Like the best singer/songwriters, Hayes Carll has a wickedly pointed sense of humor, a devastating observational eye for humanity’s flaws and an unfailing hope for its redemption.
The Texas native began his career over a decade and a half ago, releasing his 2002 debut, Flowers and Liquor, to great acclaim and drawing appropriate comparisons to Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark and Ray Wylie Hubbard, who Carll cites as a mentor and friend. Three years later, Carll self-released his sophomore album, Little Rock, on his Highway 87 Records, which generated plenty of label buzz, resulting in a contract with major indie Lost Highway Records.
With Lost Highway’s increased distribution, Carll’s next album, 2008’s Trouble in Mind, was a breakout hit. Village Voice slotted it at No. 60 among the year’s best releases, and the album’s most prominent single, “She Left Me for Jesus,” earned the Americana Music Association’s Song of the Year award.
After having four songs placed in the film Country Strong in 2010, Carll unleashed his Roots Rock/Country/Folk masterpiece, KMAG YOYO (& Other American Stories), in 2011. The title and attendant title track are named after the military bug-out acronym for “Kiss my ass guys, you’re on your own”; the song itself is a wounded soldier’s twisted hallucination of government experiments with LSD and the arms race in space — among other unlikely events — gone wrong and wronger. The album was a critical and commercial success. The Americana Music Association named KMAG YOYO the year’s best album, and Rolling Stone, American Songwriter and Spin all lauded the album in various end-of-year honors.
In the wake of KMAG YOYO’s wild success and the subsequent touring grind that followed, Carll severed ties with Lost Highway and navigated his divorce. Last year, he teamed with esteemed artist/producer Joe Henry, who Carll had interviewed as a production candidate for Trouble in Mind, and began work on Lovers and Leavers, which was released last month through the Thirty Tigers company. Spare and introspective, Lovers and Leavers is a quietly poignant rumination on love in its broad variations — lost, found, lustful, romantic, parental, musical — that may be the most reality-focused set of songs Carll has ever recorded.
Given the gravity of Lovers and Leavers, it’s no wonder that it took Hayes Carll five years to pull these songs out of his core and air them in the cold light of day. For him and for us, it was worth the wait.
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This article appears in May 4-11, 2016.