DYLAN EARL, LEVEL-HEADED EVEN SMILE

Growing up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Dylan Earl's mother seized every opportunity to educate him on their swamp surroundings and play country tapes in their ’89 Econoline. He loved the songs on those tapes almost as much as his memories. At fifteen, after the devastation laid by Hurricane Katrina in ’05, Earl relocated to Arkansas while his mother stayed in Louisiana to work. The change offered him a new beginning or, as he puts it, “the real birth of me.”

When Earl lived in Lake Charles, he befriended kids he despised, “the type of folks that I was subject to and the churches I was being forced to go to, those people knew something was different about me. I tried every which way to assimilate, because I thought that was the only option.” Looking back he was “slightly queer and just weird to them.” By the time he got to Subiaco, he’d lived in three different places in the span of a month. That dislocation stayed with him and later surfaced on his last album, I Saw the Arkansas, where he set those memories into songs. The record turned his first Arkansas years into story, marking the beginning of his voice as a songwriter.

Earl’s new album, Level-Headed Even Smile, is not only an effort to close the book on that part of his life, but a conscious attempt to discover who he is when he is writing a record. He sees himself as part of a line of working-class songwriters intent on pushing country music into new conversations while honoring the music he grew up with, as he confronts questions of identity and the present head-on.

Musically, Earl leans into a sound built on his baritone vocals and familiar country textures. The title track sets the tone with its easy swing, “Get In The Truck” sketches the mind of a restless traveler over mandolin and dobro, “High On Ouachita,” written as a bridge between albums, pulls from the Arkansas landscape and his connection to place, and “Outlaw Country” lands as a tongue-in-cheek challenge to authority.

Earl delivers on Level-Headed Even Smile, a  country album that shows the strength of his writing and the character of his sound. It’s the kind of album you can imagine playing on a cassette deck in that Econoline, the way country music first reached him.