Gill Landry, the singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and member of Old Crow Medicine Show, has just released his third solo album, a self-titled LP via ATO Records.
The New Orleans native came up busking on the streets of his hometown and around the country, even getting as far as Paris, before eventually joining up with OCMS in 2004. He is currently on tour with fellow country/folk solo artist Justin Townes Earle and then he will head over to Europe to open shows for Laura Marling.
Jambands.com spoke with Landry from his current base of operations in Nashville, TN, where he recorded most of the new album. The songwriter humbly discusses the development of his craft, the differences between playing solo versus in a band, and why he may have stretched the truth a bit when applying for the Old Crow position.
How did you first start playing music?
I had an uncle that played guitar with his wife, and they sang. That definitely interested me. I got my first guitar when I was like five, learned “Camptown Ladies” and things like that from a little folk book or something. Then it just followed me through my life. The pursuits just came naturally. Just like any kid, you have dreams of being onstage and whatnot when you’re playing music, but the evolution of my life in music was very much just that, an evolution—a series of circumstances that followed. And here I am now, doing this. This is a little more of a conscious effort, because I know well what I’m up for now and I’m still doing it. [Laughs]
So was guitar your first instrument?
Probably voice was my first, but I guess everybody sings. So guitar was my first. I think drums were second. Then everything after. I’m a little “jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none.” I really love writing songs—that’s my favorite thing to do. I’ve always been into the song and stories in songs and in the telling of tales in that way. So for years, all I could do was just strum chords and sing, and that was enough for me because that’s what I wanted to do—I wanted to sing. I wanted to sing about [Woody Guthrie’s] “Pretty Boy Floyd” or I wanted to sing “Bad Mouth” by Fugazi, whatever. I just wanted to sing something. When I learned to pick—I learned to pick from my friend Felix—it was this country-blues picking, this type of folk picking with ragtime and country-blues. You’d thumb the bass and play the melody with the rest of your fingers. And it sort of opened up the guitar—because I was never a shredder. I never wanted to play hot-licking solos, but that was a way, then, to even add more complexity to being able to sing—to play either harmonies or melodies along with yourself and keep it full with just a guitar.
With Old Crow Medicine Show, your instrumental arsenal is a little more varied. How did that all come about with those guys?
I was in Seattle at the time. It was summer and we were busking, I think, and had some gigs. Then I got a call. My friend Sam Parton, she was in a band called The Be Good Tanyas, and they had toured together [with OCMS]. She wrote me a letter—when Critter [Fuqua] had left [OCMS]—and said “You should go and do this.” And she had said it to me, actually, months earlier, and I didn’t even listen to her—this was 2004, so I didn’t really know anything and I was busy with my own stuff. So she wrote me again, and at the time I was just kind of miserable doing what I was doing, or I wasn’t finding inspiration at the moment. So I wrote them and said “Hey man, I heard you were looking for someone.” That easy.
You know, I did a bit of lying to get the gig, but it wasn’t out of any kind of hot desperation—it was just to do something else. I just took on the task. I remember they called me, and what they needed was a banjo player and a dobro [player]. I played a bit of slide, mostly studying blues stuff. I hadn’t played much banjo that wasn’t just picking—like just finger picking banjo—and they wanted clawhammer. But then I learned that sort of in the process. My growth within that band, instrumentally, was just as things were needed, or as things were interesting to try. Like the pedal steel, recently, which I pretty much learned on the road. And I mean, it’s a vast ocean of learning that I’m just a small cup into. [Laughs]
I feel like I’ve just dipped my toe in. So it’s sort of just been like that. I’m all about the song, ultimately, although that may change. As I’ve now—not intentionally—become a better musician, it is fun to just play, you know, without the story— just moments in time passing, music heading in no particular direction, generally, just moving through time. It’s quite nice. And we really had like minds. I’d say me and the guys—certainly me and Ketch [Secor]—have done a lot of deep study into old music. I mean, you could drill me about pre-war music. We’re not schooled, but we’re self-schooled, you know, we know a good bit. So we came from the same mind. And at that time, there were people into it, but certainly not as many—and certainly not our age—that were steeped in the study of the roots of where Old Crow was at at the time. But that’s how it just ended up being right for the bill. And us both coming up out of busking—that whole perspective.
What can people expect from the new album?
If you’re familiar with my previous solo work, I think I’ve taken a great step forward in the production of it. It’s a very cohesive body of work, but each song is definitely its own entity—but they’re not so far from each other that it’s like eating an apple and then drinking gasoline or anything. Each song has its own view. The label picked “Just Like You” [as the single], and people around me seemed to agree, but I don’t really see a single on the record. I don’t think of records in terms of singles, but you do have to put something out. I feel very strongly about every song on the record. And I don’t aim to write singles, I just aim to write my human experience in song and just have it be a good song, you know?
You look at the wealth of any great songwriter’s catalogue, and what’s in popular culture is generally a very small bit—and the most understandable bit, the most easily accessible bit. And I took such a long time about [the album]. I don’t want to toot my own horn, but there’s a lot in it. There’s a lot of work in it, so there’s a lot of subtlety. I’m by no means a genius—at all [laughs], at all—but there’s a lot of thought and care that went into this album. There’s things that are accessible on the top, but there’s also a lot of slow burners. Because the poetry is what I really love in songs, and the language can, hopefully, unfold with time.
My best friend Felix Hatfield, who I wrote quite a few of the songs with—and he’s been very aware of the process because we’re really great pals—every now and again he’ll say he found something new at the end of a song that he’s already heard. And it’s very intentional to craft a song like that, that can mean something at different times and different emotions. That’s always an intent, and I hope I achieved something close to that. I certainly feel like I did for myself, because even in singing, even just performing last night, I found new feelings within these songs that I know quite well. Anyway, I think it’s a good body of work. I put my stamp of approval on it. [Laughs]
Do you think this album was a departure from the first two solo ones?
Absolutely. The first two, I felt like I took really good care in the writing side of things—as we grow, I can look back and I mostly like the writing on a great percentage of my previous work. But I didn’t really like how I created them. I did it in a very “this is how you make a record” way. And I was never really afforded the ability to [do it differently], being able to have a good gig that’s helping me to afford the gear, for instance. But previously, everything happened so fast, and then you were done. I just felt like such a leaf on the wind in the process. And there was a lot of learning in this process that I found every level of rewarding.
It took a long time, through a lot of frustrations. But I indeed could have kept sculpting, I could have kept adding songs to this forever. And if ever there was a challenge, that was it, just knowing when I felt like it was done. And then you got to move on. I mean, I’m excited to tour this one, and hopefully be writing along the road, and really excited to make the next one. I don’t think it gets better than that, I really don’t. Being excited about your work is one of the best things, and that’s where I’m at. That’s how it’s different. In previous projects, everything was really fun, and I think it was great. I don’t look upon them in a negative way.
The last one [2011’s Piety & Desire I made with The Felice Brothers up at their chicken coop studio in New Paltz, NY, and they were the band, and I was so excited because I’m such a big fan—at the time, I was burning out that first record of theirs on repeat. So it was very exciting, and everything was live, and I love that style, too. This one I feel more 100% confident, because I took so much more of a hands-on approach. But that previous process was also really great—and it’s all learning. For all I know, five years from now I’ll be talking about this like it was paltry. You never know.
Could you talk about the guests on the album?
So, it started out with Odessa, who is relatively unknown. She has a record coming out, and she’s fantastic. She plays and sings, and she had done touring with me—she’s a really good friend. And Robert Ellis came in and played some guitar—it was so Nashville: just called him up, just living in town, a couple of musicians, said, “Hey man, you wanna come over and put some tracks on this?” And that’s one thing that I really like about the record—it’s very casual, the whole process. Like Laura Marling—that vocal—I was in London and I brought the track, and—modern times, I can record it in her house in London—then brought it back over here. And then Ross Holmes and Nick Etwell, who I guess I met through Mumford and Sons, because they both played with them, they’d come through town. And I believe they offered when I was talking about it. It was just so casual, like, “Would you be interested?” “Yeah, come over.” Then they’d just come over. Some of them, you throw a few bucks, some you just give a bottle of whiskey, some just don’t want anything at all, just a copy of the record. It’s so great, and I’d say a really great thing about being solo and not being in a band is it completely opens all of those possibilities. With a band, you have more of a specific thing.
What are some of your influences, specifically in your solo work as opposed to being in a band? If they’re different.
They’re quite different, because with Old Crow we very much write for the band because Old Crow has its own voice. Like “Just Like You,” that’s not gonna be on an Old Crow record, it’s just not, and for obvious reasons, I think. The band I started with, which really was just me and my friends making records and playing on the street—the [Kitchen] Syncopators band—in going to make records, I would choose a variety of tunes, but it was all in the same realm of genres and played with the same instruments. I would make sure that it had one sort of ragtime guitar tune, one that was sort of spooky-minor, one that was a really sweet melody, you know, to have some diversity on the tracks. My favorite records are made that way. With my favorite records, I like the whole record. I like the story that flows through it. And I would say it’s in the songwriting, and it’s in a certain diversity. Not so much “concept records,” although like, say, Red Headed Stranger by Willie Nelson, which I think is a concept record, is one of my favorites in the country genre. It’s obviously absolutely brilliant. So that really inspires me. My favorite records aren’t ones where I skip songs. I like a continuum. I like the movements—but we’re dealing with folk music, so it’s not like classical pieces with crazy movements. Anyway, that’s what I like in records—a diverse collection of songs that flow together as a seemingly complete thought. That’s what I strive for—and then we have what I make [laughs], which I hope is something close to that.
So do you have to be in a different mindset when you’re writing solo as opposed to for a band?
Well the songs that I have penned for that band are very different than songs that on my records, and that’s a very conscious thing, and it’s fun. That last record of theirs [2014’s Remedy, that song “The Warden,” when I went to go write it—because we all go in our own corners and write songs and bring them together and collaborate from there—I thought, “What doesn’t the band have? A song about prison.” So then I sat down with my friend Felix and said, all right, let’s write a song, and it just evolved into “The Warden” and the whole bit. And keeping it in the folk vein of sound and sentiment, you know, is not how I would approach a song naturally. I guess that’s the difference.
These songs on this record of mine are more just following what interests me and seeing what comes out, whereas I have to be a bit more deliberate in writing for other people, and certainly in writing for Old Crow. I mean, it’s deliberate in all instances, but it almost takes a little more work, because it doesn’t come as natural to me. One thing I love about solo is I’m allowed to make it free of any boundaries of anyone else. The freedom of that is sort of what I got into it for. Although it’s also a great pleasure to play in a band and with people, it’s extra rewarding to be able to just do what you want—like spread the paint around and get weird with it, pull it back, push it forward, very much like sculpting, in a way—then to stand back and be like, “Nice! It’s not a piece of shit!” [Laughs]
You say you and Ketch are self-taught and interested in pre-war songs, and obviously Old Crow is very steeped in that. How do you keep it fresh, when you’re writing songs from a bygone era, but for modern listeners?
A lot of it comes from the fact that you’re playing predominantly for—at least in our age bracket, and certainly when we got started—an audience that isn’t terribly familiar with the music. So even though it’s quite old, in this moment, when it’s being played, it’s not old. So I think the spirit of it still works today as it did then. Nobody knows all the sources today—why would you? You have to be interested and go and seek out all those records, study them and all of that. I find, just in the handful of tunes that I wrote for [OCMS], I’m thinking, how do I approach this genre and not just be totally repetitively boring or, rehashing old stuff in a dead way?” How do you put something new in it? How do you write about a human experience in a way that may pique an ear in a way that it hasn’t been piqued before? It just takes work. Just sitting with it. And there’s not a lot of really modern context, in that we’re certainly not gonna write about texting or anything like that. Also, a lot of old time music, for one—and a lot of Old Crow’s canon, I would say—is very much geared toward good time, breakneck, clawhammer celebration. I feel like it’s a very spirited, very human music. Sometimes it’s just about the vibe of the whole bit, you know? With “The Warden,” I felt like we really hit on a perspective of the prison in song that I hadn’t heard before. And that was just sheer happenstance through writing, and just following where the storyline was going, bouncing back and forth off each other. I’m really proud of that song. I feel like I got lucky with it, because it’s the closest thing to a true folk song I’ve ever written, and I love folk music. So I felt some power in it, and felt like I reconnected with something that has always inspired us.
