Kevin Gordon was born and raised in the musical fertile state of Louisiana (Monroe, Louisiana to be exact). However, New Orleans was not the musical magnet one might expect for a Southern boy raised by parents whose musical tastes ran from “The Killer,” Jerry Lee Lewis to Ray Charles. Instead, in high school, he played in a rock band, which specialized in covers of the Ramones and Sex Pistols. Before that, he had played the trumpet in his junior high school marching band, which led to an experience with the Ku Klux Klan over in Colfax. That moment has now turned into the most talked about track on Gloryland, Gordon’s new release on Crowville Collective. The track “Colfax/Step in Time,” in its story and detail, brings the listener through a window in time, and the vision it allows is real American history delivered by a real poet.

Gordon knows his way around melody and rhythm like a Steve Earle or a Bruce Springsteen. His particular skill is how he adds these essential elements to the creation of narratives that explore, wonder, and question the human condition. Gordon appears to be an intrepid explorer, not afraid to investigate the secrets of his past, his family, and those things left unknown. All these components help keep the landscape of Gloryland vast and unpredictable.

One’s influences may not always appear as another musician or band. Music City (Nashville, TN) has its advantages too, in the evolution of an artistic career. In Nashville, where he moved in 1992 after earning his MFA in poetry from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he met Lucinda Williams. Williams, who is a fan, sang on his tune “Down to the Well” from the 2005 album of the same name. Keith Richards and former drummer/vocalist of The Band, Levon Helm, have recorded “Deuce and a Quarter” written by Gordon and his frequent collaborator Gwil Owen. “Deuce” can be heard on the 1996 solo album by Scotty Moore who was Elvis Presley’s original guitarist.

Gordon revealed a highly honed sense of humor during the course of our, over an hour long, conversation. From his home in East Nashville, he told me it’s only a short walk now to an establishment that serves Guinness on tap. This is definitely the man to bump into at the local pub. He would fill your night with stories.

GALO: How long did the recording process for Gloryland go on for?

Kevin Gordon: We started tracking in September 2008; that was an experimental session. We did basic tracks for three songs. In that session, Joe [Joe McMahan, producer of Gloryland] had me record vocal and guitar parts — just a performance to the dreaded click track. Then we had two drummers and a bass player come in and play along with my basic tracks. The following April, we went to a studio [in Nashville] called House of David and recorded the same setup, except that we all played simultaneously. So, it was a little more traditional that way.

GALO: Would you say growing up in the South has shaped your music?

KG: Absolutely. I think from a very early age I was attracted to rhythmically driven sound that would now be considered roots rock [a term referencing the origins of rock ‘n’ roll]. My parents listened to a lot of Jerry Lee Lewis and things like that, even though they were of the Beatles generation. They were often listening to music that was a little before that. Jerry Lee and Ray Charles are two that I remember. That interest took some interesting turns where I grew up. I was one of a group of about six guys who were skateboarders. We were probably the only subscribers to Skateboarder magazine in Louisiana except for possibly New Orleans. So, through that, I was hearing about bands like the Dead Kennedys and X. Eventually, I grew interested in writing songs and learning to play the guitar in junior high and high school.

When I was in high school and college, it all kind of came back around to roots music (the general nature of that term drives me crazy), but through things like hearing the Sex Pistols covering Eddie Cochran and that element of X’s music which bounces off of people like Cochran and Gene Vincent. I was really drawn to X because of what they seemed like they were trying to do, which was to take early rock ‘n’ roll musical forms and inject them with lyric content that was more muscular, more poetic, and more interesting. That’s what was interesting to me because I was already trying to write poetry.

To go hear any bands live that were noteworthy or [that] people were getting excited about, you had to drive five hours to New Orleans or six hours to Dallas.

GALO: I want to get the timeline correct. When did you attend the University of Iowa writers’ workshop and were you thinking about music while studying for the poetry degree?

KG: In college, I was doing both. I’d been playing in a band and writing a lot of songs, and then I was accepted to the Iowa Writer’s program. I didn’t know what else I was going to do actually, and so, I took the fact that I was accepted into that program as a sort of sign that this is what I’m going to do for the next two years. I didn’t want to teach. I didn’t get a teaching certificate with my Bachelor’s degree from the school I graduated from in Louisiana.

GALO: But being accepted by the writing program at Iowa must have encouraged your writing.

KG: Absolutely. The workshop environment gets derided a lot and some of that is certainly deserved; it is an ego circus, but for somebody like me, who came from a small town just to be with other people around the same age who were into writing as much as I was, [it] gave me a lot of confidence that I needed at that point.

A year into grad school, I was playing with Bo Ramsey who played with Lucinda Williams for a little while. So, I was in a situation my second year where I would be in these seminars talking about obscure literary topics and then jump in a van and drive to places like Cascade, Iowa, in the middle of nowhere, playing for farmers in a field. It was a cool dichotomy, I guess. I was at Iowa from 1987 to 1989 and lived there until 1992, when I went to Nashville. That’s when the songs I was writing turned back toward more roots based stuff.

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