‘It's the best country album I've heard all year, to be completely honest’. That was the opening line of the email sent to me with a download of Nashville-based Mose Wilson’s self-titled, debut album. Hardly an original approach but on this occasion that declaration was spot on as the album was one of the best of 2021 at Lonesome Highway. The ‘who’s who’ list of Nashville session players on the album is impressive but I was equally struck by the songwriting and style of the material which makes it a genuine ‘country’ album. Not unexpectedly Wilson is no newcomer to the scene. He has served his time as a hired hand as well as being a member of the Florida-based band, Hotel Oscar, before getting down to business and writing and recording this solo album. We caught up with Mose recently in snow covered Nashville via Zoom, where we heard of his career backstory and his enthusiasm about the resurgence of traditional country music in East Nashville and further afield.
I saw an Instagram post and photo from Grimey’s Record Store in East Nashville earlier this morning and the area was like a picture postcard.
Yes, I live down the street from Grimey’s and we’re (turns the camera in the direction of his back yard) covered in snow this morning, it’s beautiful.
You started singing at a very young age at church. Was that by your own choice or pressure from your parents?
I didn’t have the choice as to whether I was going to go the church, that’s for sure (laughs). It was a really small church in a small town in Tennessee, at the foot of Sewannee Mountain, between Nashville and Chattanooga. Every Sunday night at church, song leaders just came up to sing songs and anyone in the church that wanted to sing could come up and lead a song. When I was five years old, I told my parents that I wanted to lead a song, I had already picked out the song I wanted to sing, There Is Power In The Blood. I couldn’t read but I learned every verse and got up and sang my heart out, though I was holding the songbook upside down. I still love singing gospel songs and get together with friends here in Nashville that also grew up that way and sing Gospel songs, even though there’s a bit more alcohol involved these days singing the songs.
I believe that your mom was a classically trained pianist.
Yes, she was. Her teacher had been a professor at The Juilliard School in New York for a long time and had retired in Tennessee. She can still do it, if you put a sheet of music in front of her. Whatever it is, she can play it. I remember her playing Chopin pieces when I was a kid, followed by Scott Joplin. I used to try and get her to play the blues or a country song with me but it just didn’t register.
What music would have been around you other than Gospel in your childhood?
Everybody in my family enjoys music, even though myself and my mom are the only musicians in the family. My dad is a big country and classic rock fan and my grandparents were huge country music fans. My grandad listened to the Grand Ole Opry every week and he got me into Hank Williams when I was young. I also got into the blues real young as my uncle was a big blues fan and he gave me some Muddy Waters cassette tapes when I was in first or second grade. I had a little Walkman and used to walk around with my earphones in listening to those tapes all the time. He also gave me a tape of Buddy Guy’s Damned Right I Love The Blues. I remember hiding it from my parents because it had the word ‘damn’ in it and I was afraid they’d see it and take it from me.
You moved to Nashville at eighteen years of age. How did the migration from rural Tennessee to Music City pan out for you?
I wasn’t ready for it; it was a culture shock. I went to school here at Belmont for a semester, it was a songwriting major, the first one that they had there. I did not like anyone I was going to school with because most people at the school were from out of State. There was a lot from New York and a lot from California. After one semester I became discouraged, I didn’t like the music, didn’t like my classes, but I did like going down to Broadway and picking up gigs. I started playing guitar in bands when I was eighteen and I left school and stayed in Nashville for two and a half years just doing that, playing gigs downtown. I wasn’t supposed to be playing bars at that age but they let me play and served me beer. That was twelve years ago and Nashville was very different to what the city is now, much more hometown.
You then headed southward to Florida. What triggered that move?
I was twenty-two at the time and had just broken up with my long-term girlfriend. I wasn’t getting many gigs and Nashville was beating me down. I wasn’t really ready for city life yet and had a friend down in Florida who offered me a job to work on the beach for the summer. I went down there and loved it, working the beach every morning, hanging out with the tourists at night and taking my guitar out and playing songs. By the fall I had started getting steady work playing music and gave up the beach job. I started a band called Hotel Oscar and put out a record that got really popular on The Gulf Coast and basically spent the next six years touring out of there. I lived in Pensacola and then lived over in New Orleans and all of that culture had a really big effect on me.
Hotel Oscar’s sound was more roots and southern rock than country. Were you still a country artist at heart back then?
Yes. I was still writing country songs but with Hotel Oscar we were playing other styles and I think that helped with the appeal. People were able to latch onto soul music and punk music in the songs and could go out and dance, and have a good time. The guys that played in that band have all gone on to do great things, the drummer is with Tedeschi Truck Band now and the sax player plays with Marcus King.
What triggered the move back to Nashville?
I started a country band in Florida and it was working ok, but country music wasn’t accepted as much down there as when I was living in Tennessee. A country rock band in Nashville reached out to me because they needed a lead guitarist for a tour. They offered me a full-time job which was the perfect opportunity for me to move back to Nashville. It gave me steady income, so I moved back in 2018. I still had a bit of a bad taste in my mouth from my previous time in Nashville and I was a bit hesitant going back, but it’s been a completely different experience this time. I got back into the country scene that didn’t seem to exist before. Having met some great people in the country scene in Nashville now, I was able to make my record the way I really wanted to. I also got lucky in a way because with Covid in 2020 and everything shutting down so much, nobody had work. I was able to call up all these guys that I admired so much and asked them if they wanted to be a part of the record and nobody said no.
You certainly got your own Wrecking Crew onboard to play on the album and the legendary Matt Coles to produce. How did you connect with those guys?
Matt Coles is a great engineer and has worked on some great albums, and working with Compass Records is his main job. His wife is from my hometown and her and my dad grew up together. I didn’t know it but my dad had sent her some demo recordings that I had done. She played them to Matt and he really liked them and asked me if I’d like to come into the studio and work on some songs. At first, we were going to put together some demos to shop around but after that session, Matt asked me if I wanted to write songs for other people or try to cut a record. As I really wanted to record my own record we started brainstorming from there. A lot of the players came from Matt. He has a good concept of players that work quickly and efficiently and players that would suit my sound. So, he brought in Miles (Miller), Casey (Driscoll) and Dan (Dugmore). Dennis Crouch is a friend of mine: we had met at a honky tonk Tuesday at American Legion. My friend Mark Pointen, who played guitar for Jerry Reid for a while, introduced me to him. I didn’t know who he was at first, I just thought he was a really nice guy. He told me he was a bass player and when I went home later, I looked him up and realised who I’d been talking to. He’s not at the American Legion often so I’d say I got lucky that night as we’ve been friends ever since. My girlfriend lives near him, there’s a big park where I go to run and he walks his dog there, so I run in to him all the time and catch up. He’s a great guy and my favourite player in Nashville.
How long did you spend in the Compass Record Studio recording the tracks?
We cut it in two sessions pretty much. It was kind of spread out: the first day was in July 2020 and then we came back in at the end of August. We cut the acoustic tracks first, Cornered, She Don’t Live Here No More, Blue and ‘89 Lariat, and we came back and cut all the full band stuff in one other day in under five hours. None of the players had heard the material before. I had written everything out and would play through the acoustic. Everyone would read the charts and make notes, we would go in the studio and three takes later it was done. All very old school style. Dan Dugmore was the only one that we had to overdub; he was a little worried about the virus. He came in later and I was there when he played. It was amazing watching him work.
You also had siblings Johnny & Mary Meyer from The Meyerband lend a hand.
They sing on several songs; Burning Memory is probably my favourite one that they sang on. They are so professional. Mary took charge of the vocal instructions for the two of them and Johnny was in charge of the musical ideas. You can tell they have been playing their whole lives as they have their own language. They were in two different rooms but could see each other through the windows. They played everything live, sang, played the banjo and the mandolin.
Over what period had the songs been written prior to recording?
They were written over a long time. The first one I wrote, This Time It’s You, goes back to 2015. I had a lot of songs, probably thirty, that I had written over various periods. The most recent is the single, Don’t Need You, which I wrote not long before we recorded the album. I was watching the Superbowl with some buddies and I just had this idea that popped into my head for that song. I walked off into another room, wrote the song and missed the whole game.
Dare I ask if that song is based on personal experience?
Kind of. The original lines came from something I was going through at the time. Any sort of heartache seems to be a good thing for any country songwriter, at least you get something out of it.
I love the YouTube video with that song. It’s pure country, featuring everything from moonshine, pick up truck, fishing and beer. It even has a hound in it.
That’s my sister’s dog. His name is Ruby. The video was all shot in my hometown. I had visually come up with the ideas of places I wanted to shoot, places I loved growing up, and places I thought would look cool on a screen because I’ve loved movies all my life. Michelle Kowalski, the cinematographer from New Orleans, worked the video and she has a great eye for capturing what you’re going after. I sat down with Hannah Juanita, who has done several videos and is really good at writing a script, and she helped me lay it out on paper, stayed in charge of the video and directed it as we were shooting. There was only the three of us. The lake beside where I grew up, close to my parent’s house, is in the shoot. I grew up in a valley at the foot of the mountains and we went up to the top Sewannee Mountain for the cabin shots, which is a good friend’s family house that’s been in their family since before the Civil War. It was a long shoot. It took all day long but we really had a lot of fun.
The album criss-crosses various aspects of country music including bluegrass, Cajun, traditional and blues while avoiding going down the dreaded pop crossover road. It reminds me in many ways of the musical variation on another East Nashville resident Sierra Ferrell’s recent album LONG TIME COMING.
Sierra is awesome and a good friend. I remember my first year here in town. She had already been here a couple of years and we would all hang out after the Honky Tonk Tuesday shows at American Legion. We’d all head back to somebody’s house, build a fire and sit around and pick and sing. I remember hearing Sierra singing up close and in person for the first time and being blown away. I’d never heard anyone sing so powerfully and with so much confidence. She’s simply amazing. She knows exactly what she wants to do and does it. I was torn between so many styles recording this album and I was worried that I was having too many styles on it and that it wouldn’t have a cohesive sound.
Do you sense and witness a resurgence in popularity for real country music in Nashville? Artists like yourself, Sierra Ferrell and Joshua Hedley are making true country records in Nashville and Jesse Daniel, Charley Crockett and Jason James are doing the same in Texas.
Yes, definitely. Actually, I was just talking to a good friend of mine Aaron Goodrich, he’s a great drummer in town and used to play with Colter Wall and Jaime Wyatt. We were just talking about the resurgence in country music around here and a lot of folks think that the Ken Burns Country Music documentary is doing the same thing for this generation that O Brother Where Art Thou did twenty years ago, bringing it back to the forefront for people that really like country music.
Despite that, those artists I mentioned are not going to be played on Country Music radio?
Well definitely not over here. I think that Europe has a better sense of what country music is than people over here. Pop country over here rules the radio, that’s all you’re going to hear.
Is the album a ‘one off’ country album for you or where do you see your musical direction in the coming years?
Country is where I want to be. There might be times when I dabble in other things but if I’m putting music out under my name, I want it to be country or some form of country. I still do feel that in a way I want my projects in the future to be more centred, maybe dedicating an album to a certain type of country and getting deep into that avenue for a period of time. Maybe I might cut a bluegrass album because as much as I love writing, I’m probably more of a player than a writer. I write every day but the musician inside of me always wants to dig deep into the styles of country music.
Have you got plans to get on the road and tour the album?
I’ve done some shows already and am heading to Texas this weekend for two more, one solo and one with a full band. They’re both with Gus Clark, who is another up and coming guy in Nashville, who’s put out some great records. The band I’ve got are guys that I toured with in Texas last November, so they’re familiar with my stuff. I’m still working on getting a full-on tour together for later in the year.
Many artists like yourself avoid playing too many shows in Nashville, preferring to play outside of Tennessee.
Yes, that’s very true. Willie Nelson called Nashville ‘The Store’, where you go to buy and sell things. That’s the truth: you don’t want to play here all the time but you want to be here and be around the people here, and be influenced by all that. Having said that, we played in Dee’s Cocktail the other night with Vaden Landers and Hannah Juanita. It was a great show. Dee’s has a built-in crowd on Mondays because East Nash Grass play from six to eight every Monday. There’s always a good crowd to see those guys because it’s the best bluegrass in Nashville. The first time I played a headline show in Nashville was three years ago at Madison Guild Show on a Monday night at Dee’s. There was an ok crowd there back then but these Mondays are great, there’s huge crowds there. It’s also always hard to make money in Nashville and its never about your artistry, but if you leave Nashville with Nashville players you’re respected more, paid more and the shows are better. It’s a tough balance and I always realise that when I leave to go on the road for a couple of weeks and come back and am picking and playing with my friends, I feel a little bit rusty having been gone for a little while. Everything here is so tight and everybody is pushing it so hard. It’s competitive but it’s good competition, everyone gets along really good here.
Have you ambitions to get over to us in Europe?
Definitely, as soon as I get the opportunity. I can see where my record is getting played and bought the most – and both Ireland and Germany are the biggest ones. I’d love to get over there.
Interview by Declan Culliton