Six years after loss of daughter, songwriter John Evans releases new material.
After loss of daughter, John Evans returns with contemplative ‘Polyester’
JOHN Evans picked up his daughter in Beaumont and asked her where she wanted to go.
The choices were Houston, where he’d lived his entire life, or Austin, where the veteran rootsrock musician, songwriter and producer could also find regular work.
“It was the first time she was going to be living with me full time,” Evans says. “So I gave her the choice. Comfort or adventure. She chose adventure. So we put our stuff in a trailer and headed across I-10.”
Movement — both physical and personal — informs Evans’ new album, “Polyester.” The record also repeatedly touches on ephemeral connections, whether between two people or between people and belongings. So it starts with the song “Polyester,” a swaggery appreciation of that stylish but unforgiving unnatural fabric with a monstrous guitar riff.
But shed the facade of the stylish coat and the album progresses into matters of flesh and bone and spirit, closing with “Good Life,” a song of bare-boned sincerity. Though not stated outright in the lyrics, the album’s big, beautiful beating heart is Evans’ relationship with his daughter.
“‘Good Life’ is just about appreciating where you are,” says Evans, who will play Cactus Music on Saturday. “Coming to grips with where you are and being OK with it. Abbie is in that. She didn’t need things. Instead, she focused on the things that are important. And she helped me realize there aren’t that many things that are. Not many things worth getting bent out of shape about.”
Abigail Evans toured with her father in her teens, running his merch stand. She got a diagnosis of the rare disease epidermolysis bullosa, a connective tissue disorder. She died in December 2013 at the age of 20.
Evans, 48, has always cut a striking figure. A lean, tall, wild-haired guitar whiz, quick to crack a crooked smile. But for the first time, following his daughter’s death, he largely went quiet. He’d still play gigs with his band or do production work. But “Polyester” is his first recording in over six years. “I knew she’d want me to go out and be social again,” he says.
His process was a little different this time out, more internalized as he wrote most of the songs without his band. The songs aren’t necessarily a departure. Evans says, “I grew up listening to Buddy Holly, so even if I made a 14-song album, it’d still come in below 40 minutes.”
As always, he’s most comfortable working in the dirt of early rock ’n’ roll, when country, soul, pop and rock weren’t sifted into different piles. Some of the songs snarl (the title track), and others are better suited for a moonlit drive (“Sweet Dreams”).
“The goal was good flow, no lulls,” Evans says.
Though it’s easy to be snared by the fuzzy guitar on the title track, even the slower pieces have an engaging sense of movement. A gently plucked banjo moves “Grandma’s Chair,” another song about the ways we attach meaning to familial relics. “I got a piece of my family sitting right there,” Evans sings.
“That’s straight from my life,” he says. “I still have that chair. My previous girlfriend tried to get me to get rid of it. There was no way I was getting rid of it. I read something recently about how millennials don’t want their grandparents’ (expletive).”
Today, it sits in his listening room in Buda. When Evans was unpacking in his home there, he came across a jar of notes from a high school girlfriend.
“It was in a box that had moved so many times and never been opened,” he says. Another song, the quiet “Love Note,” came from that discovery.
“Polyester” plays like a series of whispers from the past that Evans captures and projects into musical films, all about two or three minutes long. He dedicated the collection to Abigail.
The next few months find Evans with a busy slate of shows. He’s also busying himself with production work, including a Jesse Dayton album out later this year. He may produce Allison Moorer’s next recording. And Evans also recorded a set at Blanco’s the day before the old-school Houston honky-tonk shuttered — that live album is due later this year.
Evans already has another set of songs recorded that likely find him in a contemplative space. Right now, they’re just voice and acoustic guitar.
“I keep thinking about putting bass or fiddle on them,” he says. “So I’m doing everything I can to keep my hands off it. To just let it be.”