Hear No Evil

One of Memphis country rockers Lucero's best-known tracks Tears Don't Matter Much, from their classic 2003 album That Much Further West, contains the verse:

“Cory Branan's got an evil streak/And a way with words that will bring you to your knees/Oh he can play the wildest shows and he can sing so sweet/I still sing along.”

Yet it's only in recent times that those then-cryptic lyrics have really started to resonate, as the Mississippi-born, Nashville-based Branan has taken his escalating solo career to the wider world.

“Yeah, they're real good dudes,” Branan laughs of the Lucero shout-out. “Actually I was down in Mississippi just a couple of weeks ago during the tour with Tim [Barry], cutting a track. I'm going to do a split-release with The Gaslight Anthem guys, but I had all of Lucero except for Brian [Venable] and Ben [Nichols] backing me up covering a Gaslight song. I got to do some shows with Gaslight earlier this year and it was great. I don't know what song of mine they're going to play, but we'll see how it goes.”

Presumably Branan hit it off with The Gaslight Anthem guys given that they're now recording each other's songs.

“Yeah, you know, Brian [Fallon]'s a really good dude, and they're a pretty stand-up band,” he continues. “They've taken a heap of people I know out on the road with them – stuff that they don't have to do. They take people they enjoy, because they're going to sell the shows out no matter who they put on the bill. Nice dudes.”

Obviously the Lucero connection goes way deeper.

“I lived in Memphis and we all started about the same time,” Branan recalls. “Ben had been in a punk band before from Little Rock, but he moved to Memphis and started Lucero at about the same time that I started writing songs. It's a pretty small scene there so we got to know each other and hung out and did some tours – hell, I lived with the guys for some years in a warehouse. We're just kind of buddies from the block.”

All of the disparate sounds from the music-rich South eventually seeped into Branan's writing.

“I grew up obviously around church music and bluegrass and blues and roots music, and then as a teenager you just go as far as you can get away from that,” he laughs. “Growing up in Mississippi, it wasn't like I was in a cotton field – I grew up in a suburb, although I spent the summers down in the woods – so I was just like any other hoodrat with a skateboard and MTV, just gettin' whatever I could get. At the same time that I could get hold of, say, a Black Flag record I would also have Eazy-E or Iron Maiden – whatever I could get a hold of. It kind of came at me all at once, I was never doing one thing. I went straight out of playing guitar in punk bands to playing guitar in country bands – just getting work, basically.”