Introducing Hayes Carll at the WMOT’s AmericanaFest Day Stage, Web Wilder joked about his first interview with the Texas singer-songwriter. He had been told, “This guy has great stories.” That day, he says, Carll didn’t come through. For his set at The Wash–Eastside Bowl, he proved to his audience that he had plenty of stories to feed his lyrics.
He opened with “You Get It All,” the title song from his upcoming album set for release on October 29. As his fans will attest, Carll has a way with a hook. He introduced the next song with a story about the new dog he and wife singer-songwriter Allison Moorer adopted through a rescue center. He described the havoc the dog has wrought: “She ate our couch, she eats our table, she eats the floor. She ate a blanket some guy named Hermes gave my wife.” When the dog destroyed Moorer’s white peonies, she told him, “That’s why we can’t have nice things.”
He turned it into a song. After singing, “Help Me Remember,” a tender nod to all that’s lost in dementia, he sang “She’ll Come Back to Me,” calling it “a sad one just to mix it up.”
Continue to joke about not having stories, he described how during his “first twenty-four years and the last eighteen months when I finished, nobody clapped.”
Singing a song co-written with Brandy Clark, who sings on the new record, he said, “I’m going to do both parts. Not in a weird way.”
While Hayes Carll is the master of dry humor, he was serious as he expressed his gratitude to the Americana Music Association, saying that he performed for the first time, his first time at the Ryman, and continuing for 18 years. The organization, he noted, makes a place for “people like me that don’t have a traditional musical home.”
He closed with one of his recent hits, “None Ya,” just another of his songs that proves he really does have plenty of stories.
