Adam & Chris Carroll on The Bowery Stage w/Cole Allen

Adam -

Want to hear a good story? Listen to any Adam Carroll song. His Texas peers sure have, over and over again, and are quick to heap superlatives on a stoic artist whose compositions provide a solitary glimpse into a verdant imagination.

Jon Dee Graham says Carroll "may be the best songwriter that Texas ever produced," while Robert Earl Keen proclaims, "If all were right with the world, Adam Carroll would be the Townes Van Zandt of our age."

"His lyrics are like a good book: They take you somewhere and leave you better than they found you," says Terri Hendrix.

Slaid Cleaves calls Carroll "the quintessential small-town songwriter," adding, "Travel outside the cities of this country and you'll recognize the barbecue-joint waitresses, the rice farmers, the karaoke singers, the black-flag pirates and the hi-fi lovers of this land--you'll meet them all in Adam's true-to-life songs."

Now, with the release of two new albums--I Walked in Them Shoes is a solo effort, wile Good Farmer was recorded in tandem with his wife, Chris Carroll--there are more characters to meet, at once fascinating and familiar.

Carroll grew up in Tyler, Texas, which he describes as "pretty southern" compared to other Lone Star habitats, in the '70s and '80s. This led him to identify with great southern bards like Flannery O'Connor and Lucinda Williams, even if he felt a bit out of place in his hometown.

“I had a few friends, but I was very shy—still am,” he explains. “But I was pretty good at reading, so I tended to live in my head. I was kind of imagining writing stories for myself.”

Music was a constant in the Carroll household. Adam’s mom is a musician, while his dad had a killer record collection—John Prine, Johnny Cash, Jimmie Rodgers, and the like. Adam took piano lessons and sang in a choir, but when he purchased Neil Young’s Harvest as a senior at a North Carolina boarding school, he developed a fervent desire to play guitar.

That itch would get scratched at Tyler Junior College, where, Carroll recalls, “there was a really good guitar teacher, Frank Kimlicko.” Carroll worked in a coffee shop near campus that featured live folk music, and his appreciation for Prine deepened. When he went to see a Prine show at the Majestic Theatre in Dallas, Carroll says, “I couldn’t believe how good he was. He was the first artist I saw live who met every expectation I had of a performer.”

Eventually, observers would come to say the same of Carroll. But it would take awhile for him to find his comfort zones.

"I've just always been kind of a reclusive guy,” he says. “I moved from Tyler to the Austin area, and I tried living in Austin for a little bit. I had a real hard time with it.”

But then Carroll ambled into Cheatham Street Warehouse in San Marcos, a college town in between Austin and San Antonio. Opened in 1974 by Kent Finlay and located hard by a set of railroad tracks, Cheatham Street ranks among Texas’ foremost songwriting incubators, with George Strait, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Todd Snider, James McMurtry, Sunny Sweeney, Terri Hendrix, and Jamie Lin Wilson all cutting their chops on the honky-tonk’s stage.

“I just felt really at home there,” says Carroll, who wound up moving to San Marcos. (He and Chris now live in nearby Wimberley.)

“Night at the Show” from Carroll’s new solo album is a tribute to Finlay, who passed away on Texas Independence Day in 2015, while “My Only Good Shirt” is dedicated to Lloyd Maines, the legendary Texas producer (and father of Dixie Chick Natalie) who helmed several of Carroll’s records. Finlay’s daughter, Jenni, produced the album Highway Prayer, a 2016 tribute to Carroll that saw his tunes covered by the likes of Cleaves, McMurtry, Terri Hendrix, Jamie Lin Wilson, Walt Wilkins, and Hayes Carll. Musicians aren’t typically the subject of tribute albums until they’re dead or sick (Carroll’s neither); the fact that so many of Carroll’s peers jumped at the chance to participate in Finlay’s project is testament to his outsize influence.

That influence extends north of the Canadian border, where Carroll met his future wife at a music festival in her hometown of St. Catharines, Ontario, in 2012. They had each gotten sober, and connected over that commonality as their fellow headliners howled at the moon. Chris was already a fan of Adam’s music and was “blown away” when she saw him play. She wasn’t shy—and, unlike Adam, isn’t in general—about expressing her high opinion of him, which got him out of the psychological rut he was in at the time.

“Anytime anybody would tell me I was good as a writer or performer, I couldn't ever hear it and I couldn't say it to myself,” says Carroll. “I feared success. I had a hard time taking compliments. Chris was such a fan that her support has given me a new lease on looking at myself and my music. She believes in it so strongly that it's helped me to believe in it.”

She’s also helped him become a better musician, and the two have an easy chemistry that extends from Good Farmer to the road, which they traverse in an RV with their three dogs.

“Having Chris to play with has actually improved my solo playing,” he says. “I’ve had to learn more about being a guitar player. And her singing that accents a lot of my songs, it's making me want to be a better musician. I'm trying to learn harmony; she's really good at it. Playing with Chris is making me see that I can learn those things on my own now. I'm willing to do it because she's willing to do it. I'm trying to be a better guitar player to make her sound better, to be a complement to what she's doing."

Chris -

For most kids, a broken radio in the family van might get in the way of singalongs. But Chris Carroll’s dad loved John Prine, and she’d fill the dead air with “Sam Stone,” entertaining a pair of younger brothers. A little sister followed years later. Carroll was born in Toronto, but grew up in St. Catharines. “We did a lot of camping; we made the best of it,” she says. “The north part of Ontario is breathtaking.”

Still, it wasn’t easy, and she had some things to overcome. In her mid-thirties she wound up caring for her grandmother until she died. Oma’s passing proved cataclysmic; she once told Carroll, “Nothing else makes you happy, so why don’t you just play your music?” So, says Carroll, “I decided to take a chance on my music at 36.”“I started booking gigs, it was wild,” she adds.

One of those gigs was a slot alongside some country-folk heavyweights at the 2012 Cicada Festival in St. Catharines. Michael O’Connor and Adam Carroll had traveled north from Texas, and they blew Chris away. “Adam played ‘Rice Birds.’ That’s an incredible song,” she recalls. “And then he played ‘Old Milwaukee’s Best,’ and I just busted up. It’s so funny. I’d never heard songwriting like that live. Then I heard O’Connor play; just the troubadour, the musicianship—I’d never seen that before. There was something different with those two.”

After the festival, during a picking circle, Chris and Adam gravitated toward each other. Adam headed home to Texas, and later I got an email that said he liked my songs. Up to that point, we were just friends. He wrote me a song, ‘Little Runaway,’ from some of the things I had told him about my life. My friend Angela told me to get my passport because I was going to Texas. I was going through some serious stuff and he was depressed. He had to come out of his depression and I had to tone it down a bit. It worked for us. He didn’t talk to anybody, but he’d talk to me.”

Once in Texas, Chris released the well-received Trouble and Time, a stylistically adventurous album that bridges that gap between Neko Case, Natalie Merchant and Big Star. Living and collaborating with the local legend who would become her husband, she fell head over heels not only for Adam, but for the Texas music scene.”Songwriting is part of what Texas is,” she says. “There are lots of amazing songwriters in Ontario and Canada, but it’s more sparse. Here, it’s a lifestyle. There, it’s sort of like a dream.”

Working with her husband, however, has proven to be a sort of fusion between dream and reality. “It feels like there was something missing that whole time,” she says. “I was terrified to write with him in the beginning. I was intimidated. I knew who I was married to. I’m crazy about his songwriting.”

The feeling is mutual: The Carrolls just collaborated on an album, Good Farmer, that sees Adam graciously—and shrewdly—yielding lead-vocal duties more often that not to his wife, who instills a certain verve into one of his best songs, “Hi-Fi Love,” that’s enough to dampen the edges of your grin with teardrops. (The pluralizing of “leaf” in “maple leaf” is a sly nod to a certain hockey team in the city of Chris’ birth.)

Chris boldly headed south for her career to go north, and now she’s earned the admiration of those two Texans who knocked her socks off at Cicada Festival so many years ago as we as the rest of the songwriting community.

“As a vocalist, she has the capacity to add just the right mixture of dark and light shades to whatever the canvas of words and music call for in any given song,” says her husband. “As a writer, she’s sensitive to the story in a song, and she’s not afraid to follow the poetry wherever it is meant to go. I can say that I’m a better musician and writer for having shared the stage with her, and a better person for having married her. She’s a treasure.”

Renowned Texas songwriter, Terri Hendrix says of Chris, “She performs like she writes. She’s funny, quirky, introspective, authentic, sincere, and all woman. Her vocals pack a punch or land soft and tender. Her Canadian and Texas roots have intertwined into the fabric of her songwriting making her all the more unique at what she does and how she does it. Chris isn’t trying to be anything other than herself. This is her charm. She’s the real deal.”

Or, as O’Connor puts it, “Everything that girl says sounds like a song.”

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