Absolute heartbreak has been part of country & western since before Hank Williams pined that he was so lonesome he could cry, way back in the 1940s. There’s a strand of country that’s an endless paean to the cowboy’s (and cowgirl’s) wandering soul, to messy lives lived among empty bottles and broken relationships. Texan Hayes Carll falls very much within this tradition and his fifth album, from its title onwards, is a warm bath in melancholy and broken-heartedness.
In truth, it gets a bit much over the whole ten songs, drifting into the realms of the maudlin but, taken in smaller doses, these numbers are beautifully written observations, perfectly delivered in his cracked voice. Like Leonard Cohen, another master of the morose, Carll spikes his songs with an understated bleak humour that many will miss. Not all of them. Some are just pure ache, like the tear duct-tickling “Good While It Lasted”, an ode to the impermanent nature of love, bathed in pathos, nostalgia and longing.
The album is produced with clarity by Joe Henry, who has given the likes of Emmylou Harris a polish in the past, and Carll plays a mean acoustic guitar at the top of the mix. There’s minimal downtempo backing – a tint of piano, an unobtrusive rhythm section – but the songs themselves carry the weight. They are potent creatures, poetic and forlorn, redolent in places of that master of roots Americana misery Townes van Zandt. Carll does let up very occasionally, as on the relatively perky “Love Is So Easy”, but for the most part this is an eloquent pity party where a typical couplet is “Living rooms, coffee houses, rundown bars/10,000 people alone under the stars” (from “Sake of the Song”). Lovers and Leavers is the perfect album to stick on late at night when the blues bite hard and it’s time to wallow in them.
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