Inside The Entwined Stories of Loose Cattle’s LP ‘Someone’s Monster’ and Ex-Broadway Show ‘Tammy Faye’

In the 1970s and ’80s, Tammy Faye Messner and her ex-husband Jim’s Christian television show, The PTL Club, flourished then flamed out in the white-hot, big bang of TV evangelism. Preachers like Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham proselytized directly into American living rooms though home TV sets and reached a ubiquity and influence that afforded conservative evangelicals a grasp on American politics, values, and lives — the influence of which remains today in America’s extremist media landscape.

Tammy Faye, for her part, offered a gentler narrative. She preached love for everyone and made waves within the evangelical community for her radical acceptance of homosexuality, and on-air conversation with an HIV-positive gay pastor, Steve Pieters.

The reverberations from televangelism’s flashpoint in American culture — including Faye’s defiance of the furor and fervor (which begat her own success and subsequent downfall) — and its echoes today recently converged for Tony and Grammy award-winning actor and musician Michael Cerveris. Last fall, Cerveris played Reverend Jerry Falwell in a short-lived Broadway production of the Tammy Faye musical, which featured music by Elton John. Simultaneously, he released an album with his Americana band, Loose Cattle, titled Someone’s Monster.

Antithetically to Falwell’s staunch, virulent conservatism, Someone’s Monster offers a set of beautiful, painful stories about the kinds of small tragedies that happen to no-name people and often go unnoticed and unreported — abuse, addiction, generational poverty, racism. Presented together in lovely country music-tinged songs, it amounts to a weighty consideration of human ills.

Central to both album and musical is the consideration of who gets to succeed in America, on what grounds, and on whose terms. “In a weird way, it felt like two sides of the same thing — expressing the message in two different arenas,” Cerveris says.

Though the album was written and recorded well before Cerveris’ run in the musical, Tammy Faye opened on Broadway the same week as Loose Cattle’s release show for Someone’s Monster at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan. Last week, the band released a live recording of that show, titled Live Monster, complete with three bonus tracks beyond the studio album.

Dual Careers

Cerveris grew up in West Virgina, where he gravitated to fiddle-heavy folk music and attempted to convince his classically trained father that the music was just as worthy. Cerveris was also an athlete until he had to choose between sports and acting, later teaching himself how to play guitar and acting in community theater productions and summer stock theater. Acting took off before music, though, and he starred in off-Broadway productions before his 1993 Broadway debut in the title role in The Who’s Tommy, which earned him his first Tony nomination. He went on to be known for his roles playing the lead in Hedwig and the Angry Itch and in Sweeny Todd, as well as his Tony-award winning work in Assassins in 2004 and Fun Home in 2014. His screen acting work as including television shows like Fringe, Treme, and The Good Wife, as well as films like The Mexican and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.

Cerveris, who’s played many complicated characters over the course of his career, was initially reluctant to play Falwell in Tammy Faye. Hesitant, as he says, to “make any kind of case for this person’s humanity…someone who I have blamed so much for the ills of our entire nation, specifically groups of people that I care a lot about and is so contrary to the Christianity that I was raised with, despite claiming to be its guardian.”

Despite her place in evangelical Christianity, which often carries the stigma of closed-minded conservatism, the real-life Faye challenged those confines by preaching love. “Love struggles to be loud,” as the character of Faye (played brilliantly by Katie Brayben on Broadway and originally in the West End) says in the musical.

Near the show’s end, she and Falwell meet after their respective deaths. Falwell tells Faye he died of heart failure, to which she replies, “Oh Jerry, that’s not how you died. That’s how you lived,” and dismisses Falwell downstairs, off stage to a presumed eternity in hell. After his departure, Faye tells the audience about her study of the bible: “And love, love is mentioned so much. 489 times, in fact. Do you know what’s only mentioned 89 times? Hate. Love more than hate. That’s it.”

Cerveris was able to reframe the Falwell role as a public service — one that would help tell people a nuanced story and challenge their perceptions. After portraying Falwell’s ire so convincingly, one night as Cerveris left the stage and passed through the audience, a man whispered to him, “Fuck you.” Cerveris recalls thinking to himself: “My work is done.”

A Different Kind of ‘Monster’

Cerveris and Kimberly Kaye formed Loose Cattle in 2011, while they were dating, as a for-fun country cover song project (their friendship and the band survived their breakup). As Cerveris delved into his Southern upbringing, struggling to rectify those stereotypes with his own experiences, he found country and Americana music helped explain the many nuances and contradictions. He educated himself on Hazel Dickens, John Prine, Jimmy Rogers, Woodie Guthrie, The Carter Family, Hank Williams, Doc Watson, and the Drive by Truckers and Jason Isbell.

Kaye grew up in Freehold, NJ (home of Bruce Springsteen) listening to The Chieftains, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and many Broadway cast recordings on vinyl. She grew up classically trained in jazz vocals, trumpet, and musical theater, which led to playing in punk and ska bands and devouring Lilith Fair greatest hits recordings (which especially resonated with her as an antidote to the male-driven, blue-collar rock and roll of her youth).

Someone’s Monster is Loose Cattle’s third album, but only their first of (mostly) original songs. Writing the album, Cerveris and Kaye looked to deep southern storytelling traditions to craft complex tales of human existence. “We were usually drawn to the outsider perspectives and the people who are often overlooked in any community,” says Cerveris. “Partly because we both felt like we had been misfits and outsiders in our communities growing up, so we were drawn to those points of view.”

Someone’s Monster opens with the brooding, indignant “Further On,” an incredulous lament. Cerveris and Kaye, like many others, hoped that fighting COVID-19 would unify Americans and recalibrate how the country values human life. Instead, the country fractured further.

“[I] thought that this global threat to our existence would be this straw that broke the camel’s back and finally made us all recognize our interdependence and interconnectedness, and that it would be the thing that would unite us against the common enemy,” Cerveris says. “I now think if aliens ever do come down to take over the planet, we’re just fucked, because it’s not going to be Independence Day. We’re just going to be fighting about whether the Democrats invited them down purposely or whatever.”

After “Further On,” the album unfolds in a series of intimate vignettes: There’s a cover of Lady Gaga’s “Joanne,” which implores a loved one not to succumb to illness and remain earthbound, and features Lucinda Williams. There’s the total destruction of a young woman whose life unravels through a failing (abusive) relationship and dead ends in fatal pregnancy complications in “Cheyneville.” In “Here’s That Attention You Ordered,” a swampy revenge fever dream, they tell a story inspired by Kaye’s real experience of a woman who was objectified and fondled by a strange man. And in the gothic, wrenching “God’s Teeth,” Cerveris struggles to rectify the community-oriented Christianity in which he was raised, with the vitriolic version he still often encounters (and which Falwell personified).

After a brief, joyful break to cover Lucinda Williams’ “Crescent City,” a love letter to New Orleans (where Kaye lives and which serves as the band’s spiritual home), the album pivots to eulogize the lives and ways of life lost over the last few years in the song “Before We Begin.” As a thesis statement of sorts for the album, Lose Cattle used to kick off live shows with the song, and considered it for an album opener. Instead, they placed it mid-album, where it falls as the first track on the second disk of the double vinyl, 12-track album.

“Sometimes the most respectful thing you can do is put the urn on the altar instead of the middle of the room,” Kaye says. “Surely you will notice the altar. It’s an altar. I don’t need to stick this in the middle room and put a neon sign on top of it and be like, ‘By the way, this is our COVID grief song. Do you guys see it? You guys see it?’”

The rest of the album is less character-driven, but remains focused on marginalized stories of those who resist and survive cycles of power and suppression. “Not Over Yet,” is an anthem to resilience — addressed to New Orleans after yet another hurricane — but honoring the strength of the people who keep putting their lives back together. “The Shoals,” which features Patterson Hood, is a swampy, defiant retort written from the perspective of a river demon. “Antiversary” is a waltz back to life after a breakup and “Big Night Out” is a pop-country bop for anyone who’s faded from relevance, written with middle-aged women especially in mind.

Human Stories

In the simplest terms, Someone’s Monster makes Faye’s case from her speech to Falwell at the end of the musical directly, fiercely, and succinctly, beseeching the listener to hold onto humanity’s fundamental decency. But as they headed in to record at Dockside Studio in Louisiana, where they cut the album, Kaye worried too many of the tracks were angry. She texted Cerveris and suggested they write one more song that wasn’t furious. The result, the string-driven, sweet and slow “Tender Mercy,” closes the album, and proffered the album’s title. “No need for arson / Burning it down / Open your heart and / Spread it around / We’ve been doing it wrong.”

“The title is a reminder especially at this moment, no matter how righteously pure or righteously indignant you feel, we are all someone’s monster,” Kaye told the audience at the Someone’s Monster release show. “No matter how hard you try, no matter how hard you try to extend compassion, because you hurt somebody. And we gotta be accountable for that.”

“That whole song is — and the decision to title [the album] that is — a plea, or an olive branch, or a hand being held out to try to find some way to connect and reconcile all of us to something that gets us out of this downward spiral that we’re in,” Cerveris adds. “Because all the anger in the world, justified as it is, is not going to get us there.”

The landing page for Loose Cattle’s website features simply the band name, and a tagline of sorts: “Towards a New South,” which might as well be the mission statement for Somebody’s Monster, and equally so for Tammy Faye. Taken together, album and musical connected through Cerveris’ work in both, present a dark, nuanced dissection of the generational and social forces keeping people down in America, particularly the American South. And through those critiques, a way forward told in tiny, important, human stories, whose relatability elevate them to inescapable importance.

“Michael is not an actor who has a band or an actor who’s a songwriter. He is a musician and a songwriter who happens to be a really fucking good actor and just broke through there first,” Kaye says. “It’s so easy to do the thing of ‘well, he’s on Broadway and he tells stories, and he was Sondheim’s muse, and so that’s why he tells story songs.’ No, that’s not why he tells story songs. He tells story songs because story songs really impact people, and melodies and harmonies can resonate with you [as do] visceral, emotional pictures.”