Photo Credit: Sound Cloud
In the early 2000s Rayland Baxter was a college lacrosse player living in Baltimore when his father gave him a guitar. Baxter got kicked out of school for a year and when he returned he gave up lacrosse in mid season in favor of the guitar and music. Baxter’s father was a professional, having played in Steve Earle’s band the Dukes in the 90s and maybe he knew a bit more than Rayland did about where his interests truly came from.
Not long after, Baxter dropped out of school and moved to Colorado, playing in bars on open mic nights, before returning east to go on a European tour with his father. From there, it was six months in Israel where Baxter says he honed his songwriting. That led to a career move to Nashville as a songwriter, where he recorded his first album Feathers and Fishhooks.
Rayland Baxter had his breakthrough with his following full length record, 2018’s Wide Awake. After completing his tour in support of that record, he set down to write songs for a follow up. He says, “That’s when I hunkered down in my basement … right there by Nikki Lane’s store [High-Class Hillbilly], and I stayed down there for three months, pretty much through New Year’s. I remember watching the fireworks, walking up from the basement into the backyard. And I was there for three months. I counted at the end of it, and I wrote like 130 songs.”
Those songs were set aside when he got word of his father’s death. Baxter started from scratch on the newest record, working for about a year, mostly alone in an old rubber band factory in Kentucky that had been converted into a recording studio.
Amongst the artists appearing on the new record is Shakey Graves, who says “Rayland is a king of chaos who simultaneously knows exactly what he wants out of his craft and strives to achieve it any way he can He has been working like a wild man and has created a whole new sonic world for his mind to occupy. It’s his most complex and challenging music to date, and it’s encouraged me to take my own brave steps forward into the sounds I hear.”
