Anderson East's new record Delilah marks a big shift for the singer-songwriter, who spent years making rounds at open mic nights between gigs as a sound engineer. While the softer sounds of his past are still present on tracks like "What a Woman Wants to Hear" and "Lying in Her Arms," Delilah is a soulful, raspy wail of a record, but East will tell you that this is less an evolution in songwriting than an expansion in resources.
"It was just me and an acoustic guitar and just my voice," East tells the Scene of his older work, "you're not really outfitted to be some grandiose experience." But the one-guy-and-a-guitar thing always felt plenty grandiose for the audience; Just ask go-to trad-country/Americana producer Dave Cobb, who signed East as the first act on his new imprint with Elektra Records, Low Country Sound, after massive acclaim for his work on albums with Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson and Chris Stapleton.
"I think all those guys have that in common," Cobb says of East and the aforementioned roster of wins in his rearview. "They all have the ability, just on their own devices, to walk into a room and pick up a guitar and shut the place down."
That ability is what brought him and East together when Cobb caught a set from the young Athens, Ala., native during a writers' round at The Bluebird Cafe.
"I heard him sing, and it freaked me out," Cobb recalls, "just the sheer tone and rasp and weight of his voice. He started to sing, and about one minute into the song, he stops and he goes, 'Scuse me, y'all, I gotta go pee.' And he gets up and holds the entire crowd at The Bluebird. He comes back out and he's patting people on the back — 'My bad, buddy. I'm sorry for holdin' you up.' I looked around, and people started laughing and giggling. He had the entire crowd in the palm of his hand."
Delilah is the product of what immediately felt like a seamless partnership between the two, one that East says taught him to "let go of the wheel" on the technical aspects and focus on singing and writing.
"It felt like we were recording the record in 1965," says Cobb, who favored a live recording environment. "I think there's something to that. There's a danger and an edge that you can't get the other way around. We definitely treated it like it was an old record."
The '60s vibe in the studio was an obvious choice for at least one track on the album: "Find 'Em, Fool 'Em, Forget 'Em." The album's only song East didn't write, it's a long-buried George Jackson cut the singer discovered during a visit to Muscle Shoals' FAME Studios archive.
"We were really curious about what they had down at FAME—in their archives and hidden in back closets," East recalls. "[As] music fans, we wanted to just hear things that nobody's ever heard before. We called down there not expecting them to give us the time of day."
To their surprise, FAME honcho Rodney Hall opened up the vault, playing cuts from the FAME gang on unheard gems along with tunes made popular by other artists. When Hall brought out "Find 'Em," a song written from the perspective of a heartbroken would-be womanizer, East was hooked. "I just fell in love with the story of it and the cleverness of how it was written," he says. "On top of that, it's one of the grooviest things I've ever heard."
That reverence for the greats of Muscle Shoals meshed unexpectedly well with East's varied musical background, and the way he contextualizes the similarities between genres lends an honesty to his transition from soft-spoken songwriter to charismatic crooner.
"Country music and gospel music and R&B music, at the core of it, it's all the same thing," he says. "You listen to Willie Nelson's early version of 'Crazy,' and it's country because it's Willie Nelson. But that same song — same production even — you could hear Otis Redding or Sam Cooke sing it, with no changes, and then what do you call it? You strip away all the rouge and makeup, and you're left with a song."
East says the songs on Delilah are snapshots of longing rather than heartbreak, storytelling with "peppered truth all throughout it." The fusion of East's own experiences with the influences of the region's greats and the contribution of his peers exemplifies the values Cobb says his imprint strives to nurture and promote beyond the South.
"I think soul music will always be in fashion," Cobb muses. "I think honest music will always be in fashion. I'm just making records that represent where we come from."
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