The first thing you notice about singer-songwriter Jon Byrd’s new EP Me & Paul is the guitar attack. Byrd’s latest batch of material hews to the laws singer-songwriters respect, and he sings in a tenor voice that sounds a little like Gram Parsons’ — but without the maudlin overtones. Me & Paul, which is Byrd’s first release in four years, advances the art of the Nashville co-write, with Byrd sharing songwriting credits with tunesmiths Kevin Gordon and Shannon Wright.
Indeed, Byrd’s new music comes out of the singer-songwriter tradition. It also gives an idiosyncratic guitarist the opportunity to show off his highly ornamented style. Pedal-steel player Paul Niehaus — that’s the other guy in the EP’s title, whose résumé includes stints with alt-country band Calexico and Nashville rockers Lambchop — glides beside him. Byrd snaps off terse licks, played on a small nylon-string guitar equipped with a pickup, that function both as rhythm parts and as melody lines. The simplicity of Me & Paul puts the songs across, which is what singer-songwriters aim for.
Me & Paul was produced by Joe V. McMahan, a Nashville guitarist and producer-engineer who has overseen records by local songwriters like Gordon and blues singer Patrick Sweany. It presents a version of the sound Byrd and Niehaus have perfected in the Nashville shows they’ve done together over the past few years at venues like Madison’s Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge, where the duo just wrapped up a June residency. They’ve also done similar residencies at Betty’s Bar & Grill over on the West Side and Springwater by Centennial Park.
For Byrd, who moved to Nashville 20 years ago with ambitions to be a picker and a songwriter, Me & Paul is about the songs, as people often say in Music City. It’s also about his guitar style, which is the product of long experience.
“I came here as a sideman,” Byrd says via phone from his home in Nashville. “I never wanted to be the front guy. I just wanted to play guitar, find a great band and get better as a songwriter. I’d written a few songs and I thought they were pretty good, and so I just said, ‘You know, I want to go where the songwriters are.’ ”
Byrd made the move to Nashville after spending the previous two decades in Atlanta, where he had played guitar in rock outfits like The Windbreakers and Slim Chance & the Convicts. He laughs about being what he calls “one of those shoegazing art-rockers” during his time in Atlanta, but Byrd spent his early years in Alabama, where he got a dose of both the hits of the day and country music.
He was born on Sept. 4, 1955, in Birmingham, and grew up in the Alabama towns of Frisco City and Tuscaloosa. By the time he made his way to Atlanta in 1981, he was a proficient guitarist who listened to axmen like Television’s Tom Verlaine. That’s interesting, since Byrd makes a point of saying he never rocks. As he told writer Juli Thanki in a piece for The Tennessean: “I love rock. But I also know what rock is.”
In Nashville, Byrd became immersed in the city’s alt-country songwriting scene. He joined a group of songwriters that includes folk-rocker Amelia White, country tunesmith Davis Raines and New Wave guitarist and singer Tim Carroll. Byrd has also written with other quasi-country artists on the level of writer and musician Peter Cooper, who penned the jokey pro-Nashville tune “If Texas Is So Great” with Byrd. That song found its way onto Byrd’s album of material by some of his songwriting friends, 2017’s Dirty Ol’ River.
Me & Paul replicates Byrd’s recent shows with Niehaus, right down to Byrd’s twangy vocals and push-and-pull guitar approach. For Niehaus, playing with Byrd has given him a chance to perform with a true guitar stylist.
“It gives me an opportunity to play real country, and honor our heroes,” says Niehaus. “I hear a lot of Willie Nelson and Merle in his style. But he brings a new thing to it, which is inevitable. You can’t really go anywhere with just doing retro.”
Me & Paul isn’t retro — listen to the way Byrd fires off his guitar licks during a cover of The Louvin Brothers song “Cash on the Barrelhead.” Byrd and Niehaus also essay “I’ll Be Her Only One,” which Byrd wrote with Gordon. Like much of Byrd’s music, it skirts sentimentality but remains tough, thanks to his pained singing.
Elsewhere on Me & Paul, “Why Must You Think of Leaving?,” Byrd’s co-write with Shannon Wright, dips its toe into rock, complete with chords that remind me of those in Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s 1972 folk-rock hit “From the Beginning.” Byrd’s percussive guitar makes the song work in the context of Nashville singer-songwriterdom, a subset of rock that generally doesn’t rock.
“If I’m playin’ a steel-string acoustic, or my own Tele, I’m just blurring and blending. But man, I can do a little trill or a run on my nylon-string guitar, and it cuts.”
