Erin Enderlin grew up in Conway, Ark., the seat of Faulkner County, 30 miles north of Little Rock. Most of the characters in her songs could have been residents of her hometown, and she thought of calling her new album Conway. But she was afraid people would think it was a Conway Twitty tribute record, so instead she called it Faulkner County.
That had the added advantage of nodding in the direction of her favorite novelist, William Faulkner, who drew his characters from the area around his own hometown of Oxford, Miss. Enderlin has also been a Twitty fan since childhood, and it’s that combination of modernist literature and classic country that makes her songs so distinctive.
Consider the song “Tonight I Don’t Give a Damn” from the new album. It opens with a slow-moving Wurlitzer electric-piano figure, and her weary soprano sets the scene with literary details: “Gene Watson singing ‘Farewell Party’ / Single-barrel double shot on ice / Sitting here talking to a stranger / ’Cause I don’t wanna be alone tonight.” The song’s narrator knows she’s heading toward a one-night stand that will leave her guilty and empty in the morning. But right now, she doesn’t “give a damn.”
You don’t hear this kind of song on country radio anymore — this kind of adult situation, where sex and alcohol can overwhelm good judgment, where strong desires can justify any mistake, where guilt is not only acknowledged but also accepted as the price of admission to human interaction. If you’ve been listening to radio fantasies about guilt-free highs and hook-ups that all turn out for the best, Enderlin’s songs offer an unexpected, bracing splash of reality.
“Sometimes we want to be comforted,” she says, “but sometimes we just want to recognize the human condition. It’s not about condemning or glorifying; it’s about being real, showing a person’s flaws and failures. Sometimes people don’t make the best decisions, and I love songs that put you in that specific moment in time. The intensity of that is very compelling to me. When you’re in the middle of something, you feel it a lot stronger.”
Enderlin has had some success on country radio. When she was a senior at Middle Tennessee State University in 2004, her co-write “Monday Morning Church” was a hit single for Alan Jackson, reaching No. 5 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs. Another co-write, “Last Call,” was a top single for Lee Ann Womack, reaching No. 14 on that chart in 2008. Enderlin has five songs on Terri Clark’s most recent album, 2018’s Raising the Bar, and she has cuts on recent releases by Reba McEntire (Stronger Than the Truth) and Rodney Crowell (Texas). You’ll be able to hear Enderlin on the radio again on Saturday, when she plays the Ernest Tubb Midnite Jamboree. (You can see the show live at 10 p.m. at the Texas Troubadour Theater, or hear the broadcast on WSM-AM 650 at midnight.)
“I grew up listening to my grandfather’s record collection,” Enderlin says over the phone from Arkansas, where she’s visiting family. As a child, she couldn’t play the records herself. Each time she visited, she could ask for one album, and he would play it. “It was mostly country music and mostly male singers. I remember watching the Nashville Now TV show and seeing Reba. Something clicked inside me: ‘Oh, girls do this too.’ I’ve been a fan ever since.
“I have a lot of different influences,” she adds, “but that classic country sound is really special to me. I’ve been obsessed with fiddle and steel forever, because those instruments bring out so much emotion. I was also influenced by Emmylou Harris and that California country-rock sound, songs like Rodney [Crowell]’s ‘Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight.’ Rodney is one of my favorite writers, and that song I co-wrote with him, ‘You’re Only Happy When You’re Miserable,’ he recorded as a duet with Ringo Starr.”
Faulkner County is a sequel to Enderlin’s 2017 album Whiskeytown Crier. Most of the songs on both collections originated in the same sessions produced by Jamey Johnson and Moose Brown, and most of the characters in the songs are residents of a typical Southern small town that might be called Conway or Whiskeytown. It was Johnson who had the idea of making the earlier record a concept album, an audio newspaper reporting on the local residents’ misdeeds like a town crier.
“Because I write such stories,” Enderlin explains, “it was easy to imagine all these people living in the same town and hanging out at the same bar. Tammy Wynette and those singers weren’t singing their own diaries. They took on the personalities of people down at the hairdresser’s, going through life’s trials and tribulations. I grew up watching Leave It to Beaver, but life isn’t like that. There are problems worse than burning your apple pie in the oven.”
Such problems are tackled in “Broken” and “Till It’s Gone,” two songs from Whiskeytown Crier that were remastered and reprised on Faulkner County. “Broken” opens with the kind of line you’ll never hear on a “Hot Country” playlist: “He was a bastard, even though he knew his daddy.” The song’s narrator is that boy’s teenage wife because, as she sings, “I saw in him what he saw in me / A broken limb from a crooked family tree.” The pedal-steel guitar, which had been hovering behind the half-spoken verses, swells underneath the chorus as Enderlin sings, “When broken’s all you know / It’s all that you know how to be.”
“A lot of people think these songs are very dark and these characters are undesirable,” says Enderlin, “but you’re only seeing them in that moment under pressure. Some of us wear it on our sleeve, and some of us don’t. Like in The Scarlet Letter, this girl has to wear a letter on her shirt, but how many other people made the same mistake and don’t have to wear the letter? As much as we like to think our own experience is so unique, it’s really not. Don Schlitz is one of my favorite writers, and ‘The Gambler’ is one of my favorite songs. I have nothing in common with either of those characters [in the song], but still he draws me in and I connect with them.”
Any songwriter who can make the connection between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Don Schlitz in her songs is someone to be reckoned with. That’s Erin Enderlin.
