Don’t mistake Hayes Carll’s Lone Star State accent for just another aw shucks country singer. He’s proven across eight records and for nearly two decades, that while his brand of country may sound reassuringly familiar, his lyrics are as sharp and wickedly wry as ever.
Take “Nice Things,” the opening track off his new album You Get It All. In the song, God comes down the earth to survey her creation and ends up reeling in an oil barrel while fishing, can’t drink the water because of pollution, gets arrested for taking one toke off a joint, runs into a mob chanting about sinners, and gets berated for asking for a dollar. “This is why y’all can’t have nice things,” she sings in the chorus. And that’s just the first song.
Over the course of his career, Carll has evolved into one of the strongest songwriters around, capable of straddling the line between classic country and modern Americana. And that growth as a songwriter is all over You Get It All. “Help Me Remember,” a painfully relatable song, is a first-person story about Alzheimer’s unfolding like the poetry of an old Willie Nelson song. The track, co-written by Josh Morningstar, comes from a familiar place for Carll, who saw his grandfather losing his grip on lucidity because of the disease. “I was 14 years old and sitting in the passenger seat of my grandfather’s truck in Waco, TX, the town he had lived in for most of his life,” says Carll. “He turned to me at a stoplight and asked me where we were. He looked scared. I know I was. I’ve thought a lot since then about what it must feel like to lose the thread of your own story. This song is for the people who’ve experienced what my grandfather did, those that are experiencing it currently, and for those who serve as their witnesses and caregivers.”
That song, like most on You Get It All, illustrates why Carll has built up such a loyal fanbase with both the record buying public and fellow musicians. He can have you laughing your ass off one minute and crying just two songs later. While his catalogue certainly doesn’t suffer from lack of great records, there is a brilliance to this one that sets it apart from most that have come before it. The record is consistent in its songwriting, from that wry opener to the closing song, “If It Was Up To Me,” a love song to humanity of sorts about running the world that dodges the hokiness for relatable earnestness and ultimately results in a stellar record that shows the results of two decades in the making.
Photo credit: David McClister
