Hayes Carll
When you think about it, it’s entirely fitting that Texas singer-songwriter Hayes Carll’s fall tour was underwritten by The Onion. Trouble In Mind, Carll’s third disc (and first for Lost Highway), is a great big hoot, a kinda funny, kinda sad, virtually encyclopedic examination of the lives of luckless losers that navigates between territory usually ceded to either Carl Hiaasen or Tom Waits with a deftness that’s harder to achieve than it looks.
Populated with tales of barroom sad sacks, romantic defeats and routine public humiliations, Trouble In Mind suggests Randy Newman without the sharp elbows, a less topical Todd Snider, or an only slightly less soggy Waits (whose “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up”, a natural fit, is covered here).
Musically, Trouble In Mind is an amiable, workmanlike country-rock record, serving up mid-tempo, moderately hook-happy tracks suffused with pedal steels and mandolins. It’s melodically unremarkable, one of those albums that exists for the pleasures of its lyric sheet.
The record-opening “Drunken Poet’s Dream”, co-written with Ray Wylie Hubbard, is a Carll specialty: a shambling ode to an exaggeratedly peculiar sort of girl (“She’s wild as Rome/She likes to lie naked and be gazed upon”). The plucky “Girl Downtown” doesn’t really go anywhere or do anything much, but it’s slight and lovely just the same.
And then there’s the attention-hogging twang parody “She Left Me For Jesus” a rollicking, profane, Molotov cocktail of a song (“She said I should find him/And I’ll know peace at last/If I ever find Jesus/I’m kicking his ass”). It’s either Carll’s all-access pass to the big time or his ticket to hell, depending on who you ask.