Hayes Carll Rocks Little Rock Crowd at Rev Room

Hayes Carll performs at The Rev Room in Little Rock, Ark. on Saturday, August 3.

by Julian Spivey
Hayes Carll brought his latest tour promoting his most recent album What It Is to The Rev Room in Little Rock, Ark. on Saturday, August 3 to play for an always loyal crowd of enthusiasts supporting the Texan singer-songwriter who briefly lived in central Arkansas and went to Hendrix College just up the road a ways in Conway.
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I’ve long considered Carll to be one of the best singer-songwriters in the genres of Americana, Red Dirt/Texas Country, alt-country or whatever you’d like to call it. I’ve always been dumbfounded that you don’t here his name as frequently in conversations about the best songwriters of his generations the way you do about artists like Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, Evan Felker (of the Turnpike Troubadours) and the like.

Carll, of course, kicked his Little Rock show off with his song “Little Rock,” from his 2005 sophomore album of the same name, much to the pleasure of the jam-packed Rev Room crowd.

Carll spent much of his set highlighting What It Is, which for my money is one of the three-to-five best country music albums of the year thus far. He would perform the majority of the tracks from the album during the evening, most notably leaving off the political-leaning “Fragile Men” and “Wild Pointy Finger” off his set possibly not wanting to poke the bear in a red state.

The most political he would get was with “Times Like These” with one of my favorite lyrics of the year: “In times like these do I really need a billionaire/just takin’ all my time tryin’ to tell me I was treated unfair?”

Everything he played from What It Is at The Rev Room just proved how great of an album it is with songs like the love song “None’ya” and the terrific story song “Jesus and Elvis,” that’s based on a tragic true story.

Other terrific tracks from his latest released highlighted on Saturday night were “American Dream,” “Things You Don’t Wanna Know,” “If I May Be So Bold” and the title track of the album.

Carll’s set was perfectly mixed between his newer songs and fan-favorites off previous albums like “Wild as a Turkey” and “Girl Downtown,” off Trouble in Mind (2008) and “Love is So Easy” from 2016’s Lovers and Leavers.

One of the crowd’s obvious favorite performances of the night would be the acoustic “Beaumont,” from Trouble in Mind, which he did solo as his great backing band took a moment’s breath. I fully believe that “Beaumont” is one of the 100 greatest country songs ever written. It’s that good.

Carll’s stripped down version of “Bad Liver & a Broken Heart,” generally one of his more raucous performances of his show, was quite the surprise, but worked really well.

It was his more raucous, rocking numbers toward the end of his show on Saturday night that really energized the crowd like the hard-charging, foot-stompers “KMAG (YOYO),” “Drunken Poet’s Dream,” “Hard Out Here” and “Stomp & Holler.” You can’t hear these songs live and see the audience reaction to them and tell me that Carll isn’t one of the best artists around.

Carll finishes his set off with the usual “Wish I Hadn’t Stayed So Long” before returning to the stage after uproarious applause from the Rev Room crowd to perform an encore that featured “It’s a Shame,” one of my very favorite tracks off the modern-day classic Trouble in Mind and “The Lovin’ Cup” off KMAG YOYO (& Other American Stories).  

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