Bobby Bare, Jr. could’ve phoned in a career. He could’ve exploited the fact that he’s the son of iconic Country Music Hall of Famer Bobby Bare, was born into Nashville’s Music Row elite, and counted artists like Shel Silverstein as close family friends and George Jones and Tammy Wynette as next door neighbors. Instead, Bobby blazed a path of unique songwriting craftsmanship with a voice that blows through you like an unyielding wind on the desolate prairie.

With a big-as-the-room persona, an ability to rock the doors off the most jaded of clubs, the heart to hold a room completely still with just his guitar, and a genius for arrangement, Bobby Bare, Jr. and his band of merry makers are one of the most unique bunches around. They are adept at abandoning common sense in favor of laying themselves at the feet of a rambunctious, freewheeling, and unfettered and unhinged muse.

In the late 90's, he fronted the boss hog rock band, Bare Jr. With their two records,Boo-tay and Brainwasher, they memorably rocked out on a Nirvana-on-Skynryd-not-Sabbath groove, more indebted to the homebrew than "The Other H." He keeps himself even busier by appearing on albums by indie rock heroes like the Silver Jews and Frank Black and My Morning Jacket. Few that we have found can combine humor, pain, and anger in such an effortlessly well-crafted manner. If encountered in public, beware: Bobby is a big, gregarious, good-natured fellow who will giddily talk music (from the Smiths to Roger Miller to Metallica to Dolly Parton--sometimes in one breath) until the bartender is tossing you both out.

Look, we LOVE Bobby's records and we want people to hear them. Maybe our descriptions are making you scratch your head or are scaring you off. Forgive us, his music is ahead of its time and we are not sure what to say about it. All the years we all wasted getting English degrees are powerless in coming up with suitable words to describe his projects. When someone around the office is absent-mindedly whistling a tune, chances are real good that it's, "I'll Be Around" or "Valentine" or "Borrow Your Cape." Bobby's music is ample proof that commercial radio wouldn't know a genre-bending smash hit if it ran up and bit it in the ass, and, if radio programmers weren't all neutered corporate lapdogs, his songs would be in the broad canon of rock.

Pop stardom has, for many years, attuned listeners to the arrival of shining new faces filled with vital new ideas, to which attention must be paid. Instantly. Briefly, for the most part.

It says here that there is another path, at least if what one cares about is music, and not celebrity. The steady lines in Buddy Miller’s face, the passions which abide within his voice, and the effortless inflection of his guitar…all matched against words given shape by and with his wife, Julie, her writing and singing voice twining against his…they speak, as well, to the arrival of genius. Just not clothed in the baggage of youth.

It works like this: Malcolm Gladwell (the brilliant and best-selling synthesist of the varied research which seeks to explain how our brains work) recently summarized the research of a University of Chicago economist named David Galenson, who has been studying the age at which genius presents itself to the world. Two paradigms emerge. The precocious Pablo Picasso arrived as daunting and fertile talent in his early 20s, while the meticulous Paul Cézanne did not have an exhibition of his paintings until he was 57. Gladwell has also been advancing the thesis that it takes 10,000 hours to acquire mastery of any given skill.

This explains the slow, steady career arc of Buddy and Julie Miller.

Buddy will be 56 when Written in Chalk hits stores, though his work has been on regular exhibit since his wife, Julie (who is somewhat younger), began recording in 1990, and more so since he finally started making his own records in 1995. If his genius has not yet been widely recognized, no matter; the other musicians, they know. (There was a reason the final print edition of No Depression magazine proclaimed him to be artist of the decade, and it was not simply the mercurial humor of the magazine’s two editors. It was the music.)

He has been a singer, and the successful writer and co-writer of songs other people sang, many of them country stars, including the Dixie Chicks, Lee Ann Womack, and Brooks & Dunn. He has been a multi-instrumentalist and harmony singer for a succession of acclaimed performers, beginning with Julie, and then in prompt succession Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams. And, most recently, Alison Krauss and Robert Plant. And he has produced records – in the studio he built in their home — released separately under his name and Julie’s, and bearing their names together (as with Written in Chalk). That same living space has produced acclaimed albums by Solomon Burke, Allison Moorer, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

For some years it was Julie who stood center stage, first back in Austin, Texas, where they met (she didn’t want the band to hire him), then in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and, finally, Nashville, where they settled in 1993, a short drive from Music Row. Along the way the Millers became close friends and supporters of Shawn Colvin, Jim Lauderdale, Peter Case and Victoria Williams, played in bands with guitarists Larry Campbell and Gurf Morlix, and drummer Don Heffington.

Worked on their art, slowly, surely. Perhaps uncertainly, but working, always. Beginning in 1990 Julie released four albums within the Christian market, and then two on the now shuttered roots label HighTone. Her last one, Broken Things, came out in 1999. Buddy has so far made five proper long players under his own name, though Julie’s singing and writing voice is ever-present throughout. And then, at last, in 2001, they finally, formally released an album under both names.

Eight years later, one of the most respected creative teams in Nashville — and beyond — has returned with a new suite of songs.

All things being equal, it’s a remarkable accomplishment. Both the album, and its making. Julie has had a tough time of it. Some years back she was diagnosed with fibromylgia (which is characterized by muscular pain, fatigue, and sleep deprivation), and so has had to cope with the ravages of a chronic illness. Five years ago her brother, Jeff Griffin, was struck by lightning while mowing their parents’ yard. She is a woman who feels deeply, and there is a careful emotional raggedness to many of the songs she unveils here. (And an unexpected helping of humor and joy, and abiding faith, too.)

And Buddy…he’s just been busy. In the two weeks he had set aside to finish this album last spring — originally simply to have been another Buddy Miller album — he was also trying to learn several dozens of songs he would be playing on tour with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. And to remember how to play the steel guitar he’d agreed to bring along for that gig. In between lining up production gigs, and the like.

It didn’t get done. Or, rather, Written in Chalk didn’t get finished during that particular two-week slot, though he tried. But instead of simply meeting a deadline and turning in what he had finished, Buddy set the album aside and went back onto the road. This left time and room for a duet with Robert Plant (which they played publicly for the first time as part of the Americana Music Association’s 2008 Honors & Awards last September), and the additional gestation time seems to have emboldened Julie to become a full partner in the process. (Indeed, Buddy has only one co-write, and the balance of the album, save his well-chosen covers, comes from Julie’s pen.)
Buddy was born near Dayton, Ohio, to an Air Force family, and mostly raised in Princeton, New Jersey. Julie Griffin was born and raised in Waxahachie, Texas. They met, in 1975, in Austin, when he auditioned for a band she was in. She didn’t take to him right off, but they’ve been married a long time.

Only a couple of such confidence and competence could chance the emotional honesty of Written in Chalk. Only musicians of such renown could round up collaborators like Larry Campbell (who has played with Dylan, Levon Helm, and one or two others), keyboard player John Deaderick (Dixie Chicks, Mindy Smith), drummer Brady Blades (Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle), and singers like Patty Griffin, Emmylou Harris, and that guy who used to be in Led Zeppelin.

But, in the end, only Buddy and Julie Miller could make a record this good.

–written by Grant Alden

After leading several popular ‘80s cult bands in and around his hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, Chuck Mead landed on Nashville’s Lower Broadway where he co-founded the famed ‘90s Alternative Country quintet BR549. The band’s seven albums, three Grammy nominations and the Country Music Association Award for Best Overseas Touring Act would build an indelible bridge between authentic American Roots music and millions of fans worldwide. With BR on hiatus, Chuck formed The Hillbilly All-Stars featuring members of The Mavericks, co-produced popular tribute albums to Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, guest-lectured at Vanderbilt University, and became a staff writer at one of Nashville’s top song publishers. In 2009, he released his acclaimed solo debut album, Journeyman’s Wager, and toured clubs, concert halls and international Rock, Country and Rockabilly festivals with his band The Grassy Knoll Boys.

As Music Director for the Broadway smash Million Dollar Quartet, Chuck began crafting the music arrangements during the show’s original Daytona and Seattle workshop productions, supervised the musical performances for its 2008 Chicago opening, created new music material for the show’s Tony Award-winning Broadway run, produced the original cast album, and oversaw the music for its smash 2011 premiere at London’s Noël Coward Theatre. In 2013, MDQ broke the Chicago record for longest running musical.

Chuck’s acclaimed 2012 release, Back At The Quonset Hut, was recorded at Nashville’s legendary Quonset Hut Studio where Patsy Cline, George Jones, Merle Haggard Roger Miller, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash and more cut some of country’s greatest tracks. Produced by original BR549 producer Mike Janas and with the participation of students from Belmont University’s College of Entertainment and Music Business, the album of classic covers features surviving members of Music Row’s original ‘A Team’ studio musicians as well as guest appearances by Old Crow Medicine Show, Elizabeth Cook, Jamie Johnson and Bobby Bare.

2014 ushers in Free State Serenade, the new Chuck Mead & His Grassy Knoll Boys release on Nashville-based Plowboy Records. Produced by long-time ally and friend Joe Pisapia (kd Lang, Ben Folds Five) and featuring BR549’s Don Herron, Old Crow Medicine Show’s Critter Fuqua, Alan Murphy, Will Rambeaux, and Mark Andrew Miller, Free State Serenade is Chuck Mead’s strongest effort yet.

“It’s been incredibly liberating to do all these things I’ve never done before. I’ve already gone from the bars of Lower Broadway in Nashville to the Broadway stage, and the upcoming album is one of the most unique and rewarding projects I’ve ever been a part of. I’m looking forward to where it all brings me next.” - Chuck Mead

Elizabeth Cook is a Nashville-based Singer Songwriter from Wildwood, Florida. As a critically acclaimed live act and recording artist, the New York Times lauds her “a sharp and surprising country singer”. A veteran SiriusXM Outlaw Country Radio DJ, hosting her own show, Apron Strings, nationwide for the last 10 years, she is also a favorite of David Letterman, a regular performer on the Grand Ole Opry, and a frequent guest star on Adult Swim’s long-running hit cartoon series “Squidbillies” on Cartoon Network.

In the words of the Drivin’ and Cryin’s legendary Kevn Kinney, “Elizabeth is so far ahead and under the radar you better have a supercharger for that fastback if you’re going to catch up! Enjoy the ride…”

Steve Earle, a man who doesn’t mind telling a story, was talking about the first thing Guy Clark ever said to him.

“It was 1974, I was 19 and I had just hitch-hiked from San Antonio to Nashville,” Earle said in mid-Texas-cum-Greenwich Village drawl. “Back then if you wanted to be where the best songwriters were, you had to go to Nashville. There were a couple of places where you could get on stage, play your songs. They let you have two drafts, or pass the hat, but you couldn’t do both.

“If you were from Texas, and serious, Guy Clark was a king. Everyone knew his songs, ‘Desperados Waiting For A Train,’ ‘LA Freeway,’ he’d been singing them before they came out on Old No. 1 in 1975.”  

“So I was pretty excited when I went into the club and the bartender, a friend of mine says, ‘Guy’s here.’ I wanted him to hear me play. I was doing some of my earliest songs, ‘Ben McCullough’ and ‘The Mercenary Song.’ But he was in the pool room and when I go in there the first thing he says to me is `I like your hat.’”

While it was a pretty cool hat, Earle remembers, “worn in just right with some beads I fixed up around it,” Clark did eventually hear his songs. A few months later he was playing bass in Guy’s band.

“Now, I am a terrible bass player...but I was the kid, and that was what the kid did. I took over for Rodney Crowell. At that time Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ was a top ten hit, which was amazing, a six and half minute story song on the radio. So Guy said, ‘we’re story song writers, why not us?’ So we went out to cash in on the big wave.”

The success of ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ was not replicated, but Earle reports that being the 19-year-old bass player in Guy Clark’s band was “a gas.” At least until Earle went into a bar and left the bass in the back seat of his VW bug, from which it was promptly stolen. “It was a nice Fender Precision bass that belonged to Guy, the kind of thing that would be worth ten grand now. He wasn’t so happy about that.”

More than forty years later, Steve Earle, just turned 64, no longer wears a cowboy hat. “It was more than all the hat acts,” Steve contended. “My grandmother told me it was impolite to wear a hat indoors.” As for Guy Clark, he’s dead, passed away in 2016 after a decade long stare-down with lymphoma. But Earle wasn’t ready to stop thinking about his friend and mentor.

“No way I could get out of doing this record,” Steve said when we talked over the phone from Charlotte, North Carolina, that night’s stop on Earle’s ever peripatetic road dog itinerary. “When I get to the other side, I didn’t want to run into Guy having made the TOWNES record and not one about him.”

Townes van Zandt (subject of Earle’s 2009 Townes) and Guy Clark were “like Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to me,” Steve said. The mercurial Van Zandt (1944-1997) who once ordered his teenage disciple to chain him to a tree in hopes that it would keep him from drinking, was the On The Road quicksilver of youth. Clark, 33 at the time Earle met him, was a longer lasting, more mellow burn.

“When it comes to mentors, I’m glad I had both,” Earle said. “If you asked Townes what’s it all about, he’d hand you a copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. If you asked Guy the same question, he’d take out a piece of paper and teach you how to diagram a song, what goes where. Townes was one of the all-time great writers, but he only finished three songs during the last fifteen years of his life. Guy had cancer and wrote songs until the day he died...He painted, he built instruments, he owned a guitar shop in the Bay Area where the young Bobby Weir hung out. He was older and wiser. You hung around with him and knew why they call what artists do disciplines. Because he was disciplined.”

“GUY wasn’t really a hard record to make,” Earle said. “We did it fast, five or six days with almost no overdubbing. I wanted it to sound live...When you’ve got a catalog like Guy’s and you’re only doing sixteen tracks, you know each one is going to be strong.”

When he was making TOWNES, Earle recorded “Pancho and Lefty” first; it was a big record, covered over by no less than Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and Bob Dylan. “You had to go into the bar and right away knock out the biggest guy in the room,” Earle recalled.

With GUY it was a different process. Clark didn’t have that one career-defining hit, but he wasn’t exactly unknown. “Desperados,” “LA Freeway” were pre-“Americana” style hits. “New Cut Road” charted for Bobby Bare and was recorded by Johnny Cash. “Heartbroke” was a # 1 country record for Ricky Skaggs in 1982. But when you added it up, Clark’s songs wove together into variegated life tapestry, far more than the sum of the parts.  

Earle and his current, perhaps best ever, bunch of Dukes take on these songs with a spirit of reverent glee and invention. The tunes are all over the place and so is the band, offering max energy on such disparate entries as the bluegrass rave-up “Sis Draper” and talking blues memoir of “Texas 1947.” Earle’s raw vocal on the sweet, sad “That Old Time Feeling” is heartbreaking, sounding close enough to the grave as to be doing a duet with his dead friend.

You can hear little hints of where Earle came from. The stark “Randall Knife” has the line “a better blade that was ever made was probably forged in Hell,” which wouldn’t be out of place in a Steve Earle song. Also hard to beat is “The Last Gunfighter,” a sardonic western saga to which Earle offers a bravura reading of the  chorus: “the smell of the black powder smoke and the stand in the street at the turn of joke.”

But in the end GUY leads the listener back to its beginning, namely Guy Clark, which is what any good “tribute” should do.  

Indeed, it was a revelation to dial up a video of Guy Clark singing “Desperados Waiting For A Train” on Austin City Limits sometime in the 1980’s. Looking as handsome as any man ever was in his bluegrass suit and still brown, flowing hair, Clark sings of a relationship between a young man and an older friend. Saying how the elder man “taught me how to drive his car when he was too drunk to,” the young narrator describes a halcyon fantasy in which he and friend were always “desperados waiting for a train.” As time passes, however, the young man despairs. To him, his friend is “one on the heroes of this country.” So why is he “dressed up like some old man?”  

Steve Earle delivers these lines well, as he always does. But the author of “Guitar Town,” “Copperhead Road,” “Transcendental Blues” and a hundred more masterpiece songs, would be the first to tell you it is one thing to perform “Desperados Waiting For Train” and another to be its creator. There are plenty of covers better than the original. But “Desperados...” will forever reside with Guy Clark, the songwriter singing his song, just him and his guitar. That is the main thing GUY has to tell you: to remember the cornerstone, never forget where you came from.

There was another reason, Earle said, he couldn’t “get out of” making GUY. “You know,” he said, “as you live your life, you pile up these regrets. I’ve done a lot of things that might be regrettable, but most of them I don’t regret because I realize I couldn’t have done anything else at the time.”

“With GUY, however, there was this thing. When he was sick---he was dying really for the last ten years of his life---he asked me if we could write a song together. We should do it ‘for the grandkids,’ he said. Well, I don’t know...at the time, I still didn’t co-write much, then I got busy. Then Guy died and it was too late. That, I regret.”

Earle didn’t think making GUY paid off some debt, as if it really could. Like the Townes record, Guy is a saga of friendship, its ups and downs, what endures. It is lucky for us that Earle remembers and honors these things, because like old friends, GUY is a diamond.

Acclaimed solo artist. Grammy-winning songwriter. Road warrior. By the time Kendell Marvel moved into a 200 year-old farmhouse in the Tennessee countryside in 2021, he'd already spent more than two decades expanding the boundaries of modern-day country music. 

Albums like Lowdown and Lonesome and Solid Gold Sounds were showcases for his blend of southern twang and super-sized vocals, filled with songs that split the difference between honky-tonk country and roadhouse rock & roll. Marvel's catalog reaches far beyond his solo work, too, with artists like George Strait, Gary Allan, and Chris Stapleton all landing Top 40 hits with his compositions. The man had clearly left his mark. If he'd chosen to celebrate his new home by taking a few months off, the vacation would have been well-earned. 

Of course, you can take the man out of Nashville, but you can't take the Nashville out of the man. Hours after moving in, Marvel unpacked his guitars and quickly got to work in his new space, writing songs that blended timeless textures with contemporary insight. He began with "Younger Me," a nostalgic ode to young manhood and resilience that became a Grammy-winning hit for the song's co-writers, Brothers Osborne. He kept writing during the months that followed, fine-tuning the mix of country-rockers, soul standouts, and bluesy ballads that now fill his third solo effort, Come On Sunshine.

Recorded in Dallas, TX, with producer Beau Bedford — ringleader of The Texas Gentlemen, as well as the sonic architect behind albums by Paul Cauthen and Leah Blevins — Come On Sunshine burns as brightly as its name. These are songs for Saturday night hell-raising and Sunday morning comedowns. They're stand-your-ground anthems and help-your-neighbor rallying cries. They're sharply-written tunes about booze and breakups, true love and false prophets, bad habits and proud traditions, delivered by a songwriter who's lived enough life to confidently chronicle its ups and downs. 

"I'm 51 years old, which means I'm long past the point of catering to anybody," Marvel says. "I'm just telling the stories I want to tell, whether it's a song like 'Come On Sunshine' — which Devon Gilfillian and I wrote at the height of the pandemic, looking to pour some light into the people who were shut in, shut down, and struggling with the doom and gloom we were all seeing on TV — or “Keep Doing Your Thing,” which argues that the world would be a better place if we just let people be who you are."

He even zeroes in on money-hungry televangelists with "Put It In The Plate," a southern-fried stomper that's already become an audience favorite during Marvel's ongoing tours with Chris Stapleton. "It's got that sound I grew up loving, like Hank Jr's songs in the '80s," he explains. "It's not country, it's not rock; it's just a perfect mixture of all of it. It's an interesting song because it's calling out the righteous gemstones of the world! Maybe it'll piss people off, but sometimes, the truth does that."

The truth goes down a little easier when it's set to a soundtrack of greasy funky-tonk and nuanced Tennessee twang, though. At its heaviest moments, Come On Sunshine leans closer to the rock & roll side of the country-rock divide, with Marvel delivering amplified anthems like "Don't Tell Me How To Drink" with the gruff growl of a lifer who's earned the right to call his own shots. "Brother, I've spilled more on the barroom floor than you've ever had, so let me do my thing," he barks in his deep baritone, backed by cymbal crashes and ringing power chords. If those moments nod to the ZZ-Top-meets-Merle-Haggard sound of his Keith Gattis-produced debut, Lowdown and Lonesome, then tracks like "Hellbent on Hard Times" and "Dyin' Isn't Cheap" salute the vintage warmth of 2019's Solid Gold Sounds, which Marvel recorded with The Black Keys' Dan Auerbach. Come On Sunshine finds the middle ground between those two records, its diversity mirrored by Marvel's broad list of collaborators.

Auerbach makes another appearance, this time as the co-writer of the piano-driven drinking song "Off My Mind." Mickey Raphael, longtime harmonica player for Willie Nelson, adds atmosphere and ambiance to "Dyin' Isn't Cheap," while Stapleton serves as a co-writer and backing vocalist on two tracks. Finally, solo artists like Dee White, Waylon Payne, Dean Alexander, Kolby Cooper, NRBQ's Al Anderson, and Josh Morningstar all contribute to the remaining songs. Such a lengthy guest list brings with it a number of different perspectives, which Marvel insists is the whole point. 

"I like to work with people who are different than me," he notes. "Working with Beau Bedford in Dallas meant that I was playing with guys I'd never met before. Guys who had different ideas, different tones, and different ways of playing than my friends back home. We recorded the album live, finishing the whole thing in four days. That's how you capture magic. The same thing can be said for the people I write with. I prefer left-field people — people who come from different backgrounds and different genres. Devon Gilfillian comes from the R&B world; he hears different melodies than I do. Waylon is a gay man, so he has some experiences that are different than mine. I love to surround myself with people like that, and sit in the writing room with someone who isn't just like me. Because that's how you capture magic, too."

It's been nearly 25 years since Marvel — a native of southern Illinois, where he began playing barroom gigs at 10 years old — moved to Nashville and wrote Gary Allen's Top 5 hit "Right Where I Need To Be" during his first day in town. With Come On Sunshine, he proves that one's day in the sun can last a lifetime, as long as you're willing to listen to the muse, challenge your perspectives, and chase down the magic in front of you.