The story of singer, guitarist and songwriter Austin Lucas’ time in Nashville might strike an observer as an example of how an artist can lose himself in the city and fulfill his ambitions only by leaving it behind. Lucas, who has just released the superb new full-length Immortal Americans on small, up-and-coming Alabama record label Cornelius Chapel Records, struggled four years ago to get what could have been his breakthrough record to the audience it deserved.
Lucas’ then-label, New West, passed on his Between the Moon and Midwest. When it was eventually released in 2016, Lucas’ album registered as one of the most original Americana albums of that year. But that doesn’t mean the forces of commerce always set out to squash talent. Lucas made an album the label was loath to promote, partly because Lucas’ life was a mess. He cleaned up the mess and kept on writing. Recorded and mixed by post-punk legend Steve Albini at his Chicago studio, Immortal Americans is a triumph for Lucas, but it didn’t come easy.
“Honestly, man, living in Nashville almost killed me, and it taught me a lot of life lessons,” Lucas tells the Scene from a perch at an East Side coffee shop. He’s in town to play a couple of shows at the yearly AmericanaFest, and he recalls how things were in the Nashville of five years ago, when he was signed to a publishing deal and to a major Americana label.
“When I was off the road here, hanging out, I would sporadically write songs on Music Row,” Lucas says about his 2012-2014 stint in Nashville. “The last four or five months that I was signed to New West before they dropped me, I was working a lot. I had some demos that got close, had some holds, but never got a cut. [The experience] taught me that it wasn’t for me.”
A former member of the Indiana University Children’s Choir who slides naturally into bluegrass mode, Lucas was born on March 5, 1979, in Bloomington, Ind. He comes from a musical family and from a well-defined regional music scene. As he says, “I was conceived in Needmore [Commune] in a shack with no running water my dad built.” His father, bluegrass musician Bob Lucas, had moved in the ’70s to Needmore, a few miles outside Bloomington, and the family relocated closer to town before Austin’s birth.
Bob Lucas was part of Bloomington’s ’70s rock and folk scene, which spawned a number of notable musicians and a pioneering indie label, Bar-B-Q Records. He cut an early-’70s folk-rock album for Bar-B-Q, as did Nashville-area singer and label co-founder Caroline Peyton, who worked with both Lucas and record producer and future R.E.M. collaborator Mark Bingham in Bloomington.
The younger Lucas’ music honors the experimental tendencies of his forebears, who often mixed jazz with progressive folk. But he came to country through punk.
“As I got to be an older teenager, I crossed into the world of anarcho-hardcore,” says Lucas. “I got into a lot of stuff that was on Crass Records, very heavy hardcore bands that have a metal tinge a lot of the time, very political.”
Moving to the Czech Republic in 2003, Lucas played the European punk circuit and returned to the United States in 2008. He cut 2013’s Stay Reckless for New West at Nashville’s Beech House Recording. It was an honorable effort, but Between the Moon and the Midwest, recorded in Nashville with former Glossary singer Joey Kneiser producing, broke new ground.
New West didn’t see it that way, and pulled the record as it went into production. Whatever the label’s reasons might have been, Lucas now says he realizes he wasn’t a particularly marketable commodity in 2014. Overweight, drinking and drugging, Lucas had moved to Nashville in the wake of a messy divorce, and his problems increased during his time in Music City. The label dropped Lucas in late 2014, and he released Between the Moon and the Midwest in spring 2016.
“What [New West] saw was talent in a shell that was completely unmarketable,” Lucas says. “They probably saw an artist that was going nowhere, and they chose to not invest any more money in that artist. My record still sold better than they anticipated.”Â
Immortal Americans is a nice bookend for the Byrds-like Between the Moon, and Albini’s production honors Lucas’ songwriting. Lucas, who quit drinking and has gotten into fighting trim by practicing martial arts, moved back to Bloomington a few years ago, and he sounds glad to be home.Â
Still, he remains a punk at heart, and he’s learned the music business game through hard experience. As he says about his younger days: “I had no manners as far as the industry goes at all. If a promoter gave me shit, I told him to go fuck himself. That is not any kind of position to be in if you’re trying to make a career in the thing.”
