"The latest brainy balladeer to emerge from the Lone Star State. 3 1/2 out of 4 stars album rating." – Boston Herald

"This charming debut helps Carll stand out in an exceedingly crowded pack." – Austin American Statesman

The Houston area has produced more than its fair share of great country-folk singers over the years. In fact, the sprawling metropolis of four million can be seen as the city for singer songwriters. Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, Nanci Griffith, Lucinda Williams, Lyle Lovett, and Eric Taylor are but some of the talent Houston has produced in part or in whole.

Hayes Carll, raised in the Woodlands, a suburb north of town, is poised to become the next great Houston-bred singer-songwriter. Or at least the most tried-and-true ears in the area think so. Rusty Andrews, the owner of Houston folk club McGonigel's Mucky Duck calls him "my favorite up-and-coming local singer-songwriter. He's got great songs, the stage presence, everything." Wrecks Bell, of whom Van Zandt wrote the immortal song "Rex's Blues" and the owner of the Old Quarter Acoustic Cafe in Galveston, agrees, almost word-for-word. "I don't know what it is, but he really makes people feel at ease. He gets up there on stage and just starts talking about what he did yesterday or whatever. In that way -- the stage presence -- he kinda reminds me of Townes. And he writes great songs, too. He's my favorite young songwriter."

Carll would be the last person to compare himself to Townes Van Zandt, but there are a few similarities. Like Van Zandt, Carll is a tall, lanky, and handsome fellow from a privileged background. Like Van Zandt, Carll's academic career was spotty -- he graduated (by the skin of his teeth) from tiny Hendrix College in rural Arkansas. Also like Van Zandt, who lived for a time in a rustic cabin in the hills outside Nashville, Carll likes to stay away from big-city hustle and bustle. He's spent the last few years living in a beach shack in Crystal Beach, Texas on the Bolivar Peninsula across the bay from Galveston.

There, the "Highway 87" Carll sings about is the only road through town, and it's literally a road to nowhere. 87 once ran all the way through Janis Joplin's birthplace of Port Arthur to Louisiana and beyond, but a hurricane wiped it out in the 1970s and it's been closed ever since. Thus Bolivar is populated by a rowdy bunch of shrimpers, drug dealers, and fishermen who like to party and live life off the grid.

It was there and in Galveston that Carll honed his act. Like Bolivar, Galveston is also a party-hearty town. Wrecks Bell's re-opened Old Quarter -- set amid downtown Galveston's faded grandeur -- is one of very few bars in the town that doesn't cater to the beach bash set. Carll found the haven one night after his wait-shift ended at a nearby seafood restaurant, and soon won Bell over with a couple of his Townes and Dylan covers.

It was a folk trio's renditions of a few Dylan songs that inspired Carll to become a performer. This little folk trio came to the Unitarian church I used to go to when I was a kid," he says. "It's kind of a corny story. They were singing some Dylan songs, I thought it was the coolest thing. "I Should Be Released," "Blowin' in the Wind," stuff like that. I was leaning that way towards lyrics anyway, I was real active politically and socially at that point in my life, and so I learned guitar and it came through for me".

His career got of to a slow start. Small wonder, since he was playing a 12-string guitar that only had six strings. "I had asked for a guitar for Christmas,"he remembers. "My parents rounded that one up somewhere. I guess nobody told them that it was actually a twelve-string guitar. It just had a bunch of empty pegs just sitting there." Not only did it have half as many strings as it should have, but those that it did have shredded his young fingers. "It had some kind of ridiculous gauge strings on there. They were amazingly thick. I was in incredible pain until somebody slapped some thinner strings on there. It was like a whole new world."

Carll's youth saw him listening not just to folk, but as he admits, also to all the rubbish that his generation was subjected to. He's trying to jettison all that. "I had a bunch of crap records," he admits. "But I also liked country music a whole lot, but when I heard Dylan then I got into Woody Guthrie and things like that. I figured the farther back I could go, the cooler it would be. So Dylan started the whole folk thing for me, and (laughs) I've gotten progressively more narrow-minded ever since." Lucky for us, as this record attests.