Rayland Baxter: Excitable Boy

“The song material is definitely less lovey-dovey and maybe gets more into these night escapades where I’m driving around Nashville looking for drugs with my buddy. Or tripping out on acid on the Caney Fork River and the excitement from that. The lows and the highs from all of that is really interesting song material. Then you throw in a little Jesus talk or a little ‘wondering where we go when the world ends,’ trying to get head-y on everybody, including myself.”

The result is an album rife with musical and narrative surprises. It is an album that evokes the wit and lyrical sophistication of Paul Simon in Muscle Shoals or the psychedelicized Southerness of My Morning Jacket, or maybe some long lost tapes from an alternate universe Laurel Canyon. But the songs never stay in one place long enough to be identified as anything but the whirling dervish that is Rayland Baxter. There is a lot of information, sonic and personal, swirling around Imaginary Man and parsing it all makes each repeated listen a unique undertaking.

“We wanted to take these songs and play them live and get them moving, get kind of psychedelic with it and kind of freak out, have a dynamic experience,” says Baxter. “You know, loud. Quiet. Loud. Loud. LOUD. More than a solo set, I’m trying to have as many weapons in my tool belt as possible.”

“I feel like when you find your appropriate purpose in life it comes with ease. You accelerate at a rapid rate with little work. I don’t mind obsessing over a song lyric or spending all day driving around in my car thinking about songs or all of that shit … I like the highs, I like the lows, I like the feeling of knowing that I can’t write a better song — which I don’t often feel because I know I can always improve.”

If there’s anything that Baxter doesn’t like, it’s the waiting. The songs on Imaginary Man had a nearly two year incubation period and he’s already got new material brewing. It’s enough to beg the question: What happens next? There was so much growth between albums one and two, where will things go between three and four? Baxter’s goals seem to be nothing short of grabbing that great big brass ring hovering above the cosmic carousel.

“My approach is that I haven’t even touched the tip of the iceberg with regards, you know, to my presence as a songwriter,” says Baxter. “I want to claw my way in, or surf my way in, or glide in gracefully, just standing in line with all the greats. That’s what get’s me up in the morning.”

Through the tiny microphone of Baxter’s cell phone you can hear the breaks of the Volvo bringing the conversation to a close. For a brief moment the boisterous Rayland Baxter seems subdued, the conversation taking a dynamic turn that would not be out of place on Imaginary Man. A sense of foreboding hangs on the pause, an ominous counterpoint to the joyful conversation that preceded it on this beautiful summer day.

“There’s definitely a cop behind me and right now I definitely have expired tags,” says Baxter, laughing just a little. “Yeah, he’s pulling me over [laughs]. Thanks for the call, man, I’ll see you around.”