To get a sense of what Hayes Carll has been up to the past few years, just listen to both versions of his song “Love Don’t Let Me Down.” The first, a duet with Caitlin Rose released as a stand-alone single in 2012, features Carll as the consummate country professional, singing harmony with Rose behind a gorgeously slick pedal-steel meets piano accompaniment. “Watched my dreams all turn and run/ They left me alone, thinking they’d come back someday,” Carll croons, holding out the last syllable of “someday” with the suave intimacy of a Sinatra ballad.
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Listen, then, to the solo rendition of “Love Don’t Let Me Down” included on Lovers And Leavers, Hayes Carll’s fifth full-length album and first since his 2011 breakthrough KMAG YOYO (& Other American Stories). The recording begins with Carll’s soft, tired vocal accompanied merely by the quiet drone of a standup bass. When he sings that same line — the one about his dreams abandoning him — this time it’s delivered in a cracked whisper, with Carll barely pronouncing the final syllable of that final word —”someday” — before his voice, too weary to continue, fades out and disappears.
“Love Don’t Let Me Down” is one of several new songs that, despite his original intentions, have ended up being about Hayes Carll. “When we did that song four or five years ago it did not feel like it was about my life,” says Carll, sitting in his publicist’s office on a rainy Wednesday morning in New York. “And then, it became another example of one of those songs that starts off in one place and ends up meaning something else at a different point in your life. I came back and did it solo, and it really resonated with me in a much more personal way.”
Hayes Carll has been through a lot in the mere three years that separate the recordings of “Love Don’t Let Me Down.” He toured non-stop in support of KMAG, an experience that Carll says left him “feeling really disconnected as a performer.” With KMAG, he also experienced the highest profile moments of his career, attending award shows and earning his first Billboard-charting record. He divorced his wife, with whom he has a 12-year-old child (“The Magic Kid,” a tender ballad on Carll’s latest, is about his son), and recently, began dating fellow songwriter (and longtime collaborator) Allison Moorer.
Last year, Carll also earned his first Grammy nomination as the songwriter behind “Chances Are,” by Lee Ann Womack. He skipped out on the ceremony (“I hate awards shows, they’re excruciatingly boring”) but he was thrilled to have been nominated, particularly for the Country Song of the Year category.
During that same period, Carll also eventually began compiling material for his next record, which he wanted to sound very different from anything he had done before. Unable to come up with much on his own, Carll began making regular trips to Nashville from his native Austin for co-writing sessions with people like JD Souther, Jim Lauderdale, and Darrell Scott, some of the most respected songwriters in the business.
Carll compiled several dozen songs, but when it came time to record his new album with noted producer Joe Henry in Los Angeles in the fall of 2015, he knew that a lot of the material could be discarded off the bat.
“A lot of songs were ruled [out] because they were about three-ways,” he says, referring to compositions like “One Bed, Two Girls, And Three Bottles Of Wine,” a tongue-in-cheek number that Carll had been performing live. “They were definitely songs for a different time and place that didn’t have a spot on this record.”
“The goal was to make a very concise, focused record that really spoke like a movie,” says Joe Henry, who cut the album with Carll during a quick, highly productive five-day session.
The result, Lovers & Leavers, is the type of work likely to be hailed with superlatives: his most personal, the most stripped down, the most mature. But the best adjective to describe Carll’s latest collection might just be intense. These are songs that probe insecurities, laying bare deep-seated doubts and fears you’d rather pretend don’t exist.
To give a sense of the stakes of the material on Lovers & Leavers, a simple question about the album’s lead single, “The Love That We Need,” promptly causes the singer to discuss his first marriage with the type of honesty and clear-headed self-reflection usually reserved for the therapist’s couch.
“The song is about this sense of, ‘I thought it was what I wanted and I’ve tried, we’ve both tried really hard but this is not what we need, in spite of all the good things that are here. Neither of us are at our best right now, and that’s really hard to accept, and even harder to do something about.’”
Carll has said that he doesn’t want his new album to be viewed as his Blood On The Tracks,” which is another way of saying: don’t pigeonhole Lovers & Leavers as a divorce record. But what is clear this time around is that Carll has found a new creative focus and willingness to interrogate emotions, anxieties and insecurities more deeply than he ever has before.
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Hayes Carll has been touring the country ever since the 2002 release of his debut, Flowers & Liquor. The Texas singer was poised for a breakthrough, both commercially and artistically, when he signed with Lost Highway records for his critically acclaimed 2008 record, Trouble In Mind. But that April, the very week Trouble In Mind was released, Carll came down with a bad case of strep throat. For the next five or so years, during which Carll experienced the most commercial success and sustained media attention of his entire career, his voice never fully recovered.
In fact, by the time Carll went in to the studio to record KMAG, his voice had gotten so bad that he was forced to write specifically for his newly limited vocal range. “It was this interesting, frustrating thing where my career was at its high point and my talent was sort of at its low point,” he says of the period. “There were more eyes on me than there had ever been and I was embarrassed to open my mouth on a lot of nights. I kept wanting to say, ‘You should have seen me five years ago, before this happened!’”
It didn’t help that Carll now found himself playing larger rock clubs with a loud five-piece band. “In a sense, I started shouting, and I lost a lot of what had been my strength of connecting with the crowd,” he says. “I felt like I needed to ramp up everything, the energy, the volume, and that was harmful to my voice. I enjoyed parts of it but it was not my sweet spot or comfort zone as a performer.”
“Springsteen I am not,” he adds.
Part of the problem was also Carll’s relentless touring schedule. For the first decade-plus of his touring career, Carll says it had never occurred to him to take time off from the road. “I always had this fear that the whole world would forget about me if I wasn’t constantly somewhere trying to turn somebody on to what I was doing,” he says.
“I’m starting to become aware now that artists do it different ways, they’ll tour for three to six months and then are done for the year, or they take a few months off. I never used to do that. I didn’t know that was even a thing.”
Today, Carll is energized by his latest musical direction, and he’s regained much of his vocal capabilities that had once escaped him. As of late, he’s been touring as a much quieter three-piece acoustic outfit, and his trio will be touring listening rooms and folk clubs as he promotes Lovers & Leavers.
Carll has also already begun work on a follow-up. “I can overcome the pressure of it being so long in between records by following this up pretty quickly with another one. That’s something I need and want to do,” says Carll, who hopes to record his next album within the year.
