J.R. Carroll

One Liner: Lo-fi singer-songwriter with a folky bent and a good voice

Wikipedia Genre: No Wikipedia, but I'll say Country, Americana, Folk
Home: Oologah, OK

Sunday

Thoughts:  Another fella making stripped-down Americana/country in the mold of the Zach Bryan folks.  I have been trying to think of who I would have compared these folks to before ZB existed - I guess it is the early Texas country guys like Owen Temple and Jack Ingram.  Funny thing is, if you search this on Google, it just wants to tell you about guys who are like ZB, not explain where his sound originated.  And he's not original, so there has to be a description of what came before him.  Whatever, that took at least three minutes to try to google, and the idiots on the Internet are saying stuff like ZB sounds like Johnny Cash, which is dumb.  More like Woody Guthrie than Cash.

Also, who is the female ZB?  I'm sure people have already noodled through this in their head, but the idea just popped up to me.  Someone like Zarah Jarosz or Sierra Hull are too skilled with their instruments to work.  Lucy Dacus isn't country.  A reddit person said Morgan Wade, but her music is too produced and slick.

Anyway, this guy has a singer-songwriter's voice and very spare accompaniment.  He is apparently from Oologah, Oklahoma, and used to sing in a Pentecostal church there on Sundays before a producer asked him to come work on music.  He released a few tunes on Twitter that got some traction, so he went into the studio and made Long Story Short, his 2020 EP.  He's got one other EP, 2022's Raging in the Dark, and no true albums.  Oklahoma is very well represented in the stripped-down country world these days!

"Stay" is a lovely, super-stripped down gem about a lost love.  1.3 million streams.  Just sounds raw and pained.

But the bigger hit, from that same initial EP, is "Where the Red Fern Grows," with 3.1 million streams.

Another very basic track - I guess he doesn't do much in the way of slick videos for his tunes.  But, I found a quote from him about the background of the song: "My dad is an avid raccoon hunter. When we were kids, we would go back to where he was raised, and he would tell us about how the book, Where the Red Fern Grows, was based around where my dad was raised. I had family in that area who I felt were meant for more than a small town, and I knew I could make this song about believing in them. This one is about a cousin of mine, Rachel, wherein this story she becomes a stadium-filling country singer (but in real life she is a softball player). So, I wrote that for her and for home.”

Earlier, I said he has a singer-songwriter's voice, and I meant that as a slight.  But the more I've listened, the more I have decided that he actually has a pretty solid voice.  He's not Stapleton or anything, but he can hit notes and isn't just speak-singing or anything.  But he and Bryan are apparently friends, all stemming from a time when Carroll posted a list of 30 favorite songs to Twitter, which made its way to Bryan, who pinged Carroll to say that they should hang out.  So now Carroll has appeared on some of Bryan's stuff, and has been in the background of some of Bryan's videos - they're boys.  I wonder if Carroll was even on the stage last year during "Revival"?  That was BADASS, by the way.

Anyway, I'd definitely go check this one out.