Author: Stephen Deusner

In his 40-odd-year career, Loudon Wainwright III has never played Memphis. Or at least he doesn’t think he has.

“I’ve played in Knoxville and Nashville and a lot of other places in Tennessee, but I don’t think I’ve ever done a gig in Memphis,” says the 65-year-old folk singer and actor. “If I did, I have no recollection of it.”

Not that certain people haven’t been trying to get him to town for decades now — namely, local singer-songwriter Keith Sykes.

“We met at Young Turks in New York in the early ’70s, and he’s been trying to get me to come down there,” Wainwright says. “And now I’m finally coming. I hope he shows up, and I hope he’s not too pissed at me.”

Memphis does play a significant role in Wainwright’s musical education — or, at least, Memphis’ favorite son does.

“The first single that I ever bought, a 45 for a dollar I guess it was, was ‘All Shook Up.’ And he knocked my socks off, like he did everybody else, when I saw him on The Ed Sullivan Show,” Wainwright remembers. Watching Elvis made the young Loudon want to perform, but Wainwright insists, “I don’t have an obsession with Elvis. I’m not going to Graceland while I’m in town, although maybe I shouldn’t admit that.”

“All Shook Up” may have instigated Wainwright’s first forays into writing and performing his own material, but his career has diverged significantly from rock-and-roll. Wainwright plays a brand of thoughtfully wry folk music that doesn’t overlap much with any area of Elvis’ catalog, except in one crucial area: humor.

Presley often clowned around onstage, changing up the lyrics to slyly undercut the seriousness of a rock-and-roll performance. Similarly, Wainwright — with his twitchy stage presence and smart-aleck grin — seems to smirk at the whole notion of the performer onstage. 40 Odd Years, Wainwright’s career-spanning box set from 2010, reveals a performer who expertly balances levity and gravity.

The trick to a good show and a long career is finding the right balance between those extremes, and Wainwright always knows when to crack a smile or a grim joke. On song after song, Wainwright bravely tackles unflattering subjects like sleeping with groupies and even hitting his children in anger, but he doesn’t always approach these subjects with a straight face. One of his funniest compositions, “Unrequited to the Nth Degree,” is about committing suicide as revenge on a woman who dumped you.

“I’ve always enjoyed making people laugh and being a clown,” he explains. “If I want to get heavy, that’s fine, but I can also let up a bit and get a little lighter. It’s just moving things forward by shifting gears. It’s a way to hold the audience’s attention and surprise them. It seems to work for me, although I don’t know if it would work for other performers.”

That careful balance has allowed Wainwright to tackle very eloquently and very comically the one subject that all older musicians share: mortality.

His upcoming album, Older Than My Old Man Now, is about “the passing of time and death and decay,” he says with a soft chuckle. “The trick was to write about that topic but make it bearable, not make it a complete bummer. There’s certainly some serious stuff on the record, but hopefully there’s a light touch, too.”

Older Than My Old Man Now, which is scheduled for an April release on 2nd Story Records, is a duets album almost by necessity:

“If you have one voice singing about death song after song, it gets a little harrowing,” Wainwright explains. “So we brought in some reinforcements for the heavy lifting.”

Guests include Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Chris Smither, and Dame Edna Everage (the character played by cross-dressing Australian comedian Barry Humphries).

Wainwright also sings with his children, including Rufus, Alexandra, and Lucy Roche. In that regard, one song in particular stands out to Wainwright.

“‘Over the Hill’ is an old song I wrote back in ’75 with my then-wife Kate McGarrigle,” he says, noting that their daughter Martha joins him on the new version. “It’s interesting now to record and sing that song because it was written when I was a young man. Now I couldn’t be called that by any stretch of the imagination. Hopefully, it has a certain meaning or resonance now.”

So many of Wainwright’s old songs have aged gracefully precisely because he understands that they change as their composer and performer ages.

A song like “School Days,” about his experiences in boarding school, or even a lighter number like “Swimming Song,” which he wrote especially for his children, take on a patina of bittersweet reminiscence when they’re sung by a man with most of his life behind him.

He points to “Motel Blues” (famously covered by Big Star) as a prime example: “If you’re singing, ‘Come up to my motel room and save my life,’ when you’re 25, it has a very different meaning when you’re singing it and you’re 65.”

Perhaps that’s why Wainwright has managed to remain active and interesting while so many of his contemporaries fade away: He’s letting his songs grow as he grows into them, which only makes the lighter fare funnier and the heavier fare so much darker.

The Civil Wars are not Civil War buffs. Especially with the recent sesquicentennial of that bloody North-South conflagration, it’s natural to assume that Joy Williams and John Paul White chose their stage name as a nod to that tumultuous, brother-versus-brother period in American history. Their music, despite its modern-day production sheen, is certainly steeped in traditions whose roots extend deep into the 19th century — modest country laments, fervent gospel harmonies, elegant waltz-time hymns. Instead, the moniker refers to “the battle within ourselves.” Once two struggling Nashville solo artists (married, but not to each other), the duo have found considerable success together. Thanks to a Grey’s Anatomy placement and an endorsement from Taylor Swift, the Civil Wars have become one of the biggest acts in Nashville, their rise in popularity coinciding with that of the Avett Brothers, Mumford & Sons, and other artists lumped into the New Americana movement. The Civil Wars’ range comes through in their live shows as well, which are even more bare bones than their studio recordings. The Civil Wars play the Germantown Performing Arts Centre on Tuesday, January 10th. Showtime is 7:30 p.m.

Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin wanted to call their first high school band Love. They were both 15 years old, playing house parties around Laguna Beach, with Segall on drums and Cronin blowing sax. After recording a demo album called This, “we went to a local record store,” Segall recalls, “and they were like, ‘You know there’s already a band called Love, right?’ And we were like, ‘Yeah man, we’re … Love This.’ It’s a totally silly name, but we kept it because we were so embarrassed. And, of course, now I think Love’s Forever Changes is the best record ever. But we were 15. We had no idea.”

Love This, despite its name, was the start of a long and very productive friendship between Segall and Cronin, both Laguna Beach natives who are now stalwarts on the San Francisco garage-pop scene. The two have worked together almost constantly ever since high school, on solo projects as well as joint albums, and they both display a deep knowledge of West Coast pop music, from the paranoid psych-pop of Love in Los Angeles to the short, sharp attack of the Minutemen in San Diego to the weirder, harder excursions of Crime (self-billed as “San Francisco’s first and only punk band”). And, like most of their Fog City peers, Cronin and Segall have developed distinctive means of updating pop history to the present, looking well beyond their record collections to make music that is urgent and lively and almost defiantly pitched to the present.

Of the two artists, Segall is the better known, with four albums on three labels — including Memphis’ Goner — in three years, not to mention a handful of seven-inch singles. He started in the mid-2000s as a one-man garage band, pounding out brashly catchy Nuggets-derived tunes on a battered guitar and duct-taped kickdrum. On Goodbye Bread, his latest and arguably best album, Segall made a conscious decision to get away from that lower-fi sound.

“I really wanted to focus on making it sound as good as it could,” he says. “In the past, I’ve done a lot of shortcuts and rushed stuff and not had the best gear, so the whole idea behind this record was to take as long as possible to make it sound as clean as possible.”

While it doesn’t sound quite as fried or as frantic as previous albums, Goodbye Bread emphasizes Segall’s facility with melody and lyrics, two elements that had previously been obscured by distortion.

“I’ve always felt lacking in the lyrics department, so I wanted to make them better,” he explains, noting that the album has made his live shows much more exciting to play — and hopefully to watch as well. “Our show used to be more straightforward rock-and-roll, but these new songs give it a different dynamic. There’s a little more space to go up and down in a set, a little bit more breathing room.”

If Segall has developed his style over several releases, Mikal Cronin seems to have arrived fully formed on his eponymous debut, out this month on the Chicago-based label Trouble in Mind. Taking San Francisco’s lo-fi garage-pop sound as a jumping-off point, Cronin — who plays bass in Segall’s touring band — writes relentlessly hooky songs that have more in common with Brian Wilson or the Beatles than Arthur Lee or Syd Barrett. “What’s so cool about Mikal is that he really understands how songs are written,” Segall says. “He can say, ‘I want to write this kind of song.’ And then he does it! That’s really insane.”

In between short tours with his band the Moonhearts, Cronin began recording the album while a student at Cal Arts in Los Angeles, but while that process may have been academic, his approach to pop history is anything but. “I thought of it as my senior thesis,” says Cronin, who graduated earlier this year. “That’s how I justified spending so much time traveling up to San Francisco to record it.” He made that six-hour drive numerous times while recording Mikal Cronin, which he says was “a pain in the ass” but worth it to enjoy the creativity and camaraderie of the San Francisco scene. “There’s a big gap between Los Angeles and San Francisco, both socially and culturally,” he says. “But I still felt connected up here.”

Segall and Cronin are transplants to San Francisco, yet both feel like a big part of the city’s musical community, which includes acts as diverse as Sic Alps, Thee Oh Sees, Grass Widow, and the Fresh & Onlys. “There’s a pretty close-knit feel in the city, where everybody’s helping each other out, playing on each other’s records, bouncing ideas off one another,” Segall says. “People aren’t hiding their music or acting exclusive in any way.”

Cronin agrees: “I’ve been living in Los Angeles for the last three years, and there’s not a sense of community down there. But in San Francisco, you can go to a show and recognize people from 10 different bands in the crowd. Everybody is supportive of whatever anybody else is doing. I’ve been really influenced by what Thee Oh Sees and Grass Widow and Ty are doing.”

Cronin only moved to San Francisco permanently a few weeks ago, leaving his records and equipment back in Los Angeles. The irony is that just a few days after moving in, he and Segall struck out on a joint tour. “I’ve decided to come back from this tour and just live in this city for a solid month without going anywhere,” Cronin says.

Gonerfest 8 runs from Thursday, September 22nd, through Sunday, September 25th, at the Hi-Tone Café and other Midtown locations. See gonerfest.com for a full schedule and the Flyer‘s pop-culture blog, Sing All Kinds, at memphisflyer.com/blogs/singallkinds for additional coverage.

Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin

Gonerfest 8

Hi-Tone Café

Thursday, September 22nd

9 p.m.; $20

She never appeared onscreen, but Alison Krauss played one of the seductive sirens in the Coen brothers’ 2000 country bumbler O Brother, Where Art Thou?. With Gillian Welch and Emmylou Harris, she sings an a cappella version of “Didn’t Leave Nobody but the Baby,” which Welch had written based on a single verse of a traditional mountain lullaby. Actresses lip-synced the vocals in the scene, but the trio’s easy, luxuriant harmonies on this strange lullaby made the oafish heroes’ temptation not just understandable but relatable. Who wouldn’t want to hear more?

It’s a clever scene and perhaps the most intriguing mix of Southern setting and Greek mythology in the movie. More crucially, however, it anointed Welch, Harris, and Krauss as the new queens of Americana. That didn’t mean much when the film was released to theaters, but it certainly carried some power when the soundtrack became a head-scratching hit.

Produced by T Bone Burnett and featuring Krauss, Welch, and Harris alongside bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley, Norman Blake, the Whites, and other artists new and old, the O Brother soundtrack sold millions for the then-fledgling Lost Highway label, eventually winning a Grammy for Album of the Year. No soundtrack had won that award since 1994, and no soundtrack has won since.

Has there ever been a greater mismatch between film and soundtrack? O Brother the movie is a string of cornpone clichés and inside jokes that presents a version of the Deep South that’s so layered with references and ironies that it plays like a postmillennial Hee-Haw.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, O Brother the soundtrack is almost too earnest in its gentle update of old radio hits, church hymns, work-crew spirituals, Delta blues, and hillbilly laments. With its carefully curated tracklist and austere arrangements, the album emphasizes a lack of sophistication that for Burnett and many listeners elevates the music above modern-day pop fare. Yet old-time music is much more varied than this soundtrack would suggest, often conveying dark ambiguities, needling ironies, sharp satire, disgusting racism, and shocking smut.

But that more simplistic view of old-time music has prevailed in 2011, with Lost Highway now releasing a deluxe reissue of the soundtrack. Despite the unprecedented success of O Brother, the album never spawned a larger movement: Americana flourished but remained a niche market rather than a mainstream force. In fact, it’s taken nearly a full decade for the ripples to crest into waves, but recently a new generation of musicians has begun deploying some of the same old sounds toward new aims.

This movement has been termed New Americana, and much of it can be very good: The Civil Wars evoke a taut sexual tension in their churchly harmonies, and the Low Anthem combine rootsy arrangements with ambitious production techniques and modern subject matter. But too many of their peers sound dull and unimaginative, as groups like Mumford & Sons and Seattle’s the Head and the Heart exploit old-time as a shortcut for “authentic,” in the process narrowing the emotional and musical possibilities of the genre.

Many of these young artists cite O Brother as a touchstone and artists like Welch, Harris, and Krauss as influences. All three continue to make some of the most vital music of their careers, but it’s Krauss who has remained the most visible figure in Americana.

Following the success of Raising Sand, her 2007 Grammy-winning collaboration with Robert Plant, Krauss this year released her 14th album with her longtime backing band Union Station. Already, Paper Airplane is one of her best-selling albums — and also one of Krauss’ best reviewed. She and Union Station have grown increasingly comfortable and confident together, which allows them to strike an immediately melancholy tone on the opening title track and sustain it through haunted laments and gentle bluegrass jams.

It’s eloquently played and even more eloquently sung, as Krauss trades off lead vocals with mandolin player Dan Tyminski, whose roadworn twang enlivens “Dust Bowl Children” and “On the Outside Looking In.” Yet the key to Union Station’s sound isn’t the contrast between these two vocalists, nor the technique they bring to their stringed instruments, but Krauss’ clear, crystalline voice. In the 1980s, she signed with Rounder Records as a teenage fiddle prodigy, but over the years, her voice has become the group’s signature sound, communicating strident worry and placid affirmation with equal ease.

If O Brother gave Krauss license to flaunt her bluegrass and country roots — to showcase that languid twang of her earliest material — she has since softened whatever hard edges her voice might have. It’s tempting to view this development as an appeal to mainstream audiences, but, in fact, it has allowed her greater range to explore the styles and strains lumped into Americana: Paper Airplane covers American and British folk, blues, gospel, even elements of rock.

Bluegrass remains Union Station’s foundation, but Krauss’ voice allows the band to envision that style as a new strain of American pop music. In that regard, these new songs sound like the obvious progeny of O Brother, suggesting that these old-time sounds have as much to say today as they did 10 years ago — or 80 years ago.

Alison Krauss & Union Station, with Jerry Douglas

The Orpheum

Thursday, August 25th, 8 p.m.

$49.50/$69.50

Believe it or not, “Mustang Ranch” is a true story. One of the wilder songs off the second album by Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears, it recounts a fateful night on the road, when the band was making the long trek from Salt Lake City to a show in San Francisco. In the first verse, Lewis and bass player Bill Stevenson spot a UFO hovering over the Nevada highway. Comically undaunted, they proceed to the legendarily legal brothel Mustang Ranch, where they get carded and in way over their heads.

As the Honeybears stomp out a raw funkabilly groove, Lewis recounts the antics like a particularly debauched James Brown. It sounds like he’s making it all up as he goes along, but Lewis swears it happened just the way he describes.

“It’s a true story. Pretty much,” he says. “We were drinking and fucking around in the middle of the night. A lot of times we’ll hit up roadside attractions to break up the drive, and Mustang Ranch just happened to be on the way to San Fran.” When it came time to record the album, he didn’t bother to write down lyrics. Instead, he says,”I just rambled off the whole night … and embellished a little bit.”

In a few short years, the Austin band has gained a reputation as one of the hardest-touring, hardest-playing live acts around, specializing in sweaty, grimy funk-rock riffs punctuated by raunchy horn stabs. A self-taught guitarist, Lewis started out playing gigs either solo or with a very small backing group, patterning himself on James Brown and Prince. His death-defying shows — during which he climbed on rafters and drum kits, played guitar with his face, and jumped around maniacally — made him something of a local legend.

His stage presence has only grown more intense with the Honeybears, and he admits that summoning that kind of energy night after night “is definitely tough.” He has no pre-show rituals, aside from drinking a few beers: “I should start warming up my voice or something. But you have to make up for your lack of skills by doing crazy shit. If the crowd is good, you can feed off of them.”

Primarily it comes down to good business: “You want people to come back, so you have to give them a good show.”

Lewis’ debut album, 2009’s Tell Em What Your Name Is, sounded smart and sharp, but his follow-up, Scandalous, was even better: rawer and more rambunctious, with a better sense of songwriting and a livelier band dynamic.

“I like my music pretty dirty,” Lewis says. “On the first album, that didn’t come through that well. Maybe we did too much production or something.”

On Scandalous, Jim Eno (of the Austin band Spoon) once again produced, but that grit comes from the Honeybears themselves, who sound as if the hundreds of shows between these two albums have made them tighter, heavier, gutsier. They jump genres easily and confidently, from the Bar-Kays-inspired party grooves of “Booty City” to the gospel shouts of “Lyin'” to the rambling rural blues of “Messin’.”

Lewis and the Honeybears are often lumped with the ongoing soul revival that includes such groups as Kings Go Forth, the Budos Band, the Bo-Keys, and Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings (with whom Lewis and the Honeybears have toured). But Scandalous rocks harder and more irreverently than most of the acts associated with that movement. Lewis rejects the soul revival label altogether: “People gotta categorize stuff. That’s just how it is. I love old soul music, but I think we’re more of a rock band. I started out doing funk and blues stuff, then I added horns and people think it’s a soul project.”

In tandem with the Honeybears’ development into a powerful backing band, Lewis’ songwriting has grown more daring, more capable, more evocative. Alongside raunchy rave-ups like “Booty City” and “Black Snake” are songs with more serious subject matter, like the paranoia call-and-response of “Lyin'” and the soldier’s anthem “Jesus Take My Hand.”

“I read A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, and that inspired me to write the song ‘Lyin’,” Lewis says. “I’ve always wanted to say political stuff. I’m not the smartest person, but I like to sing about things that piss me off. That’s always a good source of inspiration.”

“Jesus Take My Hand” isn’t the soaring anthem its title might suggest but a fearful blues number written to a strutting riff reminiscent of Junior Kimbrough. Lewis has said he wrote it for U.S. soldiers in the Middle East, and it’s easily one of his best and most affecting vocal performances on the album, if not in his career. “Jesus take my hand, I’m not afraid to die,” he sings, and the exaggerated scratch in his voice conveys a palpable mortal dread — not of the battlefield but of the airports and driveways and tarmacs where soldiers say goodbye to loved ones. Even after so many songs about booties, UFOs, and prostitutes, “Jesus Take My Hand” is powerful and affecting, a reminder that Lewis and the Honeybears may be playing styles of the past, but their primary concern is the immediacy of the present.

Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears, with Clay Otis & the Showbiz Lights

Hi-Tone Café

Thursday, June 23rd, 9 p.m.; $8