Hayes Carll

Hayes Carll

We’re Only Human

Hayes Carll isn’t preaching or teaching. He’s not interested in telling the rest of us what to do or think. But he is charting out a personal guide for his life, quieting the noise, and sitting with his real voice – the one that’s candid, consistent, and often inconvenient.

We’re Only Human is Carll’s tenth album. Like his best lyrics, it is also an understated masterpiece, an honest snapshot of one man’s confrontation and delight with humanity’s biggest and most intimate questions. Where do we find forgiveness for ourselves and grace for others? How do we hold on to peace of mind and stay present? What can we—and should we––trust? And how can we moor ourselves to, well, ourselves, in the midst of confusing, trying times? We’re Only Human offers audiences the chance to listen to Carll as he listens to himself.

“I’ve lived outside of myself for so long,” Carll admits. “Distractions, fear, anxiety, insecurity, and the complexity of being human in this world have so often pulled me away from being present or at peace.”

“I feel like there’s been a voice riding shotgun all my life, pushing me to do better, but I’ve struggled to listen to it,” Carll says. “The idea behind this record was to do the personal work I needed to do, then codify those lessons in song to serve as sort of breadcrumbs to get me back on the trail if, and inevitably when, I get lost again.”

Carll is more than two decades into a celebrated career. Praise from places such as Pitchfork and the New York Times––the latter of which yoked Carll’s ability to tackle tough issues with wry humor to Bob Dylan––punctuate a resume that includes Americana Music Awards and a Grammy nomination. His songs aren’t safe, but many of Nashville’s stars have recorded them, including Kenny Chesney, Lee Ann Womack, and Brothers Osborne. As a solo recording artist, Carll has long-since established himself as one of Americana’s most-played––and most loved––voices. His warm but crackling vocals, wit, and heart dance through wordplay that’s always clever, and never too precious. Through it all, whenever Carll points a finger, it’s most often at himself.

As We’re Only Human collects moments of Carll figuring out how to be with himself, the songs feel forthright, hopeful, and timely. In today’s onslaught of instant gratification, rage-baiting headlines, glorified intolerance, and falling empathy, the record is a startling outlier: an artist’s raw, real-life effort to live well—both with himself and others. Carll embraces private epiphanies, and shares them with the world, allowing them to unfold for all to see and share.

Of course, We’re Only Human is also art. So while appreciating the motivation and compelling themes driving it will underpin the listener’s experience, Carll’s album also matters because of the sheer brilliance of its execution. These are songs composed by a writer’s writer, wielding his considerable skill with precision and beauty.

The album’s title track unfolds with plaintive piano and a mantle of grace. Carll sings, with a calming sincerity, “We’ll do most anything to avoid the pain / Hiding our hearts and casting the blame / 6,000 tongues, but we’re all the same / Ain’t no need to carry that shame / ‘Cause we’re only human.”

Hard-won minutes of quiet clarity inspired some of the record’s most beautiful moments. Accented by bright mandolin and soft, simple percussion, “Stay Here a While” captures a peaceful reprieve from a racing mind. “I remember sitting on the couch, looking out the window, watching the birds do their thing,” Carll says with a laugh. “I got lost in their lives for a moment, and it was such a wonderful feeling because my mind is always going in circles, seeking excitement, and frankly, just thinking about myself. I enjoyed the peace I felt in that moment and I thought, this is lovely and I’d like to stay in this place.” Carll shared that takeaway with MC Taylor, aka Hiss Golden Messenger, who not only could relate, but helped finish the song.

“High” offers another invitation to stop and breathe. Opening with a solo horn, flute, and stripped down piano, the track is lovely and sincere, with Carll’s signature humor hovering comfortably nearby. There are also times when Carll’s sharp wit comes roaring to the foreground. “Progress of Man (Bitcoin and Cattle)” sends up society’s disorienting––and conflicting––forces, while “Good People (Thank Me)” is a masterclass in comedic timing, stubborn humanism, and the untapped potential of gratitude.

A dogged insistence on acceptance, both of one’s self and others, courses through the album— as does Carll’s determination to hold himself accountable. “If I’m judging others, then I’m not having to look at myself,” Carll says. “I’m flawed as hell, judgmental, and critical of myself and those around me. That’s a loop that feeds itself. But I figure If I can look at myself clear-eyed and acknowledge my own shortcomings, it might help me have some grace and acceptance for myself and others.”

It’s that sort of harmonious duality––embracing one’s self and confessing one’s own mistakes––that solidifies the record’s big-hearted honesty. “The creative process was in large part a self-therapy session. I don’t think that would work if I was only looking at everyone else’s issues,” Carll says.

A moving series of grounding vignettes, realizations, and self-love roll through “What I Will Be,” as Carll promises to not compromise himself to fit in. A slow-burning, blues-tinged standout, “I Got Away with It” is painful and gorgeous. Brimming with hope, “One Day” balances the work Carll sees as necessary with the certainty that satisfaction, contentment, and peace are reachable by trusting in yourself and the universe.

Featuring a parade of Carll’s longtime friends, album closer “May I Never” is a plea to himself. As Ray Wylie Hubbard, Shovels & Rope, Darrell Scott, Nicole Atkins, and The Band of Heathens’ Gordy Quist and Ed Jurdi each take verses, listeners are swept up in a resolute promise to keep after good. “It brings up a lot for me when I hear them singing those lines,” Carll says. Each of those people – whether they know it or not – have played a part in my story, and it’s gratifying and humbling to me to have them lend their voices to this song.”

In the end, Carll’s latest album is a lovingly and purposefully written collection of reminders. “I hope other people find something in it, too” Carll says. “Through it all, I am trying to stay appreciative, knowing that I did what I set out to do: write something that can help me navigate this journey with a little more grace and peace.”

Joelton Mayfield

Crowd Pleaser

By the winter of 2021, Joelton Mayfield had done nearly a decade of work to prepare his debut

LP, Crowd Pleaser. As a teenager, he’d toiled for years as the music director of his Texas church,

despite extreme doubts about Christianity’s role in his life and his role in Christian life. He’d

then shipped off to Nashville, hoping to earn a music business degree in the city where they seem

to be factory-made. He’d instead switched to English, studied the more mature songwriters

around him, joined a series of college bands, and drifted into the edges of the city’s indie rock

and alt-country enclaves, building a patchwork of players he trusted.

And that February, he’d driven two trailers and several carloads of gear to a farm near Alabama’s

Mobile Bay, turning the family barn of a bandmate friend into an ad hoc studio. He’d trucked a

Hammond organ from Nashville and his grandmother’s century-old vibraphone from Texas, even

buying a stack of area rugs to absorb the sound bouncing from the barn’s concrete floors. And

then, just days before Mayfield was set to make his first full-length testimonial, the love of his

young life—and the person set to co-produce the album, no less—dumped him.

The three weeks that followed were among the best and worst times of his life. Mayfield

substituted a pack of cigarettes a day and too much booze for sleep, teetering on the edge of a

breakdown. He was moody, distraught, and distracted, caught in a nightmare. But this was also

his dream, being surrounded by musical friends from Texas and Nashville in a barn-turned-studio

that was more practical and interesting than he could have imagined, singing songs about trauma

and hypocrisy and pain and disappointment that had, in a very real way, already saved his life.

So Mayfield and a band that sometimes numbered nearly a dozen rendered these 10 songs with

radical urgency, the bummer feelings that had first led to them reanimated by sudden rejection.

Mayfield clung to his own words, like a life preserver or guardrail or any piece of art that simply

reminds someone that this world can always change for worse but especially better. Indebted to

traditions of incisive Southern storytellers and country-rock bands interested in upending their

forms, Crowd Pleaser squares up to the difficulties and betrayals of Mayfield’s first

quarter-century and makes the absolute most of them—10 compelling affirmations for the rest of

us.

Raised outside of a small central Texas city, surrounded by open farm fields and dirt roads,

Mayfield was a “miracle baby,” the child his parents never truly expected after decades of trying.

His family was religious and musical, two disciplines forever intertwined in their lives, both at

home and at their Pentecostal church. As a kid, Mayfield won awards in the Royal Rangers, a

conservative Boy Scouts alternative, for his ability to recite Bible verses; as a teenager, he began

leading Wednesday night worship services for people much older than him and eventually even

helming the church’s music ministry. Outside of oil-slick Contemporary Christian Music, he

heard only some classic country, scant Texas blues, and the Gaithers, a family institution that was

in turn a family favorite. There was no household internet, and television was censored by a

draconian device called TV Guardian.

Fissures slowly grew between Mayfield and the church, Mayfield and family. He heard the

words about treating people kindly but then saw how others who were not straight and white

were handled by the so-called faithful. He felt exploited, too, his interest in and predisposition

for music used as (largely) unpaid labor. These feelings coincided with his late discovery of

songs beyond his faith. Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” exploded his idea of what a tune

could accomplish, as did a web of relatively outsider songwriters—Sufjan Stevens, David Bazan,

Jeff Tweedy. He began writing for himself, not only slowly finding his voice but a map of what

he believed and rejected. He fled Texas for Tennessee, intuitively knowing there was more to

discover than his hometown cloister of culture.

Crowd Pleaser documents the widening chasm between Mayfield, the sheltered Texas kid, and

Mayfield, the burgeoning songwriter indulging in all the music, movies, relationships, books and

conversations that came with leaving his sheltered early life. His sense of the bigotry, misogyny,

and myopia he’d left behind sharpened, too. These songs are a map of an unraveling and the

concomitant reformation, as he sorts through hypocrisies, doubts, and disappointments and does

his best to make sense of them. Throughout Crowd Pleaser, Mayfield returns to the line “God’s

children never grow up.” It’s as if he’s finally admitting not only that he was cast out of the

garden long ago but also that there may never have been a garden at all, that you have to move

along to find out.

Penned in three sections, the pulsing “Speechwriter” wades through the lies we slowly learn

we’ve been living with, from the way the government (no matter who has held power during the

last 250 years) fronts about holding your best interests in its candid little capitalist heart to the

promise of privilege that can still leave one rotten to the core. “How can I convince you anything

I’ve ever felt is worth grieving?” he asks in one stinging line. That same unease permeates “The

Shore,” where everything we think we know and love seems only like a cover for a collapse that

will happen any minute. “Is this the future we always dreamed of?” Mayfield sings, his voice and

the band behind him so calm and cool that they seem to be teasing us for the devastation we have

yet to detect.

The woes, mind you, aren’t all so existential. If you hear some familiar lines in “Turpentine (You

Know the One),” yes, Mayfield borrowed bits from Wilco and the Mountain Goats on one of the

oldest songs included here, meant to illuminate both the perpetual failures of the music industry

but also the miraculous way people keep making and sharing songs, anyway, because they

remain so very powerful and potentially resonant. Wilco’s Late Greats failed, as did the

Mountain Goats’ Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton. Instead, in Mayfield’s vision, we

get stuck with the bullshit band on Spirit 105.9 that is “everything you hate about everything you

wish you liked.” And still, we create. Cruelty comes in many forms, including rock radio.

Many of Crowd Pleaser’s songs scan as steadfast alt-country, Mayfield digging into a bedrock of

so-called Americana like a strata of sediment simply waiting to be discovered. As important,

though, are the vivid signs here that he is part of a Gen Z cadre for whom Wilco’s Yankee Hotel

Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born, Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted, and Neil Young’s Harvest are

part of the same firmament, not aberrations in its architecture.

You can hear it immediately in opener “Red Beam,” an apocalyptic vision of every new morning

where the growing sound swallows you like a blazing Southern sunrise. Cut by noise and

samples and built with a nonlinear structure that allows Mayfield to wrestle with the biggest

questions of our existence without pretending to have tidy conclusions, it is a theme song for

stumbling into the unknown, blinking hard, and moving forward, anyway. You can hear it in

“Blame,” too, a chronicle of being let down and left out, even when one’s desires are as simple

as “a highway exit/a checkout before 11.” Sheets of drone radiate beneath the electric surges of

the chorus, while bits of dissonant strings circle the verses like the thoughts of a brain addled by

its own overdrive. And what of the rumbles beneath and glows around “Jacob Dreamed a

Staircase,” a beautiful hymn about being deserted by faith, where the sounds sigh and moan and

growl like heavenly taunts? Crowd Pleaser is only the first full statement from a

singer-songwriter invested in the future of his chosen field.

In 2024, a year before Crowd Pleaser was even ready for release, Mayfield opened several

shows for two heroes—John Darnielle, of the aforementioned Mountain Goats, and John

Moreland. Both have used songwriting to stare into personal voids, to stand at the edge of some

never-ending abyss and tell the truth about what they’ve seen down there. Mayfield is a new

member of that tradition, having put some of the most difficult lessons he’s learned in life to

paper and then gathering his friends to help animate them, to turn them into these songs meant to

be shared like communion. “God’s children never grow up,” goes that refrain. Yes, some of them

just grow into something unexpected: songwriters able to relay the good news that can exist in

passing through the hardest of times and emerging on another side, able to sing about it.