The American South can be a fraught subject. Southerners have been so thoroughly stereotyped that it’s become difficult for outsiders and southerners alike to see the region for the patchwork of beauty and conflict it truly is.
Enter Louisiana-native Chris Watts, musically known as Dirt Reynolds.
Watts recently developed his blue-collar rocker alias to help himself and others better understand the region he’s proud to call home (and to duck alarming web searches pointing to a Colorado murderer). His debut album Scalawag is a song cycle exploring his own southern identity in modern culture. Scalawag will be released digitally on Jun 26th, followed by a vinyl release on August 28th.
“I grew up in a very conservative Christian household in the Deep South. When you’re young you just assume everyone is that way. Then you get older and go out into the world and experience different cultures and you start to see injustice and you start to become more self-aware in the process. This album helped me reconcile that.”
A former troublemaker raised in central Louisiana (dubbed Cenla), he was stabbed in a bar and shot in the New Orleans SuperDome while on Katrina duty for the Louisiana National Guard. His love of language and fascination with Louisiana politics led him to college degrees in journalism and political science. As a childhood fan of Mark Twain, he grew to love the writers who defined the South, from Flannery O’Connor to Willie Morris.
After a miserable post-college stint in Washington, DC, he returned to New Orleans determined to pursue music full-time. Watts moved to Nashville in 2013 where he began honing his craft inside the honky-tonks of Music City’s notorious Broadway Ave.
Scalawag uses universal themes, broke-but-not-broken characters, and often blistering guitars to illustrate the truth and the lies The South tells to itself and others.
Scalawag was produced and mixed by Watts and Joseph Lekkas at Greenland Studio in East Nashville, TN, where Watts currently resides. Watts and Lekkas also played guitar and bass respectively, with Erin Nelson on drums.
Today Glide is excited to offer an exclusive premiere ahead of its release. Watts and his band channel his wild life experiences into twangy alt-country that is also social conscious during a time when we sure do need more Southerners speaking out against hate and bigotry. With his smooth vocals and a rocking soundtrack, Watts offers a stark depiction of small-town confinement and dreams dead-ended on songs like “Lee County,” and grabs our attention with deceptively catchy blues hooks on “The Day David Duke Came to Destrehan,” a boogie-woogie, ZZ Top-esque rocker about blind bigotry. “The Boys Gotta Go” burns brightly and is sadly poignant with its tale of the heartbreak that ensues when a father tells his son his black friend isn’t allowed in their home. Watts isn’t afraid to get into heavier honky tonk territory, like on “Empty Beds, Empty Bottles,” while getting more serious with the moving “Fireworks Over Buhlow,” a song honoring a childhood friend and fallen soldier who lost his life in Iraq. He pays tribute to his time spend as a national guardsman during Hurricane Katrina with “I Know What It Means,” a reference to Louis Armstrong’s classic “Do You Know What It Means (To Miss New Orleans).” On songs like “American Kind” Watts and his band bring to mind the socially-charged Southern rock and roll of the Drive-By Truckers with the Heartland everyman-isms of Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp.
Watts talks about the inspiration behind the album:
“David Bowie said if you want to make art, do what scares you, and that’s what I tried to do with this record. The eleven stories on ‘Scalawag’ are microcosms of The American South- songs of heartbreak, hardship, resilience, and hope. I didn’t intend to write a concept record about southern identity in the 21st century. But now I realize it would have been harder not to write it.
What does it mean to be a southerner in 2020? How do we preserve the beauty of the region we’re so proud to call home while distancing ourselves from a shameful past that still rears its ugly head today? In order to answer these questions we have to start looking at ourselves in the mirror, because sometimes our own reflection is what scares us most.”
LISTEN:
