The title of Hayes Carll’s new album - his tenth - is We’re Only Human. But in conversation about its self-reflective themes, one begins to wonder if he’s using the majestic plural, otherwise known as the “royal we.” Not that Carll has any monarchical pretensions whatsoever; quite the opposite. It’s just that this especially introspective and vulnerable album feels like a mid-life tear-down and rebuild, a diary of a search for self-awareness and self-forgiveness.
“I was starting to get really tired of having those same talks with myself, and I wanted to see some change,” Hayes says in Episode 331 of The String. He talks about “leaning into trying to figure some of those things out. Why am I so uneasy? Why do I have so many fears and anxieties? Why am I having such a hard time being at peace? Why am I failing at all these things all the time? When I started thinking about that and doing work on that in my personal life, it just started showing up in my work, all of a sudden that became the more interesting thing.”
This isn’t the side of Hayes Carll that comes to mind first when I reflect on his two decades as an admired and imitated Texas songwriter. I think of the clever and funny stuff and his virtuosic wordplay. I think of his characters, like the sorry bastard in “She Left Me For Jesus,” or the savvy road warrior who gets his band out of trouble on the highway with a “Bible On The Dash,” his great duet with Canadian friend and fellow ranconteur Corb Lund. And I think of possibly my favorite Hayes Carll song, the epic title track to his Lost Highway album “KMAG YOYO,” a surreal song about a problematic soldier and LSD that has to be heard to be believed. I ask Hayes about this one, and his story is great.
Carll’s famous sardonic wit does show up on We’re Only Human, especially in the two songs written with Nashville’s Aaron Raitiere. “Progress Of Man (Bitcoin And Cattle)” skewers today’s bizarre economy. But the sentinel songs here are self-confrontations, as on “Making Amends” and the stunning “I Got Away With It.” About this one he says, “That's just about me (and) the role that I've played in relationships over my lifetime, and not having been the man I wanted to be - not having been somebody that could be counted on or depended on in the way that I would have liked to have been.” As I said, it’s not classic Hayes Carll, but it is an honest portrait of an artist as not-a-young-man. In fact, he turns 50 next January, so the inevitable mid-life accounting seems to have begun.
Our conversation focuses heavily however on those carefree younger days, including a very funny story about his first high school band and a run to a Houston tattoo parlor. Hayes got the itch to write songs after hearing some Bob Dylan folk songs at church as a teenager. Things got rolling after college when he made an odd but fateful move to the tiny Bolivar Peninsula on the Gulf Coast, just next door to Galveston, where the draw was a legendary 70-seat listening room called the Old Quarter Acoustic Cafe.
“I walked in there one night, and there was a shrine to Townes (Van Zandt), Blaze Foley, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. It was a church for songwriting. I mean, it was a dysfunctional one and a super colorful one. But people came there to play their own songs and try them out,” Carll says. He was 22, newly moved to the tiny Bolivar Peninsula, just next to Galveston. It was there that he put together a picture of the Texas songwriting legacy and where he launched his career. “I was in heaven. This world just kept getting deeper and deeper.”
From there, he moved to Austin where he got on the radio and made a deep network of contemporary Americana artists, including the Band of Heathens, whose co-founder Gordy Quist just produced the new album. Hayes released two albums on the Music Row renegade label Lost Highway and basically took a permanent place in the Texas/Nashville pantheon. Today, a sign over the Old Quarter has Townes Van Zandt on one side and Hayes Carll on the other.
Hayes offers some songs for WMOT folks in our recent Wired In Sessions video alongside Anderson East, which you can see here.
