Artist Spotlight - Marcedes Carroll

Marcedes Carroll’s We Lost Track of the Stars captures human nature ebbing (“Crooked Nail”) and flowing (“Old Fashioned”). We recently caught up with the Montana-based singer-songwriter about songwriting, life in the country and the excellent new collection.

“I let the songs come forward until they fit into a complete piece,” Carroll says. “A friend had shown me an interview with Bruce Springsteen and what he said really resonated with me: ‘Sometimes you can’t make an album until the songs are there.’ I love that idea.

“My philosophy was to write a full, complete project with this album because mentors I have around here in Montana and in the industry would say, ‘Remember when records used to be full works of art?’”

Alt-Country Specialty Chart: How long have you been in Montana?

Marcedes Carroll: I grew up here since about nine years old. I spent my adolescence in other parts of the north up here but keep boomeranging back to Montana. There isn’t a whole lot of city hustle and bustle here. Montana is more solitary. I use aspects of nature in my writing from living here and my life has a more desolate mentality.

Songwriters from West Texas say the same.

So many great writers have come from the Lubbock area. Such a vast expanse. I would say that space in places like Lubbock and Montana gives you the room to reflect and have perspective and decide how you’re feeling about things. The space allows you to move forward a little slower. We have a way slower way of living here.

Yeah, it’s hard to write when six people are honking at you for taking the wrong left.

There’s definitely that. You’re being interrupted all the time in places (like Austin). You can choose to put your phone in the drawer for the day out here in the country. I can’t do it that often, but maybe on a Sunday.

You know, the world won’t implode if you put your phone away for a day.

Yeah, but it’s gotten bad. Think about how addicted we are. “Oh, I’ll Google it. I’ll look it up. I’ll just plug it into Maps.” We were just driving around for three weeks and were like, “Man, think about when Willie Nelson was doing this in the (Seventies).” They weren’t looking at Google Maps. They were looking at paper maps and those maps sometimes weren’t updated. Todd Snider has that live album where he’s like, “Yeah, if you don’t know how to get to Luckenbach, you might never make it.”

Speaking of being lost, talk about the album art on We Lost Track of the Stars.

The album artist is a local friend who I have known for years. Our mothers and brothers used to hang out when we were in high school but we didn’t even know each other. We met a little after college. She’s a jack of all trades: a fly fisherman, a bird hunter, an artist and a writer. There’s a lot of heartbreak in these songs and the arc of finding love, losing love, moving on your life and being able to hang your hat on that same crooked nail.

That seems like the lyrical theme of the song ‘Stars.’

Yeah. The main line is: “Love is not the darkness / It’s the stars that remain.” Then I found the cover art online and noticed that it had the Hank Williams “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” sheet music in the background. Turns out the artist got it from an old Hank Williams song book when she was creating the art. She wrote on it, “We lost track of the stars” but blacked it out. I noticed that when I bought the art piece from her and thought, Holy crap. Love is so abstract and hard to measure, but that’s what it feels like when you’re feeling lost and your life gets turned upside down.

– Brian T. Atkinson