Nick Shoulders and The Okay Crawdad
- All Bad, the latest album from Nick Shoulders, ultimately encapsulates everything that makesShoulders’ inimitable form of country music so vital: a heady balance of dazzling musicianship andpunk defiance, coupled with gritty eccentricity and a generational connection to the roots of thegenre. The album emerged from the chaos of the post-pandemic world, and manages to be a pleafor patience as much as a call to action. With a singing style deeply rooted in his family’s musicallineage and a heartfelt reverence for his lifelong home of mountainous Arkansas, the incisive yetwildly jubilantAll Badvocally objects to the reckless destruction of the natural landscape and ever-eroding line between church and state, while still offering plenty of joy and dance-ready rhythms.Having recently experienced their first years of rapid growth and relentless touring, Nick and hislongtime band, the Okay Crawdad, wrote and recordedAll Badwhile confronting a nationprofoundly changed by development and industrialization run rampant. Spanning a variety of earlycountry styles, the album’s infectious rallying cry “Won’t Fence Us In” shines alongside everythingfrom jangling cajun waltzes to surf-rock infused bluesy ballads–all tied together by a voice seeminglyout of place in this century, yet ever ready to speak up about its problems.“The idea of country music as our sacred inheritance as opposed to a marketing scheme has beencentral to my work for a while now,” says Shoulders. “It’s about finding collective liberation in ourconnection to the landscape, to ancient singing traditions, to a way of producing music that predatesthe industry built around it. This album came from tapping into what my band and I did as streetperformers and moldy little honky-tonkers: it’s continuing that dedication to making music that’shonest about the lives we’re actually living, rather than trying to create a more marketable reality.”Released via Gar Hole Records (a label founded and co-owned by Shoulders),All Badmarks thefirst LP made with his longtime band since 2019’s premier full-lengthOkay, Crawdadand theirsubsequent pandemic-imposed hiatus. After writing most of the album from the front seat of a tourvan, the Fayetteville, AR-based musician took a batch of demos he recorded whilesnowbound andrecovering from Covid to his longtime band (bassist/harmony singer Grant D’Aubin, lead guitaristJack Studer, drummer Cheech Moosekian) and collectively headed to New Orleans. Hoping toemulate the methods of their first two efforts, Nick and the band recorded in a home studio on thebanks of the Mississippi river.“We wanted to make the record the only way we know how: straight to tape in a shotgun house withjust a couple of microphones,” he says. “There were times when we had to pause because a bargewent by and blew its air horn, or there were kids out on the levee playing music.” Also featuringpianist and co-engineer Sam Doores of the Deslondes, pedal-steel guitarist Nikolai Shveitser, andfiddle player Mickey Nelligan,All Badembodiesan infectiously rhythmic sound partially informedby Shoulders’ pre-pandemic years living in New Orleans. “As someone who resided in their van andplayed banjo on the sidewalk for a while, I eventually found my way toward the magically vibrantSouth Louisiana dance culture that gave birth to what you’re hearing on this record,” he says. Theband’s sound, a fusion of rural singing with the sweat soaked rhythms of New Orleans dancefloors,is influenced by the kinetic nature of the region’s rich musical history, as much as it is Shoulders’own vocal pedigree.Taking a cue from some of his most formative influences (the likes of Hazel Dickens and JimmyDriftwood), Shoulders createdAll Badin an effort to “honestly interpret the grim political and socialreality we exist in,” as he puts it. “Every one of these songs is carved from some of the hardest
experiences we’ve ever had,” he says. “The hope is that people will recognize something of theirown lives in those stories and feel understood and seen.” But even at its most sorrowful moments,All Badsustains an unbridled exuberance, thanks largely to Shoulders’ riveting vocal work—anelement indelibly shaped by the landscape that raised him. “My musical upbringing at home wasmostly learning owl calls, whistling along with cardinals, whooping and hollering with all my littlefriends out in the woods,” he says. “All that primitive yodeling I did as a kid ended up turning into aphysical skill set that became so important to my singing without me even realizing.”A prime example ofAll Bad’s multilayered emotionality, the album’s title track unfolds as both apainfully real piece of autobiography and an emphatic statement against despair (“We bury friendsand try to share our pain/November hurricanes and acid rain/They built to burn but we will live tomaintain/Because it ain’t all bad”). One ofAll Bad’s most lighthearted offerings, “Appreciate’cha”arrives as a piano-laced and sweetly buoyant ode to the “subtle activism that exists in the very natureof Southernness,” in Shoulders’ words. “We in the South live in a stiff-upper-lip culture where somuch is repressed, but the term ‘Appreciate you’ allows for a shockingly vulnerable moment ofgratitude in the day-to-day,” he says. “I wanted to write a folk song showing gratitude for all thesmaller moments of humanity that deserve recognition, whether it’s the miners who keep the lightson or the people sweeping the floors after our shows.”Over the course ofAll Bad’s 14 tracks, Shoulders imbues his songs with an elegantly offbeatmusicality that echoes his complex relationship with country music. “My dad is a great whistler, andhis folks apparently were too; essentially every person in my family belonged to some regionalmusical lineage: my grandparents on both sides had ways of singing to pass down to me, withincredible vibrato and richness to their voices,” he says. “Despite all that, I spent years reactingagainst the American traditional canon—partly due to overexposure, but also because of recognizingwhat people associated with that cultural construct. Instead I just wanted to make the loudest,scariest music possible.” At age 13, Shoulders got a Walmart drum set and spray-painted it pink,then spent much of his adolescence playing drums in metal and punk bands. But after discoveringthe original blues, folk and country recordings of the 1920’s and 30’s, he found his perceptionradically altered. “In those records I was hearing about a world with endless wars, bank failures,crops drying out in the fields—andthat was the same world I lived in,” he recalls. “I felt somethingclick, and it led me toward reclaiming these rural singing traditions from a space of commercialpropaganda that’s intent on selling a lifestyle we don’t actually live.”With his live experience including touring with the likes of Sierra Ferrell and performing at majorfestivals like Stagecoach, Shoulders makes a point of bringing an educational component to hisexultant and deeply communal show. “As much as we’re throwing a party, it’s also a priority to bethe teacher I never had, and share this vital information that’s done wonders to improve myunderstanding of history, and the present we’re left with,” he says. Both live and on record,Shoulders’ music achieves the rare feat of imparting difficult truths while inciting a certain joyfulabandon. To that end, the dance-ready rhythms and heavenly melodies ofAll Badstir up a potentcontrast to the album’s thorny lyrical themes. The result: a body of work at turns sublimelyfreewheeling and profoundly illuminating, primed to permanently warp the listener’s perspective toglorious effect.
