By Scott Nicholson
High Country native Barton Carroll may have named his newest
CD “The Lost One,” but he’s found his groove
as a modern troubadour, who updates the folk tradition with
modern, yet timeless, messages.
Barton
Carroll was raised in Banner Elk and played in the
local band Silly, before moving to Seattle and launching
a solo career.
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Born in Louisiana, his family moved to Boone when he was
3, then moved to Banner Elk the following year. He grew
up there and attended Avery High School, and after graduation
from Warren Wilson College, he returned to Boone to deliver
pizzas before deciding to hit the road with his guitar.
Carroll grew up around music, and his parents were performing
artists. In the sixth grade, he became interested in punk
rock, not suspecting he would one day gravitate to toward
playing acoustic.
“I tried to resist liking bluegrass and mountain music
until I grew older,” he said, expecting music would
be his escape from the mountains.
He was in a band called Silly throughout high school and
college, and then moved to Seattle, after touring as an
opening act.
“I needed to live in a city for the resources,”
he said. “I wasn’t interested in urban music,
and I wasn’t really sure I’d be doing folk music.”
He developed elements of his self-described “Appalachian
sound,” though he doesn’t admit to being a purist,
and he feels outside of many identifiable music traditions,
especially the Seattle music scene that’s often equated
with 1990s grunge rock. The “folk” label seems
the simplest description, though his instrumentation is
as likely to include a bassoon as a fiddle.
“There was nothing really urban about my music,”
he said. “I feel like I have more in common with Richard
Thompson than with Ralph Stanley.”
He always wrote his own songs and joined in several musical
acts as a guitarist, while building up a collection of original
material.
“It was like having a paid vacation from my ego,”
he said. “I could get away from the writer’s mind.
And I learned from other people and followed it until it
concluded, and that’s when I went back to my own stuff.”
His first album, “Barton Carroll,” was recorded
in 1999, and “Love and War” was released in 2006,
five years after it was recorded. “The Lost One,”
released in February, was recorded in 2006.
“I just kept making them and putting them in the can,”
he said. “That’s the only thing you can control,
and you can’t really control that, either. The only
real ability you have is to keep on with your work. By the
time I was discovered by this record label in Alabama, I
had three albums finished, without any idea of when they
would come out.”
His titles and his songs often touch on love, loss, damage
and hope, sometimes at the same time, as in the ballad,
“Small Thing,” about a childhood victim of war.
“That was about a woman who lived in Avery County,”
Carroll said. “She lived in Berlin at age 16, during
the Russian occupation, and my mother helped her write a
book about it. It’s a direct connection back to that
area. I’m a big history buff, and ‘Love and War’
was all about those historical themes. I didn’t study
history; I just read it on my own.”
Though he’s comfortable with a small record label,
he understands it doesn’t have the resources to promote
him as a national act, and he works as a plumber when he’s
not on tour. Giving more thought to creating and crafting
his songs than to polishing and marketing an image, he isn’t
sure what kind of audience he will reach.
“I feel lost, I feel like I don’t fit in, just
like in high school, I guess,” Carroll said. “I
don’t get a lot of (musical) comparisons from journalists.
I think there are plenty of singer-songwriters out there.
It’s more youth-oriented than ever, and I feel old,
but so much of what music does for me is internal and the
journey inward. The music landscape is external and the
Internet is transient and that’s not what I value.
I value the lasting and the authentic.”
He said he’s more likely to be compared to novelist
Cormac McCarthy than with the typical acoustic singer-songwriter.
“I get compared to writers more than I do to any musician,
and that’s very flattering,” he said. “It’s
kind of hard to know, and I feel a bit lost in it. I don’t
feel like I need to fit anyway, though it seems some days
it would be easier.”
He’s currently working on a new album and said he would
enjoy the rhythm of releasing an album, touring to follow
it up, and then repeating the process.
“I almost always have the music and vocal melody first
and for lyrics, I have to get blood from a stone,”
he said. “Lyrics are very important to me. I’m
more of a Doc Watson man than a Bill Monroe man. I just
love Doc’s voice and delivery. The lyrics are always
the most important part and where my ear goes first when
I’m listening.”
He often goes for quotes from author Stephen King for advice
on the creative process, such as shutting out internal critical
voices while creating but listening to them while revising
or editing: “Each song and each story suggests what
it wants musically and that’s fun because it feels
like it comes from the subconscious or some other place.”
Though widespread fame has eluded him, he feels having a
regular blue-collar job gives him the necessary grounding
to focus on themes that matter.
“Life is sort of serving me what I deserve, the thrust
and the journey is, in a way, turning out perhaps the way
it should,” he said. “I know when I was 19, I
wasn’t ready to do music on a big scale. My ego can’t
handle being a star now, and I know I couldn’t do it
at 19.”
With “The Lost One” getting significant airplay
on WNCW 92.9 FM, Carroll is developing a regional following
and said a lot of locals still remember the band Silly.
Songs like “Pretty Girl’s Going to Ruin My Life
(Again)” and “Those Days Are Gone, and My Heart
is Breaking” show a maturity and depth that couldn’t
have been produced by an arrogant, posturing, fast-strumming
teenager.
Lines like “Hair’s falling out and my back’s
got a pain, I’ve been drinking my Scotch in my truck
in the rain, I think it’s a fine way to spend the day”
perhaps could only come from a plumber instead of a rock
star.
“I’m halfway through writing another album, hoping
to have it done this summer, and I’d like to do it
all over again,” he said. “I really like recording
and playing live, even in the bad times, and I hope to carry
on with that.”
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