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Hayes Carll was born too late to have a voice like his. Strained into a whiskey glass and burnished by cigarette smoke, Carll's voice sounds as if he were a generation older, a contemporary of Ray Wylie Hubbard, Robert Earl Keen and Steve Earle.
John Hunt -- drums
Darcy Yates -- bass
Hayes Carll -- vocals, guitar
Lance Smith -- guitar
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Highway 87
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Naked Checkers
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Arkansas Blues
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It's A Shame
Flowers and Liquor, 2002
Little Rock, 2005
The last time Hayes Carll had a new batch of songs ready for release, he was playing a festival in Colorado. Backstage he told friend and mentor Ray Wylie Hubbard he planned to title his album Trouble in Mind. “You can't do that,” Hubbard told him just as an announcer called Carll's name to go onstage. He didn't find out until later it was the name of a blues standard.
Carll says he doesn't yet have a title for his new album, which he's hoping to release in July. He's likely to take his time titling it.
But fans will likely hear four or five of the new songs when he plays Monday night at McGonigel's Mucky Duck, backed just by multi-instrumentalist Scott Davis.
Carll says one big difference between Trouble and the new album is his backing. Last time he recorded with a group of Nashville players. “This record I used my band, which I've never really done before,” he says. “But we spent most of the past 2½ years together. I was just enjoying the vibe I was getting with them being on the road. I wanted to get that on the record.”
A few songs are still being tweaked, but Carll sounds confident that the summer release date will hold. “I still have a little work left to do with some of the writing,” he says. “One song I started writing about one thing, and it ended up being about another.”
Though the Bolivar Peninsula has figured into Carll's music before, none of the new songs directly addresses the region hit so hard by Hurricane Ike. “I'll get back there at some point, but for this one I was in a different place.”
He's also suspending his popular Stingaree Music Festival, the annual gathering he began on Crystal Beach.
“The storm changed the whole makeup of how you pull off a festival,” he says. “And it takes a lot of time. We just didn't have that time or the resources. But we're going to figure out a way to pick it up in 2011. I'm really proud of what we had going.”
-- Andrew Dansby | February 2010
Hayes Carll is sitting alone in a vintage movie-theater chair against a wall of the Houston Continental Club, directly behind a T-shirt stand, not too far from the door. Only the toes of his boots are visible.
He's not hiding, really, and he's not nervous. He's doing what has served him well throughout his relatively short but promising career as a singer-songwriter: hanging out in bars and honing his observational skills.
"I lay low, watch the club and see what the opening act is about," he says. "For so many years in Galveston, if I went to a bar, I sat there alone, watching people."
In those days, Carll wasn't likely to be recognized or embraced by the other pub-crawling denizens, who tended to be wizened regulars or tipsy tourists. He was making enough money playing covers in beach bars to pay his rent. In his spare time he wrote his own songs that no one - at that time and in that place - really wanted to hear. But he had the chance to develop an engaging stage presence and begin to write intelligent lyrics about whiskey, sex and loneliness.
Now, at 30, the formerly restless teen from The Woodlands is playing as many as 200 dates a year solo or fronting a band.
He's been touring nonstop since last year's release of his second independently produced record, Little Rock, and, having sidestepped recording contracts in the past, signed with Nashville-based Lost Highway Records in May in anticipation of his third.
"Hopefully I'll be rich and meet very important people," hesaid, with characteristic tongue-in-cheek humor that doesn't quite hide his blunt honesty. Carll, still based in Texas, will join a roster of recording artists he admires, including Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Lucinda Williams, Ryan Adams, Mary Gauthier, Van Morrison and Elvis Costello.
"Lost Highway was at the top of my wish list when I started looking at labels again," Carll said. "They are a major label but they seem to let their artists make very creative, unrestricted records and then really work hard at promoting them. I saw it as a chance to get the muscle of a major label with the creative license of an indie."
Wait for the punch line: "Plus I'm broke and didn't want to take out another loan."
Lately he's been touring with the Gulf Coast Orchestra. His songs, whether they rock or speak softly, are versatile enough to work in any format. But sometimes leading a band makes it more difficult to connect on the same level with the audience, he said.
"What I've always liked is talking to people, making them laugh, trying to bring them into my show," he said. "Now I'm trying to find a balance between what I liked about the listening rooms and the energy of fronting a rock band."
He had always enjoyed writing - poetry, short stories - even as a kid, and added music to the creative mix by the time he was in high school. Inspired by beat poets, Texas troubadours and Bob Dylan, his vision of the future began to take shape, even if it was all still a bit of an outline.
"I had a desire to take on the world and see everything there was to see. To a 15- or 16-year-old in the suburbs it sounded exciting and a million miles from my life," he said.
But wanderlust mixed with aspirations of higher education got him only so far - Hendrix College in Conway, Ark.
"I was going to be a theater major but it didn't work out," he said. "I kind of expected I'd go to college to have a good time,
to meet girls and to get some experience with life - and that's what I did. I was not a good student. That took a back seat to trying to find myself."
Still, there was only so much he could do there in the pursuit of self-discovery and a dissolute lifestyle: "I was in a dry county in the middle of Arkansas," he noted. "All I really wanted to do was travel. But I had only written one song."
After college, he moved to the Bolivar Peninsula.
"I was pretty unemployable with a history degree and a minor in theater, and I graduated last in my class, so people weren't knocking on my door to hire me."
He waited tables, dug ditches and tended bar. Then he started asking bar owners if he could play for them, at first for free, then for money.
"When I first started I had to get over the idea that I couldn't sing - or not care whether I could or not," Carll said. "The first, most important thing for me was the words, but I realized no one else was going to sing the songs. I could try to sell them in Nashville, but that's not where I was. I was at the beach. So I started singing my own songs and doing the best I could."
He took courage from the example set by some of his heroes.
"Kris Kristofferson, John Prine and Ray Wylie Hubbard have so much more depth and life experience in one sentence than there are in 40 of Mariah Carey's No. 1 hits," he said. "A guy with a great song is still what gets me. So if I live hard and sing a lot maybe my voice will turn into something that will affect people."
He found courage too, in alcohol, but only until he heard what he sounded like drunk. "I did used to get nervous but it got to the point where I didn't have time," he said. "If you're playing every night and you sit around nervous all day you'll never get anything done. After a while I started to have confidence in what I do."
Playing the Old Quarter Acoustic Cafe in Galveston he found a more attentive audience and tapped into a network of other like-minded musicians.
"I discovered him," Rex Bell, Old Quarter proprietor, said. "He did one of my open mics one time. I just saw something magic about the kid, took him under my arm, told him to get a set list together - he didn't have one - and I started to let him open up for some of my acts. He just took off. ... And now he's on the verge of being a star."
He was in notable company - past and present - at the Old Quarter.
"There is a shrine to Townes Van Zandt there," Carll said. "And while the club didn't take itself seriously it was hard not to take it seriously that real songwriters had tread there."
Playing Houston for the first time wasn't something he took lightly, either, even though it was at a dive. "The first Houston gig was like playing Carnegie Hall for me," Carll said.
After hearing him play at the Old Quarter, Lisa Morales asked Carll to open for Sisters Morales at McGonigel's Mucky Duck. She later produced "Flowers and Liquor", his first album, on Compadre Records.
"He was very raw when we first heard him, and he just had it," Morales said. "He had the stuff. He's great with the audience. He's just got his own thing and he could be huge. He just needs to be heard."
Rusty Andrews, owner of McGonigel's Mucky Duck, saw his potential, too, and booked him as often as he could.
"He's one of a kind, absolutely," Andrews said. "He's got the kind of aw-shucks stage presence that most people find endearing."
Carll's at a time in his life when he's trying to find a balance. Recently married, he and his wife, Jenna, a teacher, have a toddler. So far, though, he hasn't been writing about family life.
"Boozing and rambling songs - I'd been studying that kind of style for years and that's what my lifestyle was for years, so it came kind of natural," he said. "I want to evolve as a writer, but it takes time."
On "Little Rock" he teamed with Ray Wylie Hubbard to write "Chickens" and with Guy Clark on "Rivertown".
"His songs had depth and weight to them," said Hubbard, who met Carll at the Old Quarter. "They were well-written, well-crafted and the last verse was as strong as the first verse. Young writers sometimes miss that and just try to finish up the song in a hurry."
The kindred spirits decided to collaborate on a song but found they couldn't summon up their demons collectively.
"He writes some dark stuff, and I've been known to write some dark stuff, so I thought we should write a "really" dark song together," Hubbard said. "But we got around each other and we couldn't go there, we were having too much fun. So we wrote "Chickens". It's not really as much about chickens as it is about the people writing a song about chickens."
Carll is taking July off to write and figure out the direction of his third record, fleshing out songs and seeing which way they lean in the country-folk-rock continuum.
"I can't say I'm going to go off the deep end and come out with a Tejano hip-hop record, but there is a lot of space I want to be able to move around in," he said. "I want to have a connection to the first two records, but I don't want to get stuck in any one kind of exact style. I want to be the Rolling Stones but I also worship John Prine and Kris Kristofferson."
And it looks like he'll be moving to Austin.
"The number of writers, pickers and friends down there is something I would love to have around me," he said.
He tried it once before, but the timing was off.
"I had no records and no gigs then," he said. "I slept on a buddy's couch and sold vacuums. I worked at Red Lobster. I really had a horrible time. I finally packed up and went back to the beach, where at least I could make the rent by playing music.
"Now it will be a completely different thing. "
-- Eileen McClelland | June 22, 2006
Hayes Carll was born too late to have a voice like his.
Strained into a whiskey glass and burnished by cigarette smoke, Carll's voice sounds as if he were a generation older, a contemporary of Ray Wylie Hubbard, Robert Earl Keen and Steve Earle. His country-tinged songs of love and loss, disillusionment and reflection on fate reinforce the idea that he's aged well beyond his 26 years.
Carll's debut CD, Flowers and Liquor, released in June on Houston-based Compadre Records, is peppered with such outsiders' lamentations but also contains several bouncy grooves that keep it from being a downer. Unpretentious gems like Naked Checkers, the ironic Bill Morrissey cover Live Free or Die and the title song can't help but bring a smile.
Lanky, affable and as easygoing as a porch dog, Carll manages to turn bruises and broken hearts into a downright good time. His comfortable storytelling style and laid-back nature quickly engage his audience.
"In performance, my strong suit is getting people involved in it," he says.
Despite being a young singer-songwriter from the Lone Star state packing plenty of songs about drinking, Carll doesn't see himself as part of the current "Texas music" boom. The frat-boy party crowd that whoops to the likes of Pat Green, Cory Morrow and Jack Ingram just doesn't get Carll, and that's OK with him.
"The ones that are getting the most notoriety aren't particularly my favorites," he says. ". . . It just doesn't move me the way the stuff that I got into this for does. I don't see anything particularly remarkable about it."
Yet there are contemporary artists Carll admires whose profiles have been raised by the current wave, among them Slaid Cleaves, John Evans and Todd Snider. As with those singer-songwriters, Carll has a somewhat older audience that can better appreciate his wry humor. Most of the time.
"I did a gig in a church not too long ago in The Woodlands," he says, "and I had to preface everything with 'I'm sorry.' All the songs are about drinking or sex or drugs . . . That was my life for this period of time (so) that's what I wrote about. Here it is.
"One day I'll write about my connection with Jesus and maybe one day I'll write about world peace, but for now this is it."
Raised in The Woodlands, Carll left for Arkansas after high school "looking to do something a little bit different." He came back to Texas with a history degree from Hendrix College and a handful of songs including Arkansas Blues, which stands out like a beacon on his CD.
He played cover songs six nights a week in bars on Crystal Beach for a while, then got his first break when he ambled into Galveston's landmark Old Quarter Acoustic Cafe on an open-mic night in the fall of 1998 and performed a few Bob Dylan songs. Wrecks Bell, club owner and former bass player for Texas legend Townes Van Zandt, was impressed enough that Carll soon had regular gigs there.
When local favorites Sisters Morales played the Old Quarter, Bell told them, "Hey, you ought to listen to this kid."
"He had something that I hadn't heard in a long time," says Lisa Morales, who asked Carll to open for her and her sister, Roberta. Ultimately, Lisa thought enough of him that she made Flowers and Liquor her first production project outside her own band. She sizes up Carll as "a cross between Townes and John Prine."
"Hayes is an old soul," she says.
Morales drew on her contacts and current and former bandmates to play on the CD. David Spencer of Sisters Morales joins Houston-area music veteran Bert Wills to give the recording two powerful guitarists. The Morales sisters lend backing vocals. Adding spice are accordionist Michael Ramos and Jeff Plankenhorn on dobro. Drummer Rick Richards and bassist David Carroll fill out the band.
Carll, who has been getting airplay on KPFT-FM (90.1), is currently performing without a band, accompanied only by Charlie Davis on mandolin. In his shows, Carll sends up the country chestnut I've Been Everywhere in which the chorus, which traditionally lists tour stops in an array of American cities and towns, simply repeats "I've been to Houston, Houston, Houston, Houston..."
The self-deprecation is about to be superseded by his tour schedule, which has him blanketing the state before embarking for Montreal in mid-August and then hopping around the East Coast, with a trip to Nashville tossed in.
And he probably won't even have to apologize for singing about drinking, sex and drugs.
-- Mark Chamberland | September 30, 2002
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