Bobby Bare Jr.'s "Visit Me in Music City" is to fantasies of Nashville as an aspirant star's Shangri-la as the kid-unfriendly version of "Big Rock Candy Mountain" was to a hobo's Eden. Bare sings of record deals that are handy as bumblebees, gumball machines that dispense guitar picks, guitar strings that grow on trees and plenty of other pie-in-the-sky perks on his second Bloodshot set, From the End of Your Leash, a full decade ago. But after a couple seasons' worth of Nashville characters landing big breaks and royalty checks at the unlikely, plot-advancing speed of primetime — not to mention several biz-glossing reality shows — Bare's song is an idea whose time has come.
"I want the city, I want the mayor to take that song and run with it," Bare says on a phone call from the road. "You know, I can change around the words some to make it more family-friendly. ... I'm thinking, like, Vince Gill [saying], 'Visit me in Music City.' I really think that should happen."
When asked if he's prepared to not only swap out the lines about "hills filled with naked Hee Haw honeys," but sweeten the sardonic tone to suit a promo campaign, he scoffs, "I can switch it around. I'll work with them. That's no problem."
Don't let Bare's playful acquiescence fool you. It's never been in his songwriting nature to aim for optimal pleasantness, or to soft-pedal much of anything. He not only tells it like it is — he tells like it is in his head, where there's nothing to check the cheek or right the warp. That's his signature: He's a brilliant needler who picks at psychic and emotional scabs with a striking amount of self-awareness.
On his new, way-out roots-pop album Undefeated, Bare once again tackles delusions of grandeur — this time his own — in the power-pop tune "The Big Time." During shows, he's taken to introducing it with a wry confession: "I'm one of those people, sometimes when I'm at home hanging out with all my friends, my closest friends, I'll look at them and say, 'I cannot wait till I become famous, 'cause I will never hang out with you motherfuckers ever again.' "
Framed as a breakup album — or as Bare puts it, a "getting dumped" album — Undefeated also features the Hayes Carll co-write "My Baby Took My Baby Away," a jaunty, bitingly funny portrait of new-dad pettiness and self-pity, some of the deftest (and in some cases, most deftly passive-aggressive) swipes at emotional nonavailability ever put to record and such potent, unvarnished touring imagery as, "The transmission is slipping / Like a pigeon through a tiger's teeth" (a line from album opener "North of Alabama By Mornin' ").
There's a lot more disclosure where that came from in Bare's recent documentary Don't Follow Me (I'm Lost), including such excruciating scenes as he and his temporary touring band settling up after modestly attended shows and his side of a tense phone conversation with his then-girlfriend back home.
"The issue there is I pay all the bills and I connect all the dots," Bare says now, "but to live with me and be close to me, to watch me do it, is horrifying, to watch how close to the edge I'm dancing."
Of course, as a native son of Nashville — and son of a 2013 Country Music Hall of Famer — significant swaths of Bare's life and career have unfolded in unusually up-close-and-personal fashion, from the endearing, Grammy-nominated duet he recorded with his dad Bobby Bare Sr. as a kid, to the time junior's fellow Belmont student, Joe Baldridge (now an A-list engineer), played it over the cafeteria P.A. as a prank. Junior had hoped to make his album release show a sort of full circle affair, luring both his dad and the members of Bare Jr. — his own late-'90s, chart-grazing, cult alt-rock band — to the stage, but the Bare Jr. reunion will have to wait. It'll be Bare and his current killer backing band, his dad, his tour mate Cory Branan, his eccentric, countrified kindred Birdcloud, his riveting songs and his anything-but-tall tales.
How's this for real talk about how Bare Jr. caught their break?
"I had a publishing deal by my fifth gig and a record deal by my 10th," says Bare. "And it wasn't 'cause I was privileged — it was because all my goofy buddies from the dorm were on my side and in the right places."
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