Outlaw at home in Eagles country
As country music drinking songs go, bottomless mimosas at brunch doesn’t have quite the severity of, say, smashing a handle of bourbon to kill an all-consuming heartbreak.
But on Sam Outlaw’s new album, “Tenderheart,” the L.A. singer-songwriter takes an image of alfresco indulgence and wrings some profundity into that everrefilling carafe.
“You might get low/ But you never will run out,” he sings, over a warm and gentle canyon-country arrangement. “You might not know/ But who’s really got it all figured out.” Then he quotes the Eagles — perhaps his closest sonic reference point — to ask, “If there’s meaning in the peaceful easy feeling/ It takes all the blues away.”
It’s day drinking with your buddies as a kind of L.A. serenity prayer.
“There’s something in the water here that makes you comfortable with combining genres. There’s an aesthetic to L.A. about the hills and the deserts and the freeways all being next to each other,” Outlaw said. “In Nashville, everyone knows what you’re working on or who is producing who or whoever you’re (sleeping with). Here you can be more free.”
Right now, the country music establishment is split between competing camps. On one side, you have the likes of Florida Georgia Line, the bro-country duo opening a four-story mega-bar in Nashville to showcase its own whiskey line.
On the other, the backlash to that has elevated psychedelic oddballs like Sturgill Simpson or shaggy veterans like Chris Stapleton to the top of the Grammys.
Outlaw is part of what may be a young third wave of artists — like the Jack White-championed Margo Price and the young ex-con Jaime Wyatt — who understand that country music at its most “authentic” is still an artifice (but to his credit, Outlaw really is his mom’s maiden name). One can write pretty, accessible songs with self-awareness about selling a “story” but also stay true and original.
“I love pop music, and I love three-minute rock songs,” Outlaw said. “My problem with ‘ bro country’ isn’t that it isn’t hip enough, it’s that it (stinks). What I do is fundamentally pop music.”
For Outlaw, that means drawing on the deep well of Gram Parsons, Linda Ronstadt and Eagles, L.A. acts who could write pristine, almost angelic tracks with raw need and dashed ego underneath.
His voice has echoes of Townes Van Zandt’s high rasp, and his writing has the concision and yearning of George Jones. But the inviting, magic-hour beauty of his playing makes it sound like his hometown.
“I grew up on the Eagles’ greatest hits, and I get so many emotions when I hear ‘Desperado.’ But those guys were all also about success,” Outlaw said.
That’s also part of what makes him an L.A. act — he’s comfortable with commercial ambition and sincere about making affecting music.
“Tenderheart” is a domestic record but also a modern one in which bigcity life is an equal part of one’s family. Outlaw’s at his best when reconciling the darker, more selfish parts of his personality (like on the one-night-stand slow burner “Diamond Ring”) with a genuine desire to be a better man and accept love (as on the album’s title track).
“I have to check in on myself pretty regularly and calm myself down. In my 20s, I was really selfobsessed,” he said. “A song like ‘Tenderheart’ isn’t bull.”