“Stoll Vaughan Is Not Afraid Of Writing Big Truths”

by Holly Gleason for American Songwriter.

HOLLYWOOD (Perfect Music Today0 7/19/20/–Stoll Vaughan is parked somewhere on the side of the road, in an RV with his wife and his dog. The populist songwriter, a secret weapon for both David Lynch and the Allman Betts Band, is thinking about the state of the world, the way disinformation is ripping us apart and the fact that the truth gets so twisted by the soundbites and talking heads. It’s hard to know where to turn, especially when you’re a particularly porous creator.

At times evoking Springsteen’s Nebraska period, Townes Van Zandt at his most gaunt or the Jeff Buckley of Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, the literal and figurative journeyman artist has a way of tumbling details from the rafters and highlighting sentiments often missed. Hemingway direct lyrically, his melodies leave room for listeners to install themselves.

The video, debuting exclusively on AmericanSongwriter.com, is equally straightforward. Black and white, looking like a young T-Bone Burnett in sunglasses, pleated pants, a dark shirt, he plays acoustic guitar, emphasizing the beat with his wedding ring. Preternatually cool, Vaughan just is. No explanation, no setting, just a man, a guitar and a song for the ages – and the moment.

“I’m kind of always meditating on the other dimension,” he says, watching the day drain from the sky. “I want to recognize the pain, but really I’m trying to highlight the hope.”

“I’m a Taurus,” he explains, “so part of my make-up is to be rooted to the ground. A lot of this record was written on the road, came together driving and drifting. You have to find centeredness (in the world). I find freedom in California to explore that I can’t find in the Southeast, but I like that I’m going back to Kentucky. I like being connected to where I’m from. Because that spirit of the universe, I’m always trying to get connected to that.

“Living my life being present, those old thoughts or assumptions, the fundamental things that can get you into trouble, they’re easier to lose if you’re moving and open.”

Which sets up “So Righteous” without even a question. Vaughan is so smart, but also so aligned to his own writing, the themes in his romantic realism move through his conversation like vines.

“Some people hear ‘Righteous’ and go screaming, ‘Those people in Michigan with their guns,’ or ‘Those Lefties in California with their liberal politics.’ Wherever you are, there’s ‘Those people!’ and that’s the problem.”

“The feelings don’t live inside us, but we live inside the feelings,” he offers of the existential suspension of these recordings. “I’m okay with the loneliness and the beauty of it; that’s how I lean into the beauty.

“I wonder, ‘If I was this person, I shouldn’t be angry, because you hold a different idea.’ It’s a lot of going back and trying to get better, to understand or accept (the opposing reality) in trying to go forward. Sometimes just to think about what people are feeling on both sides…

Whether the stomp’n’shuck hand-clapped passion of “Maria,” desolation  over a few piano notes and organ pads of the forgotten man/small town in “Oklahoma,” the striding finger-picked guitar  reassurance to a battered woman on the run “Rosie” or the elegiac “Desires of Despair,” Vaughan creates vastness out of minimalism as well as imbuing Dorothea Lange despondency with the photographer’s same dignity.

The title track of sorts fixes in amber a friend, a Midwestern kid caught in the jaws of the opioid crisis who ultimately wouldn’t make it. “I thought about the mother, who’d grown up kind of troubled, and it’s my heart for her, too. You know if you don’t change your life drastically, you’re going to lose. It’s inevitable.”

“That human touch? That’s what’s important. The homeless problem in LA is terrible, as well. So that narrator is a lot of other people, too: the father, the guy, you, me.”

Woody Guthrie understood the power of songs, and he weaponized them. Dylan, too, embraced wielding big truths as calls to action. Vaughan worries the white noise and tv news/social media cycle-created Tower of Babel makes it harder for these truths to cut through. But he’s undeterred.

“Time is not so constraining as we make it,” he continues, unwinding a larger truth that shoots through his writing. “Your fears and the little b.s. things don’t have quite the power we give them; they’re what hold you back. When you’re ‘there,’ really present, those things fall away and. these truths emerge.

“When I was at Interlochen, I had a teacher who recognized (the cocoon safety of the school’s creative environment). He said, ‘When you leave here, don’t look back. You go out and have as many experiences as possible. You go be somebody, don’t follow the crowd and really see.’”

“Maybe I can’t sing crazy melodies, but there’s a humanness to my voice that rattles (the listeners) inside themselves – and makes them feel things.

“In this day and age, you have to really listen to the record,” he admits. “And getting people to listen, it’s difficult. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go there.”