KAMG YOYO Album Review as posted in Pop & Hiss~The L.A. Times Music Blog
You can’t listen to this freewheeling Texas singer and songwriter long without becoming thoroughly convinced that he’s a full-blooded relative of Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb and Merle Haggard. Waylon Jennings’ famous observation about Grand Ole Opry standard-bearer Porter Wagoner -- “he couldn’t go pop with a mouthful of firecrackers" -- is equally true of Hayes Carll. There’s an unself-conscious commitment to his rural Southern heritage in everything he sings.
He spins a yarn with fresh wit, details a failure with unflinching honesty, and everything in between remains admirably cliché-free.
“Hard Out Here” breathes life into the well-trod genre of life on the road. Carll confesses: “Everybody’s talking 'bout the shape I’m in/They say, ‘Boy you ain’t a poet, you’re just a drunk with a pen’/It gets hard out here, I know it don’t look it/I used to have heart, but the highway took it.” "Chances Are” is a classic country weeper that exhibits the revealing, economical turn of phrase that writers such as Haggard, Willie Nelson and John Prine have mastered: “Chances are I took the wrong turn every time I had a turn to take/And I guess I broke my own heart every chance I had a heart to break.”
Carll is every bit as expressive a singer as he is a writer, drawling his trenchant observations with deceptive ease. The phrase “the real deal” is bandied about a lot in country music, but in Carll’s case, as Walter Brennan used to say, it’s “no brag, just fact.”
--Randy Lewis
Shovels & Rope will open for Hayes tonight at the Stage Door Theater in Beautiful Charlotte, NC. Get there early and say hello to Jake the Merch Guy, and don't forget to tell him that his mama sends her love.
To buy tickets or get your hands on a copy of KMAG YOYO, go to hayescarll.com
Always remember to BELIEVE~
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