In this episode, Sid Evans chats with Texas troubadour Hayes Carll, who reflects on his upbringing in Houston and his subsequent road to musical success. Hayes shares how the Unitarian Church's music sparked his guitar journey and how he's put together a legendary career. Plus, looking forward, he also discusses an upcoming album, collaborations with Band of Heathens, and life in Nashville with his wife and fellow artist Allison Moorer.
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00:00Well, hey, it's Carl. Welcome to Biscuits and Jam.
00:03Great to be here.
00:03Where am I reaching you?
00:05I'm at my home in Nashville, Tennessee.
00:08Okay. And you've been in Nashville for a good while now, right?
00:12Yeah, probably six years or so.
00:15Well, not too long before the pandemic, I guess.
00:19Yeah, we kind of got here. Let's see. We got married in 2019, my wife and I.
00:26We were living in New York at the time, and we made the move full-time here right around the fall of 2019.
00:35So we got here just under the radar, and we're able to ride out the storm of 2020 and beyond from the comfort of Nashville, which I'm very grateful for.
00:46Well, I'm sure that's a great town for you to be in, and probably just being surrounded by all the creative talent there, all the musical talent, all the venues, everything, just the whole atmosphere.
01:02It's got to be a fun place to be for y'all.
01:04It is. I've been coming up here since 2002 professionally, and made a lot of friends and acquaintances in the business.
01:14And so I had a built-in community, and my wife lived here a decade or more early on in her life.
01:22And so it was when we were looking for a place to start our lives together, Nashville was the most logical choice, and it's been fantastic.
01:34It is a really incredible creative community, and there's a lot to be said for looking at all the young kids coming up that are really hungry and that are working.
01:48And it inspires me, and it pushes me.
01:51And then I can, the same day, go have a conversation with a legend who can be a mentor, or I can pick their brain on things I'm going through.
02:01So it's really a remarkable town.
02:04That's great. That's great.
02:05Well, I want to talk about your hometown for a minute and where you grew up, which was in Texas in the Woodlands, if I'm not mistaken, kind of a Houston suburb.
02:21Tell me a little bit about that community and what it was like growing up there.
02:25Yeah, I was born in Houston, and my mom grew up in Houston, and my dad was from Waco.
02:33And we moved to the Woodlands in 1977.
02:37There were 1,200 people there at the time.
02:40It was a pine forest that a guy named George Mitchell had purchased and was going to develop to make this planned community.
02:50And so now it's like the number one planned community in America, and there's over 100,000 people there, and it's huge.
03:03I'm actually playing the 50th anniversary of the town in a few months with Lyle Lovett.
03:10Oh, wow. That'll be something.
03:12It's going to be a full circle moment, and I can tell you more about that later.
03:15But when I was growing up, it was just some houses in the woods, kind of, and so, you know, I was very fortunate that I grew up on a street with three kids that were my age, and my parents both worked.
03:33And so we just kind of, you know, ran around all summer long, you know, barefoot in the streets, playing lots of sports, collecting.
03:43We had a creek that ran behind our house that we could go out and collect crawdads or tadpoles or frogs or turtles or anything we could collect.
03:52And we could just go explore through the woods and take our slingshots and our BB guns and just go be wild and feral.
04:02And then, you know, we'd just stay out until dark, and then our parents would call us home or we'd eat dinner at our friends' houses.
04:11And it was a pretty, really free environment to grow up and just be a kid.
04:19Very different from the woodlands of today.
04:20You know, I don't know. I assume there's still some of that.
04:25But I think anywhere today, like, I think a lot about how things were growing up, whereas, you know, people would call you and you would answer the phone and people would knock on your door and you would answer the door.
04:36And now, if somebody knocks on my door, like, alarm bells go off.
04:40And it's just, you know, we have a different way of interacting with each other.
04:44But we really did know our neighbors and we leaned on each other in certain ways.
04:51And there was a – it really was a neighborhood and a town that very much – I think people felt like they were building something together from scratch because they were.
05:02And the guy who created it, one of his sons lived on our street and he designed the houses there.
05:10And I grew up playing with his daughters.
05:12And it was just, you know, Fourth of July parades and, you know, ride your bike in the parade.
05:19And we had a – just little festivals and gatherings and the little league sports and all that stuff.
05:27And so I'm sure a lot of that is still there.
05:30But, you know, there's probably an innocence or a feeling of safety that everybody kind of seemed to have that I'm not sure is prevalent anywhere in America these days.
05:44Yeah, yeah.
05:45Tell me a little bit about your mom and dad, what they did for a living.
05:49So my dad was an attorney.
05:52He started practicing the year I was born.
05:56And he just set up his own – he put out his shingle, rented a space and started from scratch.
06:03My dad was in the Navy for a while.
06:06And during that time, my mom worked as a teacher and then some beyond.
06:11And she was in the YWCA, worked there with a lot of women in the Houston area.
06:20And then she eventually went to law school when I was a kid and became a lawyer as well.
06:26So my dad was a real estate attorney and my mom was a divorce and custody attorney.
06:33And she gave it up in probably my late teens, early 20s.
06:40You know, there's no happy stories and divorce and custody proceedings.
06:44Did it kind of – did it kind of wear on her?
06:47Oh, yeah.
06:48Yeah.
06:49Yeah.
06:49I don't think she enjoyed it at all.
06:51I think my dad liked his job.
06:53He enjoyed his work.
06:55My mom – you know, my mom was a theater major in college and hyperverbal and super creative.
07:05And, you know, I think she probably would have preferred to be an actress or something in a more creative field.
07:17Choose the paths you choose to take care of your family and try to have stability in life.
07:22And so she did that for a long time, but eventually called it a day.
07:28Do you attribute any of your musical interest or talent to your folks?
07:35I do, yeah.
07:36I mean, not my dad.
07:37My dad's not musical at all.
07:41God bless him.
07:42But my mom's very – doesn't have particularly a ton of talent.
07:48She's a nice singer, but she had a passion, has a passion for it, for creativity, for art.
07:58For language, for emotional connection.
08:02And that very much rubbed off on me.
08:04I had an uncle who I only met twice in my life.
08:07He spent most of my life in prison.
08:12But he was a singer and, you know, apparently grew up in Houston playing in garage bands with Kenny Rogers and Mickey Newberry.
08:24And so I had this sort of connection through him to music.
08:30And then his father, my mom's father, Ivan Pressler, did a lot of different things, worked for the railroads, was a cowhand.
08:39And he apparently knew all these old cowboy songs and had a nice voice and could sing all these old country, specifically cowboy songs.
08:49And my mom would always tell me about it.
08:51But my grandfather had a stroke the year that I was born, and he lost his ability to speak.
08:55And so I never got to hear him.
08:59I spent a lot of time with him, but he couldn't really talk.
09:03And he sort of made up these words.
09:06Tarmade was the word that he used for basically everything.
09:09But he would, you know, he was a boxer, and so he would always relive to me his brawls or the events that he could by pantomiming or just making noises.
09:23But we had a – I'm sorry, I'm digressing here.
09:25But we had a really powerful experience one year at Christmastime, and we were all standing around the Christmas tree,
09:33and we decided to sing Silent Night as we put the angel on top of the tree.
09:39And so we're singing, and it's my brother and my parents and some cousins and my grandparents.
09:46And we kind of hear – collectively hear this voice that we can't place.
09:52And we turn around, and my grandfather is singing Silent Night beautifully.
09:57It was the only time I ever heard him sing.
10:00And I was 27 at the time or something like that.
10:03And so it was just like he's been holding out.
10:06And I don't know if – you know, sometimes like people can – there's a different – for verbal communicating versus singing or melodic.
10:18And I don't know if he had that ability and didn't know it himself or just didn't want to use it or if it was just a one-time thing.
10:24But it was really powerful.
10:26But anyway, he was apparently a great singer.
10:28And so I have those members of my family who were – who dabbled in music.
10:32But mostly I attribute it to my mom's passion and creativity.
10:37What a surprise that must have been for everyone when he just lit up and started singing.
10:43And especially for you, if you hadn't really heard him speak or let alone sing for pretty much your entire life.
10:51Yeah, it was very powerful and emotional for everybody.
10:55Was there a recording of him singing?
10:58Was that ever recorded?
11:01No.
11:01Well, my mom, a couple years ago, she gave me a bunch of vinyl that she thought were my Uncle Ted and my grandfather singing.
11:12And so I got them sent off to get them transferred to digital.
11:16But they were so degraded that there really wasn't anything listenable there.
11:22So they did each make a little recording at times, but it's not something you can really hear.
11:30You'll just have to use your imagination, I guess, to try and imagine what he must have sounded like.
11:37Well, so, Hayes, I want to ask you about food.
11:42It sounds like you had a pretty big family.
11:46You had some big gatherings around the holidays.
11:52Who was doing all that cooking?
11:54My mom's side of the family, it would just be my grandparents that would come over and they weren't.
11:59My grandfather couldn't speak and didn't cook.
12:05And my grandmother was more of the TV dinner variety of chef.
12:10So my mom and dad would prepare the meals when it was that side of the family.
12:15But on my dad's side of the family, it was a whole different story.
12:18He had a large, extensive family in Waco, Texas, where he was from.
12:23And we would get together and it would be my grandparents, my great-grandmother who lived with them.
12:32Maumaw, she lived to be 101.
12:35And Aunt Fantagene was Maumaw's sister and she lived in the house next door.
12:41Fantagene.
12:41Aunt Fantagene.
12:42And we have a joke in our family because Aunt Fantagene was apparently a decent cook, but she would always skimp on how much she prepared.
12:53And so whenever people would come over for dinner, she would prepare dinner and everyone would eat every single bit because they're starving.
13:02And so when the meal was over, she would look at everybody's plates, which were clean, and she would say,
13:08It looks like we had just enough.
13:12And so that's a joke in our family is whenever there's not enough food or something, it's empty.
13:17It looks like we had just enough.
13:19But my nana and papa had a big garden, pecan tree.
13:26And so they would shuck beans and peas that grew tomatoes and okra and all kinds of stuff.
13:35And then my grandpa was a big fisherman, so we would go catch a bunch of bass on Lake Waco and fry them up.
13:42And they would make chicken and dumplings for me.
13:46It was not a healthy diet, but it was so good.
13:50And biscuits and gravy, that was my treat when I would come.
13:54And I would always try and set a record for how many biscuits I could eat.
14:00And so it got absurd, but they would just plow me with food.
14:05And they got a thrill out of it.
14:06I was their first grandchild, and I loved to eat, so they loved to cook for me.
14:10But yeah, those family gatherings, you'd have aunts and uncles and cousins and just on and on.
14:17And so you'd end up with like 50, 60 people, multi-generational folks, and everybody would bring up a casserole or a pie or this or that.
14:28So that was a whole different experience.
14:31And this is all Texas people, right?
14:34Yeah.
14:34So you've got some pretty deep Texas roots.
14:40Yeah, I'm a seventh-generation Texan, so my son is an eighth-generation Texan.
14:47And yeah, yeah, we go back a ways.
14:52Recently, we had this great-great, I don't even know how many greats, but a relative who was a surgeon in the Civil War.
15:01And he had this collection of letters that he wrote his wife back home in Texas.
15:06And they're just amazing.
15:09Baylor University put them on display for a while.
15:13And the first line of one of the letters is,
15:17I'm writing to you on Yankee paper with a Yankee pen, so you know which way the battle went.
15:23He was with the Confederacy.
15:25And I just thought, what an evocative opening line for anything.
15:33This was just a letter to his wife, but boy, that tells a whole lot.
15:37So yeah, the roots run deep in Texas.
15:40Well, it sounds like there's some song material there, which you may have mined already.
15:45I want to.
15:47You know, there's so many interesting characters in the family.
15:50And I told my mom the other day, I said, I want to sit down with you and talk about them.
15:54Because I do want to write about them, or at least have the knowledge for myself.
15:58Because we've got a lot of interesting stories.
16:00There's some relative who died in a gunfight over a pig.
16:03Like, you know, I'm just like, there's some fascinating stories there, including a really close family.
16:15And I'd like to put it down one day in some form or another.
16:18So, Hayes, you got a lot of attention early in your career for a song called She Left Me for Jesus.
16:27Was church-going a part of your growing up?
16:32Were you a big church-going family or no?
16:35When I was in Waco with my grandparents, we would go.
16:38And my best friend was the son of a Methodist minister.
16:43So when I spent the night at his house, I would go.
16:46And in playing sports in the towns I grew up in, you know, if you went to Bible study, you got more playing time.
16:55Or, you know, it was around, and it was very present, and a lot of people were kind of pushing me that way.
17:04But my parents weren't doing that.
17:09And, you know, I think they were interested in a spiritual life, but not in necessarily a religious one.
17:18And so we went occasionally to the Unitarian church.
17:22You know, people were wearing flip-flops and had ponytails, and it's like a different scene than any church I had been to to that point.
17:30And I quite liked it.
17:32It just felt very accepting to me.
17:36And that's where I kind of caught the music bug, in a way, was through there.
17:42Through the Unitarian church.
17:44Yeah, yeah.
17:45So the Unitarians were not, at least the ones in the woodlands, were not known for their choirs.
17:51And rather than have all these, you know, these disparate folks singing songs that they probably didn't know or grew up with,
17:59they would often bring in performers to entertain.
18:04And one day it might be somebody reading from Dante's Inferno, and the next it was, you know, somebody acting out the creation story or Jesus in Nazareth.
18:20But one day I went in, and there was a folk trio.
18:24And they played three Bob Dylan songs.
18:29I was 14, and I was already a huge music fan.
18:33I grew up on country music and a little bit of rock, but, you know, just a really heavy dose of country.
18:39And when I heard these songs, they played Blowing in the Wind and A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall.
18:46And I can't remember what the third one was, but it hit me with such force seeing these people deliver these songs.
18:56And the songs themselves hit me with such force that I asked my parents that day, I said, I would really like a guitar.
19:05And that Christmas I got a guitar before I turned 15.
19:08And so it was a very direct line, and it also opened me up to Bob Dylan, and that set me down a rabbit hole that I've never quite come up from.
19:19I mean, A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall in church.
19:22I mean, that's a big song for a church.
19:25I mean, there's like 15 verses, I think, to that song.
19:28Yeah, yeah.
19:28Well, you know, speaking of influences, you know, I think about someone growing up in Texas and who's, you know, interested in songwriting and music, and there's so much around you.
19:44I mean, there's so many people, you know, even just looking at the, you know, at the men alone, Townes Van Zandt, Robert Earl Keene, Willie, Chris Christopherson, all these people.
20:01Who were some of the ones in terms of Texas songwriters, musicians that really, you know, that you really latched on to?
20:10Yeah, early on, it was definitely Willie.
20:13Like, my first musical memories are hearing Willie on the radio in the car.
20:19Boy, I was crying in the rain.
20:20It's one of my first memories.
20:24Mom, I was going to let your babies grow up to be cowboys was one of the first things I remember singing along to.
20:29Who was I thinking of?
20:30Oh, Kenny Rogers was a big one for me.
20:33Kenny's a Houston guy.
20:34And I had a cassette tape, like a Greatest Hits tape, and a little recorder tape deck that I would walk around the house with.
20:45And I was an only child until I was nine, and we didn't have a TV for a good part of that.
20:50And so that tape was sort of my escape into another world.
20:55And it's kind of how I entertained myself.
20:58And I just remember sitting under the stairwell for hours listening to Lucille and The Gambler and Coward of the County.
21:05And these songs were sagas and, you know, hit every range of human emotion.
21:11And they were really powerful to me, and they had a great hook and were fun to sing along to.
21:17So that was really a big thing for me growing up.
21:21So those were probably the Willie and Kenny Rogers were the first, the earliest ones.
21:25And then as I got older and I started to get into the songwriters and the Jerry Jeff Walkers and Chris Christopherson and Towns.
21:35Actually, Towns came much later.
21:38It took me a while to really be able to appreciate what Towns did.
21:46And but early on, it was I like the good time in music, the honky tonk stuff.
21:54And and I really liked the.
21:59The romance around those guys and the lore and the legend and all that stuff, you know, growing up in a planned community, which in retrospect was great in a lot of ways.
22:09But it didn't it didn't encourage you to let your freak flag fly or go against the grain necessarily.
22:16And I was kind of like a lot of people rebelling against that in my own way and and really wanted to to find a freedom and a sense of purpose that that a lot of those guys embodied to me.
22:29And so I got really invested in the romanticism of the singer songwriter, of the traveling bard musician, of the drinker and the guy just out there having life experiences and then channeling it into poetry of some kind.
22:47Yeah, I mean, these guys all had had these incredible experiences and stories and that reach sort of mythic proportions,
22:56particularly the way they channel them in a song.
22:59So that's got to be pretty appealing to, you know, a teenager, especially who's in the music.
23:07It was appealing to me.
23:08So but, you know, but Willie in particular, I'm wondering if you've met him or had the chance to get to know him a little bit.
23:18Yeah, I have not.
23:19I've never met Willie.
23:20I recorded my first record at his studio, the Pertinalis.
23:27I was on the same record label, Lost Highway Records for a number of years.
23:31I know one of his ex-wives, three of his children, several of his band members.
23:40I've played his picnic multiple times and I have countless friends who are in his world every day.
23:46My sister-in-law made a record with him.
23:48I mean, like everyone around me has had interaction with Willie and I've never met him.
23:55Yeah, it's just never, never worked out.
23:56The stars just haven't aligned.
23:58Yeah.
23:58Well, I hope you get the chance.
24:00I'm sure that would that would mean a great deal.
24:03It'd be nice to meet him.
24:06I've gotten to meet.
24:07I've been fortunate to meet several of my heroes and he is absolutely at the top of the list.
24:12So it would be nice.
24:14But I'm just so whether I meet him or not, I'm incredibly grateful that he exists on this planet and that he has lived his life the way he has.
24:23It's been a really wonderful example, I think, of how to be.
24:29No, no doubt about that.
24:32Hayes, I want to touch on Arkansas for a minute.
24:34You know, you spent some formative years there.
24:39You went to Hendrix College and, you know, you had an album called Little Rock and a great song called Little Rock.
24:47And, you know, it's not a place that is, you know, that is producing, you know, tons of musicians every day.
25:00Certainly not the way that, you know, Nashville is.
25:03It doesn't maybe get the credit it deserves sometimes.
25:06But I'm wondering, you know, what what those years in Arkansas meant to you?
25:11I was 18.
25:11I went off to school in Conway, Arkansas, just just north of Little Rock.
25:16You know, I was coming from Texas where we just are raised to think we're special and, you know, have egos and loud mouths.
25:24And I don't know how we got that way, but you clearly are.
25:29And so I rolled I came in hot, you know, to Arkansas and was rocking my Don't Mess With Texas shirt and my boots and thought I was special.
25:37And I had some some older fellas, some of whom were from Texas, you know, pretty quickly let me know that that didn't really fly.
25:45And I quickly, you know, put that aside and tried to embrace where I was and that experience.
25:51And, you know, I I lived in a dry county.
25:55So it was like the town I was in was not a great representation of, you know, the highlights of Arkansas.
26:00But I met a lot of folks from all over the state while I was in school.
26:05I ultimately married an Arkansan.
26:09My first wife lived in Conway, the town I was at school at and she went to school with me.
26:14And I had an uncle who was a minister in Little Rock.
26:19I forgot to tell you about him.
26:21Oh, so you had a family connection there.
26:23I did.
26:23I did.
26:24My uncle Tom was a Methodist minister in Little Rock.
26:30I mean, he was in his, you know, late 60s, mid 70s when I was there.
26:35But but I did have family there.
26:36And, you know, I really loved exploring the state, just going to the to the Ozarks and and and seeing the vibes in small towns.
26:47And it just coming from where I came from, it gave me a different perspective on on on people.
26:53I mean, my my window was pretty limited to this town in Texas.
26:57And and so it it expanded my world view a bit.
27:02And I just came to really appreciate the the state and a lot of people in it and and what they were about.
27:09So, yeah, when I started playing music, I had a little bit of a built in crowd there just from having gone to school there.
27:18And so and I used to joke like I'd say a lot of people back home in Texas have been making a lot of money writing songs about Texas, which was true.
27:27But I got in the game too late to take advantage of it.
27:30So what I'm doing is writing songs about Arkansas and, you know, just waiting for it to be the next big thing and in country music.
27:37And I'm still waiting. But I have a lot of songs about Arkansas and just a lot of great memories there.
27:43And it was it was very formative in my life.
27:45Well, as a Memphis guy who grew up going to Arkansas quite a bit, I'm a big fan of that state and the people there.
27:52It's a wonderful place. So, yeah, I love that you spent some time there and and paid it some tribute.
28:00Great. I wanted to ask about your wife, Allison Moore, who you mentioned earlier that y'all had, you know, moved to Nashville together.
28:13And, you know, she's also been a collaborator of yours.
28:19You've you've written some music together.
28:21And I'm just curious, you know, how y'all how y'all met.
28:27We met here in Nashville in 2003 or four.
28:31We're not sure which.
28:33There was a bar here in town that she used to hang out with, hang out at with with with friends.
28:39And I came to town and she was already, you know, established artist and incredibly talented.
28:47And and I was just this newbie kid who I'm four years younger than she is and about 20 years less mature.
28:57And so I just kind of, you know, had a crush on her instantly.
29:01And but it was not to be at that time.
29:07It was, you know, way out of my league.
29:09And but we became friends.
29:11And and then she the producer I was working with on my second record was a guy named R.S. Field.
29:16And he had done records with Allison and they were close.
29:20And he invite he asked her to come and sing on my record.
29:23And she did.
29:26And so she sang on two songs.
29:29And next year is the 20th anniversary of that record, the Little Rock record.
29:36And and it's it's really cool to me to have this time capsule of us singing together years before we ever had any kind of romantic involvement.
29:51And just to be able to look back on that, it's really, really special.
29:56But that's how we met here.
29:57Yeah, that's great.
29:58I didn't realize she was on.
29:59She sang on that record.
30:00Yeah, it's on Take Me Away and Where Did All My Good Friends Go.
30:04She's the she's the vocal on there.
30:06Oh, I'm going to go back and listen to that.
30:08That's great.
30:10Well, y'all wrote a song together called Nunya.
30:15That was kind of a fun one that was on your album.
30:18What it is back in 2019, I believe.
30:23How did that one come together?
30:25So she's from South Alabama and she's she's has a remarkable aptitude to string words together in a in a way that is funny and descriptive and so many things.
30:41And she says a real gift for language.
30:43She's also has a, you know, pretty heavy accent at times and a lot of phrases that come from her family that literally nobody else uses like they have they have their own language.
30:57They have words they've made up that this means that and like you would never know unless you grew up with them.
31:03And and that word, I don't remember if she said Nunya or something, which is, you know, something people say.
31:09It's not like the most obscure thing in the world, but, you know, short for it's like it's like Nunya business.
31:15Yeah. Yeah.
31:15And so anyway, it just stuck in my head.
31:18And and I I wanted to capture that over the years.
31:22I've written down all these things she says, like I want to I want to make a book one day of just her expressions and sayings.
31:29But I started writing that with a friend named Adam Landry and we were over here at the house one day writing and Allison walked through and she said, what are you doing?
31:42I said, well, we're just stuck on on this song.
31:46And she said, well, you got to just make it about this and this and this.
31:49And then she just walked out the door and that's that's her moves a lot.
31:53She'll come in and say, well, this is what you should do.
31:55And then I'm out.
31:56And and she was absolutely right.
31:58And that's exactly what we did.
31:59We wrote about this, this and this.
32:01And and so I gave her a co-writing credit on it.
32:04She didn't sit down and put pen to paper with us, but she absolutely inspired it and steered us with where we were needed to go, which we would not have gotten to without her.
32:14Easiest co-writing credit.
32:16Yeah.
32:16Well, she might argue that, you know, living with me is the toughest co-writing credit ever.
32:23But we got a song either way.
32:25Hayes, lately you've been touring with Band of Heathens.
32:29Yeah.
32:29As Hayes and the Heathens, which has got to be fun.
32:35It looks like fun.
32:36I've seen some videos of y'all performing.
32:40Would love to see you in person.
32:42But tell me how that one came together.
32:46Seems like a great fit.
32:48Yeah.
32:48The Band of Heathens are a mostly Austin-based band that I've been friends with for many years.
32:57Gordy Quist, one of the lead singers, grew up around where I am from.
33:03And I've known him since my mid-20s.
33:06Anyway, years ago, we did a tour where they're just a very musical band.
33:13They have a lot of attributes that I don't have.
33:15They're great singers.
33:16They're great instrumentalists.
33:18And they're also just really good guys.
33:20And so we did some shows where they were opening up.
33:24And I was just really impressed with them.
33:28And I kind of wanted to see what it'd be like to play with them.
33:31So I hired them to open shows by Be My Band as well.
33:36And we did a couple of tours like that.
33:39And then last year, we put together an event in Lukenbach, Texas, where we were just one band.
33:47And we had guests and stuff.
33:49And we were playing our own songs, but we were helping each other out and taking verses and stuff.
33:54And it was a great turnout.
33:56And we had a great time.
33:57We're going to do it again this year.
33:58We both had kind of an open year.
34:01We're both putting out records next year.
34:03And we thought, our dance card is not very full right now.
34:05And this was a lot of fun.
34:06Why don't we just go out and do some more of it?
34:09And everybody said, sure.
34:13And then we thought, well, let's make some music, some original music to go with it.
34:18So it's not just us playing together.
34:23And so we just recorded a record.
34:25We've got an eight-song record that'll be out in September.
34:27And then we're going to tour some more in September and December and January.
34:34And so that's it.
34:35Just kind of a side project.
34:36But it's really fun for me because I'm an angsty folk singer or a country front man.
34:43And these are things that I've never been able to relax as much as I would like to and just have fun playing music in the way that I would like to.
34:53I'm too in my own head a lot of the times.
34:56And playing with those guys, our rule is if it's not fun, we don't do it.
35:00And there's a lot of songs where I just get to be one of six guys on stage.
35:05And I'm just off in the background just playing a guitar riff, which I've never been able to do.
35:10They'll teach me, you know, here's how I do it.
35:12And so I'll learn something and I just stand back there and I'm looking at the crowd and I'm smiling at people and I'm just having fun and not thinking about what do they think of me or is this going over well or what should I play next or whatever.
35:25It's really given me an opportunity to just get back to having fun playing music and not worry about anything else.
35:35And I needed that.
35:36You're clearly having a good time based on what I've heard.
35:39And you all have a new single out called Nobody Dies from Weed.
35:45Yeah.
35:45And this might be pushing the boundaries of Southern Living material, but it does sound like a fun one and I'm sure you're getting a great reaction from the crowd when you all play it.
36:02Yeah, it's a fun song.
36:03I wrote it with a guy named Driver Williams who plays guitar for Eric Church.
36:07What's funny is that the day after we released it, whatever group is in charge of studying the danger of this or that released a report saying that, in fact, no one has died from weed.
36:22And it was really funny to have it validated by the government the day after we put that up.
36:26This is like the CDC or something?
36:28Yeah, something like that.
36:29Yeah.
36:29They tell you like, you know, cholesterol is this or smoking will do this to you.
36:33And they came out and they said, you know, essentially, you know, it can impair, you know, don't don't overdo it and don't it can lead to some bad decisions or or some accidents.
36:43But no one has actually ever overdosed and died solely from marijuana.
36:48And so it it gave me some cover with my family or the more conservative folks in my audience, because I could just say, well, you know, it says right there on the website.
36:59Well, we can I guess we can put that disclaimer on this podcast.
37:03Yeah, please do.
37:04Please do.
37:05Well, hey, just one more question for you.
37:08And, you know, I often ask this of people.
37:12What does it mean to you to be Southern?
37:14But in your case, I want to ask you, what does it mean to you to be Texan?
37:19Yeah, I don't I don't know why that just hit me emotionally for a second.
37:23I think for so long, a lot of my identity was wrapped up in being a Texan and I haven't lived in Texas for a number of years.
37:35So it's it's it's been a change, much like when I went off to school in Arkansas.
37:42I was like, OK, there's more to to life than that.
37:45But having said that, there is a pride in where I'm from.
37:55There is a connection.
37:56To the people that that travels, there is a musical history that is deep and rich and profound and second to none.
38:07It is a land of iconoclasts and individuals and every type of person.
38:17And I just I think of it as a place for of of dreamers and and and storytellers and of of my people.
38:30So, you know, I've got hundreds of relatives, most of them are gone now, but that's just it's just how I was raised.
38:41And so to be Texan, I don't I don't know what it means to be Texan, but what it means to me is, I guess, a place of love.
38:49You ever see yourself moving back there or convincing Allison?
38:53Yeah, I think about it sometimes like my son is in school at the University of Texas and my parents and brother live in Houston.
38:59And, you know, still got a lot of friends and family down there.
39:03It's very hot.
39:05I don't miss that at all.
39:08Especially right now.
39:09Yeah, it sure is.
39:11Yeah.
39:11But but yeah, I've got a lot of love for the state and I play there all the time still.
39:17Well, hey, Carl, congrats on everything and and good luck with the tour.
39:21Good luck with the album.
39:22And thanks so much for being on Biscuits and Jam.
39:25Thank you for having me.
39:29Thank you for having me.
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