catching wind of European misconceptions surrounding his identity, especially in Sweden and England. “People say, ‘Alright, this dude’s from Arkansas. We don’t know a whole lot about Arkansas. It’s in the Southern US, Arkansas fought in the Confederacy. This dude plays country music. Alright, this guy’s probably a conservative, we’re gonna go see him, because we like country music but we’re gonna shy away from politics, because he probably voted for Trump,’” he explains. “Everyone was like, ‘We weren’t really sure we wanted to come see it.’ So I said, ‘Well I’m grateful you still came out and took a chance in my art and were able to then receive my message and see that I wasn’t all those things.’ It really was just, ‘All right, motherfuckers, here’s who I am. This is what I believe in.’ I’m surrounded constantly in this business by people that have Don’t Tread On Me tattoos and Blue Lives Matter stickers on the back of their trucks, and you’re like, ‘Dude, you’re worshipping the fucking foot.’”
The song’s second verse (“You see, I’ve been to jail but I did not fight / Knew I’d be good just ‘cause I was white / And can do all them old country songs / Like Merle”) germinated while Earl was stuck in an Amarillo, Texas jail in 2021, trapped “in the belly of the beast, tripping really hard” after a possession arrest. He saw framed Blue Lives Matter flags in the cops’ offices and experienced the sham of America’s justice system firsthand. “It’s layered with scams, like calling cards or having to test my drugs so I can get off the charge, but I still have to pay for it—it’s like $1,500 and, if you don’t have the money, then you just get charged with it because you can’t afford the test to prove that it’s not the drug,” he says. “Then, people end up in jail forever for that.”
Earl was going to just release “Outlaw Country” as a non-album single, but then the election hit in 2024 and he had a change of heart. “I was like, ‘What’s the fucking point of music? What’s the point of art?’ It’s connectedness, it’s community, it’s outreach, and it’s compassion. I felt like people needed it. I hope people need this song.” The music is not only Earl’s bid to show people who he is and what he stands for, but it’s a revolt against the bastardization of country music’s mainstream, nationalist, and patriotic post-9/11 identity. After all, country and punk music are two of the most-aligned genres. “Outlaw country is punk shit. Anarchist shit is real outlaw country,” Earl concurs. “Every punk in the world fucking loves Johnny Cash, and Johnny Cash loved every punk in the world.”
But Earl grew up in the Deep South, which means he’s witnessed someone’s lifelong love of country music suddenly turn sour. “9/11 ruined country music,” he tells me, bluntly. “We’re all between the ages of ten to 15 and grew up around country music. Then everything becomes about fucking ‘put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way’ crap. And everyone’s like, ‘Oh, country music sucks.’ So we all labeled country music as terrible and thought we’ve been lied to forever.” A lot of people—not everyone—eventually let country music fall back into their favor, once they get to their late-teens or early-twenties and realize that country music started to suck at, really, just one specific point in history. “I think a lot of people started going back to it because we were getting older and able to be cognizant of the fact that the country music business decided to use patriotism as a selling point,” Earl continues. “An older punk educates you on Woody Guthrie and you’re like, ‘Oh, fuck… Woody Guthrie is punk as fuck.’ I think it’s a reclamation.”
Earl wants to use his anti-nationalist and anti-patriotic platform to get country music back to its working-class origins—restoring an admiration for nature and community, rather than some “I got a tailgate and a girl’s short-shorts and cold beer” prerogative that is now more meme than memory in 2025. “I love all those things, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think that they’re important to write about,” he clarifies. “I think a lot of people had a similar journey, where it’s a disenfranchisement from country music because of 9/11. Everyone got into punk music because punk music is awesome, and it was a bit of a rebellion against the whole establishment. 9/11 made everyone fucking angsty as shit. Everyone veers that way, and then they realize that they innately have a part of them that is country music.”
But Level-Headed Even Smile isn’t just about calling for the death of fascism and the abolition of America’s ongoing police state. Earl kicks back on “Lawn Chair,” a song that could have easily flourished in that 1990s boom of chart-friendly country music not yet poisoned by the Iraq War. There’s a Dwight Yoakam quote that he thinks about a lot: “He said something like, ‘Don’t ever write a song you don’t want to have to play the rest of your life.’” He wrote “Lawn Chair” with Jonathan Terrell and Midland’s Cameron Duddy, after cracking open beers together in his driveway while penning a track called “One Single Tear” for their “fake band,” the Darrells. “I was like, ‘Man, I fucking got my lawn chair here, I’m just sitting on top of the world.’ Cam was like, ‘That line, right there. No one’s really writing songs about just being satisfied with fucking nothing anymore.’” There’s no pretty-boy bullshit about “Lawn Chair.” Earl isn’t selling an angle, or trying to preach anything. It’s just a barn-burning, “I’m sitting here and doing just fine” country banger that folks have been hollering for at gigs. “It’s funny how much it’s resonating with people,” he laughs. “When I play it live, I usually say something about tenants’ rights and shitty landlords, because I think that there’s a lesson somewhere with everything, but people just fucking get down to that thing. It’s my version of ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy.’”
“Lawn Chair” is the antidote to the “serious artist” that lingers in Earl. He sequenced Level-Headed Even Smile to support that, framing romance and resistance in equal measure. “White River Valley” is a beautiful ode to the Ozarks, and it arrives right after the pro-hungry, hopeless, and hopeful “Outlaw Country.” “Two Kinds of Loner,” which Earl wrote for his high school best friend William Kern, who passed away when they were 30 years old, precedes the redemptive, pastoral safety of “High On Ouachita.” The countrypolitan gentleness of “Broken Parts” feeds into the “you can’t catch me if I’m going nowhere” swing of “Little Rock Bottom,” and the title track, a smoke-rolling, backroads-blaring preface, is a kind and determined explosion of truck-driving drama that segues into “Get In the Truck,” a mandolin-and-dobro-duetting love-letter to Earl’s “lost living in the fold” travels.
In his version of country music, hard truths stand next to earned blowouts, and the misfits and wayward sons can get a piece of blue mountain thrills and wildwood songbirds—or, in his own words, deep thoughts can bleed into comments like, ‘Hey, man, aren’t these trees fucking nice?” All of it is intentional. “We need to counterbalance the fucking record with some fucking bullshit,” Earl advocates. “It resonates with people, and it means something. I’m learning more about that, and that’s been a wonderful lesson to learn, to be honest with you. Maybe that’s a song that could breed a little bit of solidarity between leftists and their right-wing aunts and uncles.”
The sentimental, lineage-honoring colors of Level-Headed Even Smile contrast the material-based, algorithm-attentive formula of mainstream country music. Good luck finding a song under Earl’s name that took 10 songwriters to finish. The sellable part of his work is the sincerity. “Once you start commodifying things, there’s no expression in it,” he says. “And once you lose expression, you’re just totally off the rails. Then it’s worthless. It’s just a piece of shit, it can be thrown away.” Suffice to say: Dylan Earl just wants everyone to write what’s on their fucking mind, gesturing for his peers to “ruffle some feathers.” Considering his no-fucks-given approach to the music industry and his willingness to hold every bootlicker accountable, I ask him what he hopes to leave behind for the next batch of songwriters to find, and he wastes no time giving me an answer: “Courage.”
Level-Headed Even Smile is out September 19 via Gar Hole Records.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
