RAYLAND BAXTER WROTE SEVENTY SONGS TO FIND ELEVEN / TULIPS / 2.27.27
Rayland Baxter returns with True Violet, an album shaped by solitude, family and a renewed understanding of his own songwriting. He brings the accompanying tour to Tulips in February.
– JAMBALOO EDITORIAL TEAM
Rayland Baxter wrote somewhere in the region of seventy songs while putting together his fifth album, True Violet. Eleven survived. The interesting part is what happened between the two numbers.
For much of the past decade, the Tennessee songwriter has been pulling Americana in increasingly unexpected directions. His 2018 album Wide Awake introduced a playful, occasionally surreal approach to pop songwriting, while 2022’s If I Were a Butterfly wandered through psychedelic rock, funk, childhood recordings and whatever other musical possibilities happened to catch his attention. It was the work of somebody who seemed to enjoy finding out where a song might take him.
True Violet arrives from a rather different place.
Following the death of his father, Bucky Baxter, the extraordinary multi-instrumentalist who played with Bob Dylan and Steve Earle, Rayland retreated to his home in the Tennessee hills and began writing. He spent evening after evening alone with his guitar, accumulating songs without necessarily understanding what he was trying to say.
A conversation with his sister eventually helped him find his way through the material. She encouraged him to write about what he was actually feeling, something he later admitted he had been avoiding.
The resulting album, co-produced by Nick Waterhouse and Paul Butler, takes that change in perspective as its starting point. “Better Man” considers the possibility of emerging from difficult experiences with something useful to show for them, while “Bolly Plateau” returns to the quiet hilltop where much of the writing took place.
There is something particularly interesting about that development in an artist whose music has never been especially easy to categorize. Baxter can write a beautifully direct folk song, then surround it with arrangements that seem determined to wander off somewhere entirely different. His willingness to follow those instincts has always made the records interesting, but it has also made him an unusually compelling live performer.
His February appearance at Tulips comes as part of the True Violet tour, bringing this new collection of songs into a room that should suit both their intimacy and Baxter’s more adventurous musical instincts.
After seventy attempts at finding the right words, he has eleven new songs to share. The rest of his remarkable catalog should make for a pretty wonderful evening too.
