Grayson Capps

The Weight of the World

Royal Potato Family Records

Grayson Capps is an Americana and blues singer-songwriter born in Opelika, Alabama, to parents who were students at Auburn University. He was raised in Brewton, Alabama, but moved to Fairhope, Alabama, for high school, where he became interested in the theatrical arts. He received a degree in theater from Tulane University and stayed in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina.

Early in the 1990s, while still a student at Tulane, Capps started a “thrash-folk” band called the House Levelers. He started a second blues-rock band called Stavin’ Chain. The latter band released one self-titled album on Ruf Records before disbanding. In 2004, several of Capps’ songs appeared in the film A Love Song for Bobby Long, based on the novel Off Magazine Street, written by Capps’ father, and starring John Travolta and Scarlett Johansson. In 2011, Capps and his band the Lost Cause Minstrels released a self-titled album on Royal Potato Family Records.

Capps released his first solo album, If You Knew My Mind, in 2005 on Hyena Records, and followed up with 2006’s Wail & Ride and 2008’s Rott & Roll, the latter with a band known as the Stumpknockers. Next came Love Songs, Mermaids and Grappa on Appaloosa Records in 2015, and several albums on Royal Potato Family Records, including 2015’s Paradise Right Here with Willie Sugarcapps and the highly acclaimed Scarlett Roses, with its vivid imagery, recorded with his wife, Trina Shoemaker, who provided harmony and percussion, and longtime collaborator Corky Hughes.

The band lineup includes Capps on vocals, acoustic guitar, harmonica, kick drum, hi-hat, and percussion; Hughes on electric guitar, bass, theremin, and marimbas; and Symone French, harmony vocals. The album is produced by Ryan Avinger, Capps, and Hughes, and recorded and mixed by Avinger at Dauphin Street Sound in Mobile, Alabama. The Weight of the World is Capps’ first full-length album of original material in seven years; he returns to form with nine songs encompassing the barefoot, country-boy philosophizing and earthy musical minimalism that have come to define his singular voice on the American roots music landscape.

Capps opens with “Far Away,” a windswept road song that romanticizes the trials and tribulations of the troubadour life, featuring Durand on drums, as Capps sings, “When the wind blows, I can hear her in the trees. She’s got me out on the road drinking gasoline. Chasing butterflies where they choose to go, across seven seas, four oceans, and a thousand roads. Light rain falls on a Coca-Cola sign, somewhere near Rosedale, on the Mississippi line. My old van she carries me and I ride along. I sing to her my magical disappearing songs. Like I, I want to go where the cold winds blow. Far away, far away, far away, far away. So up near Lula, the stars begin to shine. A glimpse of the Milky Way is gazing through the pines, all the windows down, the air smells of Delta soil. The ghost of McKinley Morganfield surges up my mortal coil, and I, I want to go where the cold winds blow.”

On the topical “News,” a five-minute blast of psychedelic swamp rock with Durand on drums, Capps calls out the fear-centric disinformation propagated by modern media, as he chimes, “I’m losing sight, I’m getting old, the wheels of time, Rock-n-Roll, how much time have I got? before I lay in the ground and rot. How much time have I got? How much time have I got? One more year around the sun, my darkest days have just begun. And they say ‘that’s the way it goes’, only God up in heaven knows.”

“Rosemary & Time” features Capps as he chants, “I learned to fly in a steel machine, I’ve been a million miles without any wings. From town to town, singing my songs. I’ve got a rusted crown, I’m the king of being gone. Rosemary and precious time, what a fool I’ve been to think you were mine. Damn these eyes when they’re open, their demise is in hoping, so I drink another beer to drive away the fear. Tell you what you want to hear. I’m lonesome my dear.”

On the equally topical “My Body,” Capps speaks up for women as he declares, “Well, my body is my body, it’s not yours, it’s all mine, and I was not born to be objectified, by my brother who’s already blind. My brother swears on his bible, then my brother he swears at me. He says if I don’t swear on his bible, I’ll burn in hell for eternity. I know a war is raging, it’s been raging far too long, and I’m quite prepared for the battle, ’cause I know I’m not alone. I’m a vessel through which life travels. I’ve no time for this dogma and fear, now if that makes my brother’s world unravel. I hope I pissed him off my dear. My brother says, ‘Life, it ain’t no choice girl’. I say, ‘brother, that’s where you’re wrong, ’cause you chose to be an asshole all on your own’.”

“What Will Be, Will Be” is a high and lonesome country ballad, as Capps cries out, “The wind it don’t blow so cold in the morning. When the sun starts shining through the pines, and I never thought I’d miss you my darlin’, but the embers from the fire last night, they still shine. I’m feeling old but I don’t feel wise, but I’ve done telling myself lies. I’ll pray for you if you pray for me. What will be, girl, is what will be.”

On the haunting “I Can’t Breathe,” a desperate Capps groans, “One of these mornings you know I’ll be gone, and you won’t have a reason to blame me for moving on. You know our life is fleeting, and our time on this earth, it ain’t long, and I know you’re grieving, ’cause the right has turned wrong. Oh my darlin’ can’t you see? I’m being held down, and I can’t breathe. My heart is beating the same as you, and I know you’re feeling angry and blue. We’re all here on this ground looking to be loved. It’s time we be trading the eagle for the dove.”

The whimsical marimba-inflected “Herricane” features Hughes’ empathic guitar lines, as Capps moans, “I’ve loved and lost and loved again. Every love I had never had an end, but the end may come and my love will never die. All the love I have will only take to the sky, and the sky knows the wind and the rain, and my love will turn into a hurricane…it never dissipates, girl, it never dies, all my love knows to do is fly.”

On “Rainbow Skies,” Capps shouts, “Go away, go away, go away tonight, go away go away to stay, to the cave in your brain that’s flooded with light. Of the sunsets of yesterday remember, remember from where it is you came, and put your finger on a globe. Disappear inside a candle flame, and float away with the smoke. I’m tired of living in the city, these businessmen drag me down. Come and go with me, here my guitar don’t make much sound. We’ll go to West Virginia, we’ll go to Illinois. Drive all the way to New York City. The ears of the people who have ears to hear. And the people we’re looking for.”

On the title track, “Weight of the World,” that closes this fine album, Capps croons, “Mosquitos are alighting on my arm. It’s twilight here on the farm. I open the first beer of the day. Transition to a different place, and the weight of the world is loosening. What will tomorrow bring. I hear that old mockingbird sing. My fledglings have all flown away. There’s an empty nest of yesterday, and the weight of the world is loosening. Tomatoes are hanging on the vine. My old pocket watch has stopped keeping time. Sitting on the back porch steps just thinking mostly about myself, and the weight of the world is loosening. What will tomorrow bring.”

Capps has good reason for the years away from the studio. After a prolific run of solo albums from 2005 through 2017, he and his partner, Grammy Award–winning recording engineer Trina Shoemaker, entered the homestretch of raising children and seeing them out of the nest. While continuing to play upwards of 150 shows a year in all corners of the world, he finally had the time and solitude that his songwriting demanded. Capps adds, “If you speak your truth people might not get it exactly, but they will get their own truth. But if you don’t speak your truth, they get nothing. So I speak my truth.”

Richard Ludmerer

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