This Friday, Charley Crockett will release his new record ‘Music City USA‘ – his second record of the year. Here, we interview Charley about his slew of recent releases, the heritage of his music and what he can achieve as an independent artist.
Hi, how are you feeling gearing up to the release?
Oh, is the record coming out this week? (laughs) It feels great, I’m happy to do it. I gotta hurry up and get it out the door, so I can roll out another one.
Do you feel a degree of nerves every time? Obviously, you have been releasing more music than pretty much every artist over the past several years. Do you still get that excited, nervous energy or are you used to it by now?
Oh no, I always always feel that way. I always get nervous around the release week for all kinds of reasons. You know, you want it to make some kind of splash and you want an audience to hear it, I always get excited.
What does ‘Music City USA’ mean to you then as a concept? What did you want to share with this record?
Well, if you were to be, let’s say a 16 year old kid in Arizona, who’s gonna hear this for the first time, he or she may not be aware it has anything to do with Nashville. So, that does a couple of things that can make somebody feel like I’m talking about wherever they live right there. I’ll tell you what, in short, it has nothing to do with Nashville and everything to do with Nashville.
I mean your music is so much richer than just one city – there’s so much heritage from the whole of the USA and almost outside it. Is that something that’s really important to you – to have this huge diversity of influences clear throughout your music?
It is, I don’t want to alienate folks when I play and sing music, I want to bring people in to the sound, I don’t want to keep them out – that probably comes from having a street background, being from Texas and cutting my teeth on the street in New Orleans. Now the thing is, I’ve lived in New Orleans, and I’ve lived all over Texas and I’ve lived all over the country, but the thing about Nashville is that I’m not sure my career would have gone anywhere if Nashville hadn’t come back like it has. Independent country music came back, Americana in all the controversy over what it means and if it’s relevant. If not for those charts, I wouldn’t appear on a chart and that’s all Nashville, it’s not just country music and Americana, everything has come back and is building itself back up in a really big international type of way that maybe in some ways it didn’t have even in its heyday. I’m very grateful for that.
There’s an aspect to Nashville and even in Austin that is changing in ways that are hard to deal with, but being the type of self-made street performer that I am, you have to realise that you can’t stop what’s coming with aspects like that, but it’s hard to watch it. When I would hobo through Nashville, you’d see all of the people from the reality TV shows, with their parents driving to Nashville, waiting in line at open-mics to become the next TV star in Music City or whatever. That can be really difficult when increasingly you’re dealing with the rising cost of living, the flooding in of California and these challenges that make people have a lot of conflicting views over the way that a city may be changing, but I think that it’s happening everywhere. I think that these things are being dealt with everywhere, that’s kind of what I mean by Music City USA – it’s almost like Babylon.
It’s a melting pot of different voices.
The thing is, LA and New York have a lot of music business going on, but the independent world, for me, comes out in Nashville, there are all these businesses to support me – my agent David Massey, Thirty Tigers – if you take those guys out of Nashville, you and I wouldn’t be talking, I would not be here, there’s no way.
Talking about Nashville being a ripe environment for independent artists. I feel like, it’s almost like an integral part of your story, having that independence and being able to put out two completely different records, with completely different kind of messages in one year. This year, you’ve released your tribute to James Hand and now you’ve got your album of originals. How important is it to you to have that flexibility to be able to pivot between projects and put up the music that you want to put out, rather than play a waiting game to release tracks further down the line?
Well, I think the difference is life and death. I’ve been there, I signed and dealt with the major labels as a young street artist that was desperate to sign one of those deals. I saw into the machine over 10 years ago and I don’t think it’s gotten easier for a young person to deal with them and it’s crushing. I can’t remember the girl’s name, but she said it about Jimi Hendrix – what he dealt with in the machine that the artist was a different person six months later. That’s true of any medium, so that’s what I mean, the difference is life and death.
For me, I would remain in total obscurity, if I didn’t have the ability to pivot between James Hand and Music City USA and all the stuff that I’m going to do next. I’m living my life by the excitement and the inspiration of the next song. When they take that away, it’s already highly difficult to deal with, you know the game of life on the road and all of those things, having everything going in your favour, it’s difficult. I’m very, very grateful for having the ability to roll these records out this way. It just means everything and sometimes the shining Babylon can pull you and that’s the thing about Nashville – it’s not a song saying I don’t like Nashville. I’m really talking about there being two kinds of Nashville, it’s the duality in the city and maybe in myself.
My final question is just the craft of the record, how did this project come together – were these songs that you wrote during the pandemic or have they come together over the past year when we’ve been able to get out and play live again?
Yeah, I put out an album last year – Welcome to Hard Times – and everybody asked me when the record came out if I wrote it about the pandemic and the state of the world, and I said, ‘No, I wrote it about the state of the world,’ just from my experience in my life, because pandemic or no pandemic, I escaped death through to two heart surgeries. I escaped treacherous business deals left and right. I had been working nonstop since I was 17, I’m 37 – that’s 20 years non stop. You don’t need the pandemic, all the pandemic has done is maybe make some things a little more obvious that were already there.
So, when you come to Music City, USA, for me, in the last two years, I learned some key things, because I couldn’t tour that record. Insteadof only relying on the live show, I got better at getting the word out about the record itself, in ways that I never had time to focus on. I learned that maybe instead of spending two days in the studio, I could spend ten days taking a little more time, practicing a little more patience, within my grind, would be more effective. I’m all about working hard, but maybe I’m learning to also work just a bit smarter. I wouldn’t call myself smart at all, but I can work a little bit smarter. That’s what that has taught me and because I own this stuff, because I make the decisions along with my partners whoI’m grateful to have with me. I’m a part of everything that we do, in terms of how the record looks and billboards that get bought, the city, the venues and the cities we play, all of that is up to me at the end of the day. Being a part of all of that is is where I’m able to see more clearly, whereas the machine often offers a lot of things that I think would make it harder for me to see clearly.
Well it’s clearly working. Congratulations on the record and everything you’ve achieved over the past few years. Thank you for taking the time to chat.
