The country-rock wing of Americana music is not short on grave and gravely troubadours in the vein of Steve Earle and Hayes Carll. But one doesn’t expect to see newcomers in this camp featured on the PBS News Hour. So imagine my surprise a month or two ago to see Geoff Bennet interviewing Riley Downing about the meaning of his new album title cut “Landfill Poetry,” a wry, first-hand look at the life of a rural garbage collector.
“This business stinks
But it’s picking up.
Please drop me off
I think I’ve had enough.”
I guess I can see why the story line would be catnip to a national outlet. But my interest in Downing came from the fact that he’s only an emerging artist as far as his solo career goes. I knew him, as do many, as a veteran of The Deslondes, one of the most intriguing and harmonically beguiling bands in Americana music. His trash hauling chapter came after some youthful rambling around the country and before he moved to New Orleans in his early 20s to connect with and launch his much-admired band.
“I came back to Missouri, “says the Kansas City native in Episode 374 of The String. “I’d had enough traveling for a little bit. A trash company was starting in my hometown. (The owner) had an old '70s trash truck that he had just gotten. He was a driver for Budweiser for 30 years before he got into trash. But I became one of his early employees, and basically I just went around trying to convince people to switch to us instead of the main guy.”
Zoom out from this curious stretch of employment, and we find a rich, exploratory life devoted to music, travel, camaraderie, stories and the upsides of nostalgia. Since Landfill Poetry is his first album on John Prine’s Oh Boy Records, I asked about his connection to the late songwriting master. He binged on a few Prine albums during a long winter in his teens, and he says now what he relates to about Prine’s songs is “having fun playing with words and just nostalgia and memories and that creative well of just life that's always full, and you can go just kind of dip into it whenever you have time.”
Downing had one of his big musical epiphanies when he visited the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, KS as a teenager. It was bluegrass and folk and most importantly a lot of the audience and musical community was young, not like the blue haired bluegrass he’d seen. Then he gave the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah, OK a try, where his life changed through meeting New Orleans-based musicians Sam Doores - with whom he’d found the Deslondes - and Alynda Segarra, the mastermind of alt-folk band Hurray for the Riff Raff, with whom the Deslondes toured on their way up.
From a house on Deslondes St., a group cohered in true, bottom-up, folk style. Downing figured out harmony singing, something that had eluded him. And he’d spend hours collecting and listening to obscure 45s and 78s to build a worldview. “Everyone came from different parts of the world and or the United States and had different backgrounds of music,” Downing says. “So someone might have an idea that someone else wouldn't think of, and it's kind of all-for-one and one-for-all. But there also are no rules. We tried whatever anybody wanted to try.”
Downing dropped his first solo album Start It Over in 2021 on New West Records, the same label that’s hosted the Deslondes’ career so far. Landfill Poetry, released in late August, has been very well received, with Saving Country Music praising his voice’s “unpolished, rugged beauty.” It’s sentimental in places, such as his historic ode to his grandparents “Helen & Gene,” darkly twanging on “Hurt To Fall” (see below), and romping on “Hay Hay Hay.” The rollout led to Downing’s solo debut on the Grand Ole Opry days after this conversation.
