Hayes Carll
Trouble in Mind
(Lost Highway)

He’s got a book full of songs and a voice that’s like a deep, dried-out Texas riverbed. Meet Hayes Carll from the Woodlands. He’s standing in the long Lone Star singer/songwriter shadow of Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, Guy Clark, and Ray Wylie Hubbard (he’s written songs with the latter two). Carll’s second album is a hitchhiker’s thumb aimed for a lift straight in the direction of that legacy. He’s almost too country, and that’s a bold and refreshing move. If country radio had any balls, the album’s ambling, fiddle-strewn, and Hubbard co-penned “Drunken Poet’s Dream”—complete with references to sex and mescaline—could find a place on the air and be a hit. Songs like “Girl Downtown” and the Kinky Friedman-esque “She Left Me for Jesus” illustrate Carll’s taste for smirking at the absurdity of love and relationships that head south. Not just a deft songwriter, Carll shows good sense in picking and refiguring other’s compositions. He appropriately rocks out “Bad Liver and a Broken Heart” written by a guy named Scott Nolan, as well as adding a different and honest heartfelt gravity and twang to Tom Waits’ “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up.” Carll’s secret weapon for Trouble in Mind is Nashville producer/engineer Brad Jones. Jones is himself a fairly gifted songwriter—check his long-lost 1990s powerpop classic Gilt Flake if you can find it—and can really bring out the best in others’ work. Working at his Alexander the Great studio, Jones highlights Carll’s rich voice and textured storytelling with simple but immaculately recorded, stripped country rock instrumentation. With Trouble in Mind, Carll manages to find a place that’s laid-back, rough-hewn, from the heart, and the sort of beautiful that things have only when they’re covered in a little bit of dust.

—donny kutzbach