Photo via Hayes Carll - hayescarll.com
Hayes Carll
Hayes Carll
While he was working on his latest album, We’re Only Human, singer-songwriter Hayes Carll was also working on himself.
Carll, who returns to Milwaukee this week at Vivarium, says in the past he just wrote songs and picked the ones he liked the most to record. For the follow up to 2021’s You Get It All, he was in the midst of a lot of “personal work.”
“Trying to figure out how to navigate life with a little more ease,” says Carll, who will turn 50 in January. “I’ve been running into the same roadblocks and walls a lot of my life, and I was tired of having the same conversation with myself.”
This theme of personal reflection is very evident as you listen to We’re Only Human:
“I’m making amends of all my poor choices, my bad behavior, and my mistakes with lovers and friends,” he sings on “Making Amends.” And on the title track, he offers, “Just walking the road between fear and hope, And knowing that we’re gonna fall.”
Carll says the song came to him as he considered how challenging human experience is. “There’s not exactly a clearcut guidebook that we’re taught growing up,” he says. “And I think I had these expectations that I was supposed to have it all figured out and navigate it perfectly, and so I started trying to learn how to give myself a little bit of grace and then that led me to thinking about other folks going through the same thing and trying to have grace for them, and hoping they can have grace for me. Just trying to take the pressure off of feeling the need to be infallible or perfect, because I’m gonna mess up.”
Help from a Heathen
Gordy Quist from the Austin-based Band of Heathens served as co-producer on We’re Only Human. Quist and Carll performed together on an album released last year as Hayes and the Heathens and they have started an annual festival, Everybody’s Somebody, in Luckenbach, Texas.
“We really get along well, and I love his musical sensibilities and talents,” Carll says. “This record was still kind of being formed in my head, and I wanted to work with somebody that that I could collaborate with and just kind of organically find our way, and he provided that space.”
Don’t Meet Your Heroes Department
I shared with Carll that I saw him at the beginning of his career when he did a brief tour with the late Billy Joe Shaver that hit Austin, Texas, in 2002. It’s a memory that Carll has mixed emotions about. They were both on Compadre Records at the time, and Carll had just released his debut album, Flowers and Liquor. It was part of three-city tour that also included Dallas and Nashville. He was excited to be on tour with one of his heroes, and the shows were great, Carll says. But it went quickly downhill.
“After the first night, Billy Joe got it in his head that that I’d let like 35 people in on the guest list or something, and which I hadn’t,” he says. “I didn't let anybody in, but he could not be convinced otherwise. I think the promoter was trying to hustle him out of some money and blame me for it. And so, Billy Joe was pissed. And for the next 20 years, or until he passed, we had a kind of challenging relationship.
“I had some really good moments with Billy Joe, where we would where we would get on just fine, but anytime that came up, or I tried to clear it up, he would get very dark, and yeah, he remembered it for a long time.”
The Old Guard
But a couple decades into his career, as people like Shaver and Guy Clark have passed, it’s Carll, a Houston native, who has stepped into the role of Texas songwriting hero—even if he lives in Nashville now with wife Allison Moorer.
“The last few years, it’s hit me that I’m some kind of old guard, and I’ve been able to be friends with and work with some of my heroes and feel respected by them, and to have a younger generation of people that I really respect that come up, in some cases, listening to my music,” he says. “It’s very humbling and gratifying. It’s just my dream to make music of any kind.”
Bringing the Gulf Coast to Milwaukee
Carll’s Gulf Coast Orchestra band will accompany him in Milwaukee: Scott Davis (guitar and banjo), Jared Reynolds (bass), Mike Meadows (drums), Noah Jeffries (fiddle and mandolin) and Thayer Sarrano (keyboard).
This time in Milwaukee it’s unlikely that Carll will be “oil spotted” or left behind, which did happen to him once on a tour with Jack Ingram that came to Shank Hall.
“We stopped into this stor, and everybody was gonna buy these exotic, colorful suits for the show,” he says. “And I went into the dressing room to try on this, like, purple polyester leisure suit. And I thought they were all going to love it. Yeah, I jumped out to show them all, and the woman behind the counter said, ‘Your friends have left you.’
“So, I remember running out into the streets of Milwaukee in this purple polyester, and I’m a loser dude watching the bus go down the road. They had forgotten about me. I was the opening act and wasn’t even supposed to be there, really.”
Hayes Carll perform at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20 at Vivarium, 1818 N. Farwell Ave. Aaron Raitiere also performs.
