By Hunter Myers
Shortly after the sun went down that night in March at Waystone Pizza Co., Dylan Earl took his seat on a wooden stool mid-stage and propped his guitar up on his knee.
“Don’t be fuckin’ weird,” he begged the crowd. “I want to see people dancin’ it’s not weird to ask a friend or a stranger to dance.”
His guitar rang out and a crowd that had confined themselves to the bar, in booths, and little scattered groups flocked to the middle of the room and obeyed the music’s call to action.
I Saw the Arkansas, a love song written to the land where Dylan found a home lilted from the stage.
Turn on the radio today. Or open your preferred streaming platform. What do you hear?
Country-pop fusions with tired tropes of tractors, beer, god, country, and hetero sex?
The country-western-folk mainstream is saturated with the hyper-palatable and hyper-consumable. What you’re hearing is essentially the drive-thru cheeseburger of folk music and the roots of the genre are getting lost in the fat.
Dylan Earl embraces the tradition despite knowing it will likely never make him as rich and famous as Post Malone and Morgan Wallen.
Because he has truths to tell, it was never about the money. It’s only ever been about the mission and the message.
“This is a whole different space,” he said. “It’s real. I cherish it. Its genuine. My mom instilled a lot of this stuff in me. I value genuineness. I value my life on experience and interaction and love and kindness. I just… I have no desire to be fuckin’ rich. I dont.”
He was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana and lived there until he was 15. The winds of Hurricane Katrina ripped him up and dropped him in the Logan County city of Subiaco, Arkansas. He quickly became as much a fixture to the land as the mountains that the Benedictine monks of Subiaco guided him and his childhood friends through.
As a kid he avoided the local sheriff, monitoring his whereabouts on radio channels to avoid trouble when he drank beers in empty fields. He worked farms. He moved around the different regions and loved each one in its own way.
The natural beauty of the land and the people who live there assured him that he had found home.
“I’ll die in Arkansas,” he said.
That evening of the concert, finding Waystone for the first time came with minor difficulty. Just shy of being behind a new Road Runner gas station on Garland Avenue in Fayetteville, Arkansas. It is nestled at the end of an overlooked strip mall between an odd little access road and a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu dojo with blueish, peeling window tint.
The bouncer was unaware I was invited by one of the artists playing there that night and was confused as to why I expected free entry.
“What do you mean you’re on a list? What list?” he asked.
From deep in the bar, hidden by the sunlight that overpowered any attempt to see the dimly lit interior, Dylan Earl jaunted out of the darkness to vouch for me.
He was a brand new 35. His hair remains dense with just the slightest tinges of grey eking its way through. He’s taller than most and thin as a rail but looks like he has a stealthy strength you find among farmhands.
“He’s with me!” he told the ticket-man. “I forgot to tell them you were coming, man. Come on in!” he said, leading me into the bar.
Dylan had been sitting at the bar when I walked up, talking to other musicians, the bartender, and presumably any strangers he’d captured in conversation
“Ya’ll this is Hunter, he’s with the student radio up the hill,” he said, introducing me to the crowd sitting at the bar. He pointed in the general direction of the University of Arkansas just up the road where I’d come from, as he did it.
Just as quickly as he pulled me into the bar and introduced me to the small number of people gathered there, he vanished; off to meet more people. Shake more hands.
The show started much later after that, about an hour and a half after deafening sound checks.
When the show began, the crowd grew and it became increasingly clear I was in a special space, lost in a crowd comprised of every type of person the city was home to.
Waystone was a hole-in-the-wall third space where highly experimental and confoundingly avantgarde music performance often found shelter. Members of fringe communities that go unseen in southern college towns can be seen romping and rocking with “normal” folk here. Students, queers, furries, and middle-aged working stiffs listened to local artists, drank, and danced in the same room together, without issue.
It was at Waystone where a hyper/electropop duo, called haha Laughing performed one of the most bizarre shows I’d seen in the Fayetteville scene. They both wore camouflage raincoats. At one point the vocalist disappeared from the stage toward the bathrooms at the back of the room. She reappeared at the end of the song wearing a rubber slug mask, army crawling her way back through the crowd to the stage.
Dylan told me, the day before the concert, that he aims to be inclusive. He plays to create a beer-clinking dialogue between the “starch shirt cowboy and anarchist kid.” And here they were, just as he wanted, listening and dancing.
This dive was the perfect place to find artists like Dylan Earl, singing country music with traditional roots and rousing political messages that offend the conservative narrative often found in mainstream, modern country.
“Folk music has always been created among community. It’s used in protest. It drives community,” he said.
He evoked Woodie Guthrie’s timeless declaration, “All you fascists bound to lose.” Laughing, he said folk – real folk was made to talk shit about authority and lift up the common man
Whenever Dylan is in Fayetteville, Mason Rios is usually the person booking and setting up shows for him in the city.
I met him several weeks after Dylan’s show at Waystone. He was there performing a set of his own.
When he’s not booking for local artists and monitoring sound levels, as he was the night Dylan took the stage, he’s playing bass for a popular local punk rock band, The Garden Snakes.
Rios is a face that you will see everywhere in the city’s music scene, and remember. He looks like every Rock ‘N’ Roll 20-something from the early 70’s, dropped off here in a time machine.
Early May brought some of the brightest days of the year. Every inch of Waystone seemed to be dripping in sunlight. I was able to pull Rios away from levels and sound checks for a brief moment, to sit at a booth and talk about Dylan’s sound.
“Dylan’s doing it for real. Country is a genre that, in the last 20 years, has been bastardized the most. The roots of it are built in working class America – writing songs about everyday life and getting fucked over by rich people. Then Garth Brooks comes along and writes only about drinking beer and having fun,” Rios said.
They seemed to be good friends and this is a theme I’ve witnessed numerous times throughout the Fayetteville music scene.
Everyone knows Dylan. And those that know him, love him – Believe in him.
It wasn’t long into our brief conversation before Rios had to return to prepare for his band’s show. Garden Snakes are a big face in Fayetteville and the scene’s devotees were fast approaching.
I met Dylan in mid-March for the first time at the Fayetteville Public Library. I arrived early to get a cappuccino from the coffee shop inside. The setting sun poured in through the large glass walls. It was one of those spring days where the temperature hovered in the mid 60’s and the wind moved softly through the trees.
Dylan arrived late. He was on foot and explained he had to back-track for a forgotten leash that belonged to his 15-year-old dog, Rupert. He said that it wasn’t typical for him to keep the well-mannered pup on a leash.
I was expecting to see a man in full cowboy regalia as I’d seen him on all his album covers. Instead, he walked up to me off the street in camouflage rubber clogs, camo overalls, a t-shirt, white trucker hat and blue mirrored wrap-around shades with a very sweet, mild mannered senior dog.
We chose to talk outside in the perfect Arkansan weather.
In the south, you should know or have at least heard of the saints; Cash, Waylon, Eddie Arnold, Marty Robbins, Willie, Dolly, Patsy Cline, and on it goes.
Dylan’s mother was the one to introduce him to the genre, early in his life.
“My mom had me listening to a lot of old country music when I was a kid. A lot of old country,” he said, making sure Rupert was comfortable in the shade.
The love for the genre didn’t take, however. The country-western-folk graft failed and turned into a strong dislike that would last through most of his teen years. He said he had a theory – the 9/11 terror attack on the east coast ruined many things in America with nationalism, nativism and isolationism. One of them being country music.
“Everything became about the flag and all that shit, you know? And ‘They’re takin’ your jobs,’ bullshit,” he said. “I love my country, but I don’t need to listen to this, and then I started thinking all country music is dumb as shit.”
Through stifled laughter, he started telling me about all the music that took its place; Weezer’sPinkerton and Blue Album, Emo “shit,” rock and roll, and alt-rock.
Touching on the all too familiar feeling of embarrassment over childhood music taste, he confessed through a smile, “I’m not above saying that I’ve listened to some Dashboard Confessional at some times.”
Around the time he graduated high school, the internet was growing in popularity and became the shepherd that guided him through his rediscovery of country classics he grew up with, as well as new artists that would change his perspective on what country music means to him.
He said the meaning and purpose of country music had changed for him, from an empty corporate propaganda machine to a lively tradition of common-sense folk that opposes tyranny and extols the beauty of life.
Country became the platform he wanted to use to create a dialogue between people who wouldn’t otherwise engage with one another. Dylan said he wants to use the privilege of this platform and his art to bring people together.
Dylan’s albums up to this point have focused on love ballads and classic country songs that embody the aspects of the genre that he fell in love with.
Though he said his next album, Level-headed Even Smile, is where he brings in the political tradition of the genre to say something more with his music.
“Seeing my community rally around certain things, George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement,” he paused for a moment. “I haven’t been able to figure out how to write about it. Outlaw Country is kind of the one song on that next album that does approach a lot of this stuff. It approaches things like queerness. That song has a very straight forward opening line, ‘I’d rather be a bootlegger than a bootlicker.’ Sets the tone for the whole album.”
He said he axed the cowboy hat for his next album cover as well. To bring himself closer to his fellow man’s level. On all of his previous album covers, you can see him in full cowboy regalia wearing a cowboy hat like a crown. He said this album was for bringing people together and this was one of the decisions he said he made to better accomplish that goal.
“It’s a lot of territory I’ve never touched. It challenged me tremendously. Writing about this shit can go very wrong in so many ways. It can come out really cheesy or just limp as shit,” he said.
That night at Waystone, I got caught up in Dylan’s music. His attempt to bring people together created a wash that swept me off my feet.
I’m almost always the tallest man in every room I walk into. It’s never been more of an issue past the occasional bump on the head. That night, I was peering over everyone’s head to watch the crowd. As I looked around the room, an older woman from across the bar met my gaze for the briefest of moments and immediately left behind the company she came with to insist I dance with her.
She was much shorter than me and smartly dressed. She had soft hands and the face of a mother. She placed my hand on her waist and guided me through a dance I never even thought to attempt nor had the instinct to feel my way through.
We spun around and cut up the dance floor as best we could while Dylan sang his love songs to Arkansas. I made several hard collisions with other dancing patrons and stepped on the feet of many others unfortunate enough to cross our path.
After my spontaneous dance lesson, my partner released me when Dylan stopped playing. I went outside for a break, and she chased me down. That is where I found out her name was Tammy. She tipsily insisted, I put her number in my phone. I still have it.
I joined Dylan and a handful of musicians outside where we all took long drags off cigars and cigarettes and talked about music, politics, love, and told jokes.
The night was going to be a long one for this group. Though Dylan’s set was over, he wasn’t leaving until everyone knew how much he appreciated them coming to his show.
Ryan Tinsley is the bar tender at Waystone. Tinsley is a tall man with a stout figure. He spoke with an assertive quality that let you know this was his bar and he’s in charge. The cocktails he passed across were nothing short of magical. He is Waystone’s gatekeeper. He decides who performs on Waystone’s increasingly coveted stage.
“Dylan’s one of the only performers who sits and actually talks to people. I love when artists do that and it’s part of the reason we’ve had him back twice now,” he said.
Tinsley keeps a notebook where he takes notes on artists’ impact with the crowd. That book is where he keeps all the information that will determine if an artist is allowed back on his stage.
“The local scene is what got you where you are. Don’t forget that. So many artists do, but that’s why we love having Dylan here,” he said. Dylan brings people together on and off the stage.
When I left that night, Dylan was still meeting people, shaking hands and saying goodnight to everyone who came to his show. When it came time for me to leave, he pulled me into a hug. “It’s been a pleasure talking to you, I’ll see y’all around,” he said.