Adult Material

Hayes Carll pines for lost youth differently than Tom Waits or The Ramones. (“Pine” isn’t really a verb you’d apply to the latter two.) Waits growled through the ramshackle original version of “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” and The Ramones sawed through theirs with caustic guitars and a callow snarl. On Carll’s latest album, Trouble in Mind, he gives the song a moping country treatment that doesn’t sound a bit menacing or ironic—just heartfelt.

“I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” echoes the gap between the album’s wild-eyed nostalgia and where Carll is in life. A few years back, the 32-year-old Texas native did something revolutionary for a hard-living troubadour: He settled down with a wife and a kid. But family life hasn’t yet colored his songwriting.

Hayes Carll pines for lost youth differently than Tom Waits or The Ramones. (“Pine” isn’t really a verb you’d apply to the latter two.) Waits growled through the ramshackle original version of “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” and The Ramones sawed through theirs with caustic guitars and a callow snarl. On Carll’s latest album, Trouble in Mind, he gives the song a moping country treatment that doesn’t sound a bit menacing or ironic—just heartfelt.

“I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” echoes the gap between the album’s wild-eyed nostalgia and where Carll is in life. A few years back, the 32-year-old Texas native did something revolutionary for a hard-living troubadour: He settled down with a wife and a kid. But family life hasn’t yet colored his songwriting.

The 14 tracks on Trouble—his third album and first for Lost Highway—revolve around footloose rambling, drinking and badly mangled love affairs. There’s “Faulkner Street”—a bottleneck-seared romp reminiscing about a youthful lounging-and-partying lifestyle. “I Got a Gig” channels the “homeless Cheers on meth” where Carll first earned a living playing music in the coastal Texas community of Crystal Beach. As he puts it, it’s “a place where a lot of people move to hide out from the law, or ex-wives or the IRS.”

“When I started, I wasn’t listening to [songwriters] to hear them sing about their children or how happy they were,” says Carll. “The guys that I was into, it was about the travel and the broken hearts and the toll that life takes on you. That’s what I started out writing, and I was living that for a long time.

“Now it’s not me sitting alone by the fire, looking at the stars on the beach, smoking dope every night; now it’s me putting my kid to bed when I’m at home,” he continues. “I realized at some point that I was fairly happy and that was not a place that I was used to writing from. I dug up previous times and memories to have something to write about and to preserve them for myself.”

The 14 tracks on Trouble—his third album and first for Lost Highway—revolve around footloose rambling, drinking and badly mangled love affairs. There’s “Faulkner Street”—a bottleneck-seared romp reminiscing about a youthful lounging-and-partying lifestyle. “I Got a Gig” channels the “homeless Cheers on meth” where Carll first earned a living playing music in the coastal Texas community of Crystal Beach. As he puts it, it’s “a place where a lot of people move to hide out from the law, or ex-wives or the IRS.”

“When I started, I wasn’t listening to [songwriters] to hear them sing about their children or how happy they were,” says Carll. “The guys that I was into, it was about the travel and the broken hearts and the toll that life takes on you. That’s what I started out writing, and I was living that for a long time.

“Now it’s not me sitting alone by the fire, looking at the stars on the beach, smoking dope every night; now it’s me putting my kid to bed when I’m at home,” he continues. “I realized at some point that I was fairly happy and that was not a place that I was used to writing from. I dug up previous times and memories to have something to write about and to preserve them for myself.”

Carll bridged past and present most successfully with the Stingaree Music Festival he launched in Crystal Beach last year. For this year’s edition, he lured musical cohorts like Ray Wylie Hubbard, Scott Nolan, Will Kimbrough and Darrell Scott—all involved with the new album—down to his old stomping grounds.