"I stayed up all night last night, just signing a thousand copies of Love Story."
It is release day for Yelawolf, and you can hear a mixture of exhaustion and relief in his soft-spoken voice. The Alabama-by-way-of-Antioch MC is being escorted from the hotel to the van, squeezing in a quick chat with the Scene as he makes the rounds promoting the most ambitious and anticipated release of his career.
A sprawling 18-track opus that indulges a swath of sounds from Southern rock to trap, Love Story finds Yela at his most unpredictable, and at his hungriest. The LP boldly and brazenly recontextualizes Southern identity in the 21st century. It's a document of an artist trying to parse the myriad layers of meaning inherent to making music below the Mason-Dixon line.
It's also an album that's challenging and confusing in the way it jumps between genres and the way it blurs the line between the trap house and the mud pit, the dirt farmer and the street rat. Love Story takes more than one turn toward the dark and disquieting, where insights into addiction and poverty are unpleasantly detailed.
"Everybody at Shady Records was really cool," the rapper says. "[They] basically gave me the keys to the studio and said, 'Do what you want, man, make the album you want make.' ... Marshall [Mathers, aka Eminem] is an artist, and there's a mutual respect there in terms of creativity. There's a lot of power in letting an artist do what they want."
The artistic leeway is obvious from the album's lift-off, "Outer Space." The track opens with an alien-abduction-skit-turned-cosmic-slop that finds Yela in the rapid-fire rapper mode of his classic Trunk Muzik mixtapes. This stands in stark contrast to the lead single "American You," which almost collapses under the weight of its own small-town nostalgia.
But the initial cognitive dissonance, that nagging "what's he trying to do?" vibe dissipates as the album gets deeper. The rapper's refusal to be constricted by our standardized social and sonic fences gives the music a healthier, more enduring sense of songcraft. Here, Yela has created a robust listening experience that is far greater than the sum of its parts.
Love Story succeeds where many recent country/hip-hop hybrids have failed. Appendages aren't welded wantonly; the album isn't a Frankenstein's monster. It's a living, breathing organism. When Eminem makes an appearance on the surprisingly spiritual "Best Friend," it has none of the corporate plasticity that haunted Yela's guest-crowded, genre-muddling major label debut Radioactive.
"All those influences come from a real place," the rapper explains. "I really do love outlaw country, I really do love rock 'n' roll. ... I grew up in it.
"Onstage with Ted Nugent at 6. Onstage with Alabama and Dwight Yoakam at 7 years old. I was on tour buses for years. My mom's husband toured as Randy Travis' stage manager for years, so there's a lot of personal connections to that."
On Love Story, Yela adheres to that most primal of rock 'n' roll doctrines — open up and bleed. The results are raw, unflinching emotional screeds like "Till It's Gone," with its apocalyptic motorik beat and gentle guitar line, or the woozy wish-fulfillment of "Tennessee Love," which never seems quite secure in its happiness. And the emotional state of the characters on the album's title track is never stable, never sedentary
"The creative side is schizophrenic, but it's honest," Yela explains. "I think that it feels the way it's supposed to. It's not like someone came in and said, 'Hey, why don't you sing a country song. Just played the guitar and that's what came out of that session, you know?"
The tension between roots and modernity pulls at Love Story in much the way it has been pulling at Nashville. Starry-eyed moments of progression are tugged back to reality by the way things were, drum machines and dulcimers staring each other down like desperadoes at high noon.
"I knew that I had to go to Nashville [to record]," Yela says. "I partly grew up there, I lived there from like 7 to 15 — the formative years — the first rap I ever wrote was there. ... But overall it was the music scene and the vibe of Nashville that I wanted to reconnect with."
Love Story taps into the dynamism and multiplicity of Music City in a way that hasn't really been captured on a major label before. The vibe is less Music Row and more of the weird and wild Nashville that lurks by the pikes and no-tell motels on the edges of Davidson County. Love Story is that rarest of birds — a truly Nashville hip-hop album.
"I've come full circle," says Yelawolf. "I'm bringing everything back. The challenge was making it diverse but not too fucking all over the place. It wasn't easy, man, but it paid off."
Email music@nashvillescene.com
