‘Post Malone amazed me, we had a ball together,’ says Country icon Dwight Yoakam ahead of new album release
At 68, Dwight Yoakam continues to influence a new generation of artists with his unique blend of country and rock
IT is 11.15pm in the far west of America and 7.15am in the far west of England when I’m hooked up with self-confessed “night hawk” Dwight Yoakam.
The country singer with a rock and roll heart has just arrived back home in Los Angeles and I’m in Cornwall, where it’s calmer since raging Storm Bert piped down.
After unloading his SUV during some “nuisance drizzle”, master storyteller Yoakam settles down to regale me with a blizzard of intriguing information.
For more than an hour, he talks about getting married for the first time, becoming a father for the first time, duetting with wildly successful rapper Post Malone and making his life-affirming new album, Brighter Days.
Beyoncé called her country album Cowboy Carter. She may have done a whole different form of music in the past but she was raised in Texas.
Oh, and the not-so-small matter of trawling through his four- decade career.
“Sorry it’s so early for you,” the singer begins in his engaging drawl. “It comes from years of being on the road.
“I don’t come off stage until about now or maybe later and, by the time I get to a hotel, it’s five or six in the morning.
“That’s fine by me. Then I can have a rock and roll breakfast at four in the afternoon!”
With his ten-gallon hat, double denim outfits and bucketloads of attitude, it’s little wonder that Dwight Yoakam is associated with the “Cowpunk” scene.
He joins the dots between country twang and riffing rock and roll, between Merle Haggard and The Clash.
‘There’s a romanticism about cowboy culture’
His influences include everyone from roots music pioneers The Carter Family to country rock trailblazers The Byrds and even Britain’s original bad boys, the Rolling Stones — all reflected on Brighter Days.
In fact, the album comes over as a summation of everything that went before with added heartfelt touches, in the shape of the title track and I Spell Love, prompted by his new-found personal situation.
The first two songs, hard rocking Wide Open Heart and impassioned I’ll Pay The Price, give co-writing credits to the excellent Jeffrey Steele and set the tone for a thrilling return to the fray.
At 68, Yoakam is influencing a whole new generation of artists at a time when his type of music is all the rage.
He sang Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right. He looked shy and embarrassed but I was amazed at how well he did it.
Dwight on Post Malone
“I think there’s a certain romanticism about cowboy culture,” he decides.
“Beyoncé called her country album Cowboy Carter. She may have done a whole different form of music in the past but she was raised in Texas.
“As musicians, we don’t usually limit ourselves to categories. We play what we think is good.”
This helps explain why Post Malone, who recently released a country duets album, F-1 Trillion, turned to his hero Yoakam to further his determined foray into the genre.
To cement their bond, Post duets on the feel good lead single on Brighter Days, a danceable ear worm called I Don’t Know How To Say Goodbye (Bang Bang Boom Boom).
Yoakam explains how he first met the rapper in 2018: “Post was one of the earliest guests on my radio show, Greater Bakersfield.
“He had me on a bunch of his playlists. Then one of my show’s producers said, ‘Post Malone is a fan of yours. Do you want to hang?’ ”
Yoakam knew that Post, like Beyoncé, had also grown up in country hotbed Texas — Dallas to be precise — and instantly agreed that he’d make an interesting choice for his audience.
“Before we started the show, Post was noodling around on my Martin guitar,” he recalls.
‘He was in town to do video with Taylor Swift’
“He sang Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right. He looked shy and embarrassed but I was amazed at how well he did it.
“For the show, we did my song A Thousand Miles From Nowhere and Merle Haggard’s The Bottle Let Me Down.”
Cue further radio hook-ups. Then Yoakam was invited to join his tattooed friend at this year’s Stagecoach Festival, a huge country shindig at the same Californian site as Coachella, where they performed Dwight’s Little Ways.
At the same time, Yoakam was told: “Post also wants to be on your new record. My heart sank because I had literally finished mixing it two weeks earlier.”
He was determined not to insert a contribution into a song “with duct tape as an afterthought” and set about coming up with something new.
Yoakam picks up the story: “I was sitting at a traffic light and I told my wife, ‘It seems I don’t know how to say goodbye to this album’.”
Bingo! That gave him the idea for a song. Then a second song started forming in his mind, a country shuffle called Bang Bang Boom Boom.
Finally, by splicing the two together, I Don’t Know How To Say Goodbye (Bang Bang Boom Boom) was born.
They recorded it when “Post was in town to do a video with Taylor Swift”, as you do — for Fortnight, the lead track on her Tortured Poets Department album.
“We sang together and just had a ball,” says Yoakam.
If the track serves as an “addendum” to his album, the title track and I Spell Love are pivotal and inspired by two very special people in his life, his wife and four-year-old son.
In 2020, Yoakam was all set to get married in style to his partner of ten years, photographer Emily Joyce, when the pandemic upended their lives — and everyone else’s.
Yoakam quotes a saying once employed by John Lennon: “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”
So they had to tie the knot at a tiny service with social distancing restrictions, officiated by a kindly Monsignor at a Catholic church in Santa Monica.
“Then we found out after the fact that Emily was pregnant,” continues Yoakam. “It was our joy in the midst of the pandemic madness.
“We were going to experience a major shift in our lives and I would be living my life in reverse.
“I thought having a child had passed me by but, because of Emily, it hadn’t.”
In August 2020, the couple welcomed the little star of his new title track, Brighter Days, into the world — son Dalton.
Two years later, with “the darker days of Covid” behind them, Dalton was toddling around with his ukulele made by Fender in the shape of a classic Telecaster.
Yoakam reports: “He said, ‘Daddy, get your guitar’. I wasn’t planning on getting it but his elation when I stopped what I was doing and picked it up was overwhelming.
“I couldn’t help sharing his excitement and happiness in that moment.
“I just began singing that first line, ‘Brighter days are up ahead/Brighter days, that’s what you said,’ and he giggled and tried to sing it back.”
‘The Tom Joad road’
Six months later, Yoakam recorded Dalton performing those lines and that’s what listeners can hear as the song draws to a close.
Proud dad says: “I gave him a songwriting credit. It felt appropriate because the poor little guy has had rock and roll hours growing up with me.
“He had been to 60 live shows by the time he was two. When he got a bit older, we stopped dragging him around so much.”
That said, Yoakam reports that his “monitor guy set up a little mic rig” for Dalton at the side of the stage.
“I said, ‘He’ll have to know five good songs, then I’ll put him in the act!’ ”
If Brighter Days and I Spell Love have deeply personal connections, Yoakam’s album, complete with the widescreen sweep of California Sky, also serves as a tribute to the music of the state he’s called home for many years.
In high school, the Stones, Led Zeppelin and Creedence Clearwater Revival allowed me an access point to my peers.
Dwight on early influences
Born in Kentucky and raised in Ohio, he sees himself “a hillbilly kid” who started out listening honky-tonk singers such as Johnny Horton and Stonewall Jackson.
“Then in high school, the Stones, Led Zeppelin and Creedence Clearwater Revival allowed me an access point to my peers.
“I had an [Epiphone] Casino which gave me a little bit of the Keith Richards attitude and they thought that was cool.”
When a career in music beckoned, Yoakam flirted with settling in country capital Nashville but crucially decided to head to California.
“It is a migrant state. You know, Route 66, out to the West Coast for a better life,” he affirms.
“It’s the Tom Joad road,” adds Yoakam, intimating that he followed in the footsteps of John Steinbeck’s poor farmer in The Grapes Of Wrath.
“Going to California gave me a different perspective and it allowed me to evolve on my own terms.
“Nashville’s a writer’s town and Los Angeles is a performance town.”
When his music achieved lift-off in the Eighties, he was emboldened by the brash, unvarnished sound of the LA Cowpunk scene — bands like X, The Blasters and Lone Justice — as well as New Wave acts from these shores such as Elvis Costello and Rockpile (with Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe).
He remembers sharing the bill with Lone Justice early on and says: “The Cowpunk movement allowed somebody like me to perform in front of a rock audience and show them the emotional territory which we shared.”
Yoakam also adopted the ethos of The Bakersfield Sound, named after a city in southern California and the stomping ground of country superstars Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, who both performed and recorded with crack outfits — The Buckaroos and The Strangers respectively.
‘Rugged rock ’n’ roll’
“Buck and Merle were using their nightclub bands to record at Capitol Studios in Hollywood,” says Yoakam.
“They became the Bakersfield Sound in capital letters. I was attracted to the raw, rugged rock ’n’ roll of what they were doing.”
Yoakam reels off the names of other inspirational acts who fed into his West Coast melting pot — The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Monkees, Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles and even the Buckingham/Nicks incarnation of Fleetwood Mac.
So, by filtering a variety of styles through his own uncompromising prism, Yoakam emerged with his singular, rollicking style, topped by his distinctive tenor and his effortless ability to yodel.
His debut studio album Guitars Cadillacs Etc. Etc. appeared in 1986, the first of many to feature the exhilarating sound of Pete Anderson’s guitar.
It put Yoakam front and centre of a new breed of country mavericks that counted among its ranks Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett.
He was also noted for various movie and TV acting roles and, around the time of his biggest selling album, 1992’s This Time, he dated Hollywood star Sharon Stone.
His best known songs include two of those he has performed with Post Malone, A Thousand Miles From Nowhere and Little Ways.
And his duet with the late, great Buck Owens on a cover of Streets Of Bakersfield remains a career highlight.
Yoakam is defined by rousing live shows and well regarded albums, including 2015’s Second Hand Heart, his previous offering of mostly original songs before Brighter Days.
To prove he still wears his musical heart on his sleeve, his live set continues to feature rockabilly versions of Elvis Presley’s Suspicious Minds and Queen’s Crazy Little Thing Called Love.
Speaking of covers, Brighter Days bears three which are all drawn from Yoakam’s DNA.
Keep On The Sunnyside, written in 1899 and popularised by a 1928 Carter Family recording, is given a typically spirited Yoakam reboot with a riff inspired by the Stones’ Street Fighting Man.
The Byrds’ Time Between, which was written by Chris Hillman, appeared on their 1967 fourth album Younger Than Yesterday.
Yoakam enthuses about the original, the first Byrds song to feature the country-style guitar of Clarence White, prefiguring the band’s full-on immersion in Nashville vibes, Sweetheart Of The Rodeo.
The other cover is a gorgeous reading of Bound Away by US rock band Cake, not such a surprising choice when you hear its lyrical and melodic brilliance.
Yoakam says: “I told its writer John McCrea that I’m not usually envious of somebody else’s song but I am of this one.”
It’s well past midnight LA time when this irrepressible character and I finally wrap up our chat.
As cold, dark winter approaches, at least we can immerse ourselves in Brighter Days.
