Hayes Carll Finally Dispenses With His Cynicism, But Says He ‘Can Still Be Pissed Off’

Hayes Carll is ready for you to hear his new record. Opening up about it, however, is another matter.

“Talking about it and discussing it has always been problematic for me. I’ve always approached it with some dread and anxiety,” Carll says. We’re staring out the window of a room at the Days Inn in Okemah, Oklahoma, on a July afternoon, a few hours before Carll and Evan Felker kick off this year’s Woody Guthrie Folk Festival with a song swap in a renovated theater a few blocks away.

We’re Only Human, Carll’s 10th record in a career that dates back to 2000, drops on Friday. It is both vintage Carll and something brand new and unexplored. Everyone who has followed Carll’s career knew he was one of the foremost songwriters in Americana, with a gift for storytelling and a knack for wry humor. Whether pontificating divorce and drug use on a military base (“KMAG YOYO”), paying tribute to a woman who likes to lay naked and be gazed upon (“Drunken Poet’s Dream”), or carefully laying out the hypocrisy God would surely see if “she” came down to earth (“Nice Things”), Carll’s worldview and music have always been inseparable. However, with rare exceptions — such as 2004’s eulogy for a friend in “Long Way Home” — the most notable absence in his music has been Carll himself.

This record is a personal one that finds Carll staring down his own demons and his wishes for the world around him — and this marks his first time talking about it. If he hadn’t already been open in his discomfort with our discussion, he conveys it by easing into his hotel room chair as though there are snakes on the floor.

“Todd Snider has this great quote where he says, ‘I don’t write these songs to change anybody’s mind, I write them to ease my own,’” Carll says. “I always thought that was a really cool quote, but I realized that wasn’t how I approached music. I wasn’t working through stuff. I was writing about things and trying to be creative, but I wasn’t working on myself.”

Carll flips that realization on its head on We’re Only Human. Buoyed by a jovial, freewheeling experience recording Hayes & the Heathens in 2024 as part of his supergroup experiment with the Band of Heathens, he sought out Heathens frontman Gordy Quist to co-produce the first Hayes Carll album since 2021. The two repaired to Quist’s studio in Austin — the same place they had recorded Hayes & the Heathens — along with some of the finest musicians in the state. Brian Wright’s guitars, Noah Jeffries’ fiddle, and Geoff Queen’s steel work, among others, are constants across the album’s ten tracks.

In the process, he worked on himself.

“My mind is racing so much all the time,” he says. “I’m carrying so much self-doubt and insecurity and fear, and I get distracted so easily. I would lean into old habits, old compulsive behaviors or narratives that I had about myself. They really weren’t serving me anymore, and I would write about it for 20 days in a row, and then go, ‘This keeps coming up.’ Whatever the issues were, getting still allowed me to process and see them in a way that I hadn’t.

“I equate my mind to a snow globe. When it’s shook up and it’s in the blizzard, it’s really hard to see anything,” he continues. “The first step for me was figuring out ways, daily, to let that settle. Then, I could get into what I was feeling and thinking.”

Carll wrote or co-wrote every song on the record. He collaborated with Aaron Raitiere on two tracks, including the single “Progress of Man (Bitcoin & Cattle).” MC Taylor — better known as Hiss Golden Messenger — helped Carll round out “Stay Here Awhile.” Meanwhile, Nashville duo Brothers Osborne contributed to writing the introspective “What I Will Be.”

The writers, musicians, and Quist himself all eventually became something of a circle of trust for Carll. When he sings a line like, “I swear I’m trying to walk in the light,” on “Making Amends,” he sounds like he’s trying to convince himself as much as he is the listener. That’s the sort of record We’re Only Human is, and Quist recognized that from the outset.

“I think that Hayes sometimes has a hard time being at ease with something this important to him,” Quist tells Rolling Stone. “He cares so much about these songs and his career. But that can be a dangerous thing sometimes, and I think when you step into a studio that you have to let go of all of that. You need to be free to try to dive deep, removing all fear of what will flop or not flop. With Hayes, it was trying to get to a place where he felt free to let it happen, and trusting that it was going to be good.”

In summing up the record and this moment in the career of Carll, who will turn 50 in January, Quist uses the term “rebirth.” That’s evident in the majority of the tunes. Even in “High,” when Carll is leaning heavily on the acerbic wit that defines him, he’s still singing about growth and awareness while his mind is floating “exactly at the height that I like to fly/ I am just the right amount of high.”

Later that night, Carll sits onstage at the Crystal Theater in town, a few feet away from Felker. Carll has opened for Felker’s Turnpike Troubadours often — including earlier this summer at Red Rocks outside of Denver — but the two men have never actually played a song swap together. When the lights come up, Felker introduces Carll as “one of my personal heroes.”

Only now, when he takes his seat alongside Felker, is Carl back in his element. Playing in Guthrie’s hometown and at the festival bearing his name, he is the razor-sharp poet that the sold-out room, which includes members of the Guthrie family, had clamored all day to hear. He doesn’t just take the fans with him in his music, they follow along with his stories and his one-liners. On occasion, he even upstages Felker, Okemah’s hometown hero, only a few miles down the road from Felker’s front door.

Midway through the show, Felker plays “Heaven Passing Through,” off Turnpike’s recent The Price of Admission LP. He explains it was inspired by a quiet moment watching stars and constellations with his four-year-old daughter, Evie. The tale draws cheers and a few tears around the theater. But when it’s Carll’s turn to follow, he opts to sing “High” and immediately tells the crowd the two songs are virtually identical — “except mine is really egotistical. There were no children or mothers or constellations involved. But it’s the same.”

That Carll charisma is on greater display on We’re Only Human than on any other album in his catalog. Not that there aren’t moments when the state of the world still drives him. “The Progress of Man” is a spitfire rebuke of “the assholes and racists” he sees pulling levers of power.

“Sometimes I just start off by rhyming goofy words together,” Carll says of the song. “But then I just saw something I wanted to express — the overwhelm of input and opinions and self-righteousness and certainty that everyone seems to go through life with and batter you with.

“This record is, in large part, about grace and stillness and calmness and soul work,” he continues. “That one is more judgmental, but I also feel that, too. I can still be pissed off about things.”

The rest of the record, indeed, puts grace and stillness first and foremost. Whatever the upheaval in Carll’s life has been that drove him to write the songs, this is the mindset he’s chosen to deal with it. On “May I Never,” which he sees as “a reminder to trust my spirit and my soul, and not abandon it or forsake it,” Carll is joined by a handful of friends and fellow artists. Ray Wylie Hubbard, who inspired the song, adds his voice to a verse. So do Shovels & Rope, Darrell Scott, Nicole Atkins, and Band of Heathens’ Quist and Ed Jurdi.

The Days Inn in Okemah, while aptly described as “what you surely imagine when you think of a Days Inn in Okemah,” is still the town’s flagship motel, and a de facto gathering place for artists playing the Woody Guthrie festival. In the parking lot before we talk, I introduce Carll to Brad Piccolo, one of the founding members of the Red Dirt Rangers. The Oklahoma bluegrass band is an early influence on the state’s Red Dirt scene. On this day, Piccolo is boasting about the Red Dirt Relief Fund, which the Rangers co-founded nearly 20 years ago and which recently passed the $1 million milestone for money raised to benefit Oklahoma musicians in need.

When I ask Carll about another of the songs on the record, “Good People,” he recalls that encounter while shifting from unease to unblinking and serious.

“There’s just so much negative shit out there, every time I turn on the news or open my computer or listen to the outside world,” Carll says. “I’ve always been a believer that, at heart, people are good and want to be good. I don’t hear anything about the good that people do. That guy we were just talking to from the Red Dirt Rangers said they just gave away a million dollars. That’s the stuff I want to hear.

“It gives me faith in humanity, and it reminds me that I don’t know how that guy votes,” he continues. “Does it matter? Yes, politics matters, and being passionate and fighting for what you believe in matters, but it shouldn’t eclipse basic humanity.”

The record is not the only hard reset that Carll is pulling off. He has also found himself re-energized by touring. He’s about to hit the road in earnest in support of We’re Only Human, starting Saturday at the Grand Ole Opry and continuing through November. Already this summer, Carll has opened for Tyler Childers, Turnpike, and Robert Earl Keen, with crowds often exceeding 10,000. Then, he turned around and did a series of acoustic shows at clubs he played 20 years ago when he was first gaining attention as a troubadour from the Texas Gulf Coast. The day we sit and talk marks 41 days in a row on the road for Carll.

“To get to go back to those places and see the pictures on the walls of Guy Clark, Billy Joe Shaver, Ray Wylie,” he says, “those people are my heroes. Remembering what it felt like to just be in the same room as those guys had graced, and all these years later, I feel like I’m in the fraternity I always wanted to be in. It’s humbling and it makes me really happy. I’ve lined up more work than I have in a long time, and for the first time in a long time, rather than dreading it, I’m champing at the bit to get out there and play in front of people.”

The artists Carll rattled off, from Clark to Childers, never had much of a problem making themselves an open book in their lyrics. To hear Carll — who would still lay claim to a legacy as one of the best modern folk lyricists, even if he never wrote another word before this record — process a desire to dig deeper in his writing is striking. When we wrap up our interview, he seeks a debrief: “Be straight with me. How was that? Did I ramble?” and it’s only in answering him that I realize Carll’s discomfort is neither with the questions or answers we’re exchanging. It’s not talking about it that has him on edge, it’s hearing himself talk about it that does.

Carll didn’t just learn about himself when he created We’re Only Human, he’s learning about himself as he’s breaking it down out loud.

“I had kept what felt like a safe distance from myself for a lot of my career,” he concludes. “That worked until it didn’t, and I just hit a wall. I recognized I needed to make some changes, but I didn’t really know where to start.”

Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose latest books, Never Say Never and Red Dirt Unplugged are available via Back Lounge Publishing.