Tag Archives: Hayes Carll

Kelly Willis and Bruce Robison, Dakota Jazz Club, Minneapolis, MN

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Bruce Robison, Kelly Willis, with Jeff Kling on guitar & "Lunchmeat" on bass

Bruce Robison, Kelly Willis, with Jeff Kling on guitar & “Lunchmeat” on bass

We know them by their first names, always spoken in tandem:  George and Tammy; Johnny and June; Conway and Loretta; Waylon and Jessi.   Add the names Bruce and Kelly to that list, as they are the new heirs apparent to the grand tradition of country music couples.

Both members of this husband-wife duo have enjoyed successful careers in the music business: Kelly Willis as a well-known singer and Bruce Robison as both a performer and an in-demand songwriter.  Married for 17 years, the couple just recently joined musical forces on “Cheater’s Game,” their first album together.  The album has garnered enthusiastic reviews and a nomination for Album of the Year by the Americana Music Association, as well as a Group/Duo nomination for Robison and Wills.  Their current tour brought them to the Dakota Jazz Club in early May, where they quickly transformed the classy downtown night spot into the upscale equivalent of a Texas roadhouse.

Matters got off to a lively start with the Dickey Lee classic, “9,999,999 Tears To Go,” with Bruce’s mid-range baritone harmonizing well with Kelly’s sweet, earnest alto voice.  The country weeper, “Dreamin” followed, featuring a lonesome harp solo by Bruce, accenting Kelly’s mournful, yearning lead vocal.  Ä cover of Dave Alvin’s “Border Radio” was next, with the rockabilly edge of the original softened somewhat by the pedal steel guitar work of Jeff Kling, who alternated between the Telecaster (lead and slide) and pedal steel all night.

Kelly Willis

Kelly Willis

Not to be outdone by her songwriting husband, Kelly introduced “What I Deserve” by noting that she had co-written the song with local hero Gary Louris, best known for his work with the seminal Twin Cities alt-country band, The Jayhawks, but a frequent songwriting collaborator with other musicians as well.  When it was Bruce’s turn to step out front, he chose “Wrapped,” his composition that became a hit song for George Strait.  With its chorus about being “wrapped around your pretty little finger again,” it was clearly and unabashedly a love song directed at the lovely blond woman standing and strumming to his left.

It was back to the “Cheater’s Game,” album for the next couple of songs, the wistful, bluegrass-flavored “Leavin'” and ‘the more uptempo “But I Do.”  The fiddle parts from the recorded versions of both songs were missed – an unfortunate but necessary consequence of working within the confines of a small-club tour budget.  Switching back to material from her solo efforts, Kelly knocked it out of the park with “Heaven Bound,” a curious combination of sad lyrics wed to a rousing country beat.  It was a pure honky-tonk angel turn for Kelly, and a standout moment of the show.

The set list continued to alternate between songs off the new album and other gems from the duo’s respective catalogues, with the trucking song “Born To Roll” and the title track to “Cheater’s Game” falling in the former category, and “My Brother and Me,” and “Traveling Soldier” (Bruce’s hit song for The Dixie Chicks) representing the latter.  A cover of The Kendalls’ 1977 classic “I Think I’m Giving In” led to an audience request  for “I Don’t Want To Love You But I Do,” Kelly’s first single.  “We thought we were going to be as big as The Beatles!” Kelly noted wryly, and with the wisdom that has come from over 20 years in the business.

Bruce introduced his next song by noting “I have two kinds of songs: sad songs, and slightly faster sad songs,” leading into “Angry All The Time.”  A depressing vignette about a couple whose marriage is disintegrating, “Angry” was originally recorded by Bruce but became a hit for another, better known country music couple, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill.. The antidote to that sad song followed, with Kelly’s sweet rendition of Bruce’s tender love ballad, “Cradle of Love.”  Then it was back to Bruce, who noted that since it was a Sunday night, it was time for a “spiritual,” namely, his hilarious ode to The Red Headed Stranger, “What Would Willie Do?”  The set ended with two more songs from the “Cheater’s Game” album, the Hayes Carll composition, “Long Way Home,” featuring another harp solo by Bruce, and the hopeful, rollicking “Lifeline.”

Bruce and Kelly ended the night with the encore set of Bruce’s “What Did You Think,” followed by a rousing cover of the Jeannie C. Riley mega-hit, “Harper Valley PTA.”  With their well-balanced and carefully selected set list, Bruce and Kelly not only showcased their new album and highlighted each other’s individual careers, but also covered a generous sampling of earlier country music classics.  It was a full and satisfying evening by country music’s newest up and coming power couple.

Delivering The Goods: Hayes Carll, with Warren Hood and The Goods, Cedar Cultural Center, Minneapolis, MN, 3/30/13

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(Editors’ Note:  We apologize for the long March hibernation on this site.  The new posts should be coming with more regularity in the future.)

Hayes Carll, Cedar Cultural Center, Minneapolis, MN, 3/30/13

Hayes Carll, Cedar Cultural Center, Minneapolis, MN, 3/30/13

Pity the poor folks who sauntered in late to the sold-out Hayes Carll show.  Sure, they got a healthy dose of Warren Hood and The Goods, in their role as Hayes’ backing band, but they missed out on a fine opening set by the young Austin-based quintet.

Boyish band leader Warren Hood is an accomplished, Berklee School of Music-trained violinist, the son of well-known Austin sideman Champ Hood, and a member of the San Francisco-based acoustic/newgrass band, The Waybacks.  Equally adept at classical, Cajun, Western swing and gypsy jazz styles, Hood’s violin/fiddle playing was captivating, from the opening notes of the Doug Kershaw-like opener (“Going To New Orleans”) through the end of their set (regrettably, most of the songs were new, titles unannounced, other than that they will appear on the band’s CD coming out on June 4) .  And Hood is not the only member of the band with impressive musical genes.  Keyboardist/singer Emily Gimble is the granddaughter of pioneering Western swing fiddler Johnny Gimble, a former member of Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys.  She has a sultry, soulful voice and a deft touch on the keys, complementing Hood’s soaring violin solos.

Warren Hood and The Goods

Warren Hood and The Goods

Hood and The Goods provided complementary backing for Hayes Carll’s set, which was less rocking than his previous two visits to the Twin Cities.  The first four selections came from Hayes’ 2008 release, “Trouble In Mind”: the gentle, unrequited love ballad “Beaumont;” the stone-cold country of “Wild As A Turkey” (minus the pedal steel of the original); the lively Texas two-stepper, “It’s A Shame;” and “Girl Downtown,” a wry story-song about two ordinary folks who “maybe could be the one” for each other.

Mixed in with the set were a number of hilarious stories, including one where Hayes described living in Croatia, “where about half the country was unemployed, so there were a lot of people to hang out with.”  He described playing handball with a handball team there and heading to the shower one day after a match, only to find the entire team blocking the entrance to the shower.  Puzzled, Hayes looked to the one team member who spoke the best English, who announced, “OK, let’s see!  Is everything REALLY bigger in Texas?!” As the laughter from the audience died down, Hayes remarked, self-deprecatingly, “There were a lot of disappointed people that day.”

“I Got A Gig” was prefaced with a lengthy tale about his early days, playing a tiny bar in coastal Texas, where a local drug dealer named Mike would use his profits to stock his own private zoo.  Hayes remarked that Mike would occasionally load up his lion in a barred trailer “just like a circus trailer” and drive it to Hayes’ gigs at Bob’s Sports Bar & Grill, where Hayes could turn around onstage and gaze out the window behind him, at the lion staring back at him from his cage.  Hayes was in England later that year, when Hurricane Ike hit the Gulf, and, anxious for news of the event, he picked up a London newspaper and was stunned to see a picture of Mike’s lion on the front page.  It seems that Mike had turned all of his animals loose, to fend for themselves, before he evacuated inland, and the lion wound up inside a church, along with four other poor residents who’d decided to ride out the storm, in an uncomfortable stand-off for several days.  (Sounds vaguely like a recent popular book and movie, doesn’t it?)

Back to the music.  Hayes and Emily Gimble reprised his duet with Cary Hearst (Shovels and Rope), “Another Like You,” from his 2011 release “KMAG YOYO,” with Emily giving as good as she got on that whimsical tale of sexual attraction overcoming political and personal differences.  After the “Subterranean Homesick Blues”- like title track to “KMAG YOYO,” Hayes sent The Goods offstage, leaving just he and Warren Hood to do a 3-song mini-set, consisting of a new song co-written with Darrel Scott called “The Magic Kid,” (about his 9-year old aspiring magician son),  followed by his “license plate song,” “Live Free Or Die,” from his 2002 debut album, and culminating in the hilarious road misadventure song, “Bible On The Dash.”  Hayes and Corb Lund trade verses of the song on Corb’s current album, “Cabin Fever,” but for some reason Hayes sang the whole song himself, rather than enlisting the assistance of Mr. Hood.

The rest of the band gradually returned to the stage as Hayes strummed and began singing the opening lines of one of his signature tunes, “Bad Liver And A Broken Heart.” Where the song is normally a rave-up high point of the evening, here it was played at half speed, making it mournful and melancholy, rather than rowdy and rocking.  Personally, I prefer rowdy and rocking.

Hayes is a great collaborator, as witness the various duets and co-writing noted above, and he spent a short time near the end of his set talking about a tongue-in-cheek side project of his and Johnny Evans’, that they call The Ego Brothers.  Corb Lund was just made a member, Hayes announced, and his contribution is a brief couplet that Hayes sang, that went “I wonder what all the ugly people are doing tonight?”  Hayes then sang The Ego Brothers only official composition, “Ain’t Enough Of Me To Go Around.”  Classic braggadocio about being so sexually attractive that, for the sake of womankind, “When Momma had me, she should have had two or three.”

Hayes closed out the set with his Ray Wylie Hubbard collaboration, “Drunken Poet’s Dream,” followed by the uptempo “The Lovin’ Cup,” and the wistful “I Wish I Hadn’t Stayed So Long.”  The encore set closed out with the witty, blasphemous “She Left Me For Jesus,” (somehow fitting, Hayes announced perversely, for the night before Easter) and a rollicking “Stomp And Holler.”  Before playing “She Left Me …” Hayes noted that this was only the third night that he and Hood and The Goods had played together, and they had not actually worked that song up as part of their set list.  But, the band played with confidence and the smile on Hayes’ face betrayed a good deal of satisfaction at his choice of the band to tour with.