On a cold winter Wednesday night in a small room in downtown Denver, with a warm fuzzy warm up from the beautiful Angie Stevens, Hayes Carll thrilled a focused crowd.  This was not your typical shit-stirring, body-bumping audience.  These fans mostly knew the words, sang along or silently stood in ‘rapt-attention’ mode.  I know I did, anyway.

Hayes just seems like the kind of guy you wind up on a barstool beside and surprisingly find yourself as relaxed and at ease as you would with someone you’d known and conversed with for years.

A story told by Hayes is a gift – wrapped up in an old newspaper with no bow.  He strains to get the high notes out sometimes, and sometimes just close enough is good enough for him.  Nobody minded.  He had just finished touring with Steve Earle, playing 30-minute opening sets.  The following day was to be his 5th wedding anniversary and, as he told us, “I’ve missed 4 of them.”  Ah, the road….. He did seem pretty weary.  Who wouldn’t be, trying to keep up with a Steve Earle tour?  That just had to be trying, what with Steve’s larger-than-life personality, relentless drive, and numerous idiosyncrasies.  I  imagine that Hayes is about as laid-back personality-wise as Steve is revved up and angsty.  I love Steve and always enjoy his concerts, but opted, this time, for a full Hayes Carll show.

I found myself mesmerized – awestruck by this skinny, raggedy-haired man with a well-used Gibson on stage alone, singing our lives to us, one song at a time.  I didn’t miss the dozen guitar stands displaying flashy, expensive guitars *cough – McMurtry*.  Hayes played the old Gibson with a new pickguard popped on recently, apparently to prevent Willie Nelson guitar-wasting disease.

All evening, Hayes was comfortable, relaxed, sleepy-eyed, perhaps even bedroom-eyed.  Those blue eyes were working the room, though.  As my friend put it, he made eye contact with every woman in the room slyly and sweetly.  Hmphf!  I was convinced I was the only one, but since one guy yelled out loudly that he wanted to have Hayes’ baby, I guess that was not the case.

Is Hayes really from big-city Houston?  ‘Cause his voice is small-town Arkansas lazy, if you ask me, and I should know, having learned to talk under the tutelage of that breed.

I’ve been a fan for years but I’m avid now!  Note to self:  Don’t miss the next Hayes Carll show.

He simply delighted everyone with all those great songs from Flowers and Liquor, Little Rock, and Trouble in Mind (2008 release), and pleasantly surprised us with three new tunes that he ‘tried-out’ on us before his next release, which he says will be out in 2013.  Surely he was kidding.  He knows we can’t wait that long.

Those experiences and his years living in secluded Crystal Beach, across the bay from Galveston, playing local bars before launching out on the road, however, lend a lot of credibility to an impressive music resume.

He says he was the “perennial opening act” for the likes of Ray Wylie Hubbard, Sisters Morales, Willis Alan Ramsey, and a host of other legendary Texas artists when they played Galveston’s Old Quarter, where he learned his chops.

His second album, “Little Rock,” released on his own record label, Highway 87 Music, displays a lot of hard-rocking twang you just wouldn’t normally associate with a rich kid from North Houston. The record leans more to hardcore honky-tonk but has its fair share of laid-back country folk music as well.

In a voice reminiscent of Ray Wylie Hubbard, and maybe a little Slaid Cleaves thrown in the mix, he sings his own compositions with the kind of confident intensity that’s lacking from a lot of new “Americana” artists.

“Little Rock” was produced by R. S. Field, whose previous work includes records by Billy Joe Shaver, John Prine, and Todd Snider among others. Carll also co-wrote the song “Rivertown” with Guy Clark.

If all of the above sounds like an awful lot of name-dropping, this guy somehow manages to hold his own amidst the roster.

While all the songs are good, his lyrics aren’t necessarily groundbreaking in any way. That’s not to say they aren’t competent either. They are. Authentic, yet literate without being pretentious. He manages to hold the line with surprisingly good, rootsy arrangements.

The record kicks off with the slower tempo “Wish I Hadn’t Stayed So Long.” Sung in a lazy drawl; it’s a nice little nod to his time in Galveston and later Austin, where he did a short stint before moving on to avoid being swallowed up in the crowd of struggling musicians there.

It’s a great opener but the record really starts to take off with my favorite track, “Down the Road Tonight,” a country rock stomper in the tradition of Bob Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street.”  Shouting out a litany of diverse imagery ( . . .high-school heroes, back row preachers’ pool hall hustlers, tantric teachers, teenage cuties politickin’, Harry Krishna feed me chicken) before ending with gibberish when: “I run out of words – that’s all I got!”

The title cut is a honky-tonk rocker and the thumping, bluesy closer, “Chickens” co-written with Hubbard, is a slightly twisted ode to poultry:

“I got chickens in the front yard,
What they do is scratch and peck.
Come suppertime I go out there,
Find me one and ring its neck.”

There’s an awful lot of guitar slinging country songwriters trying their damnedest to make a name in Texas and somehow get noticed. Sometimes they all start to become a blur, but every so often one manages to sound all the right notes of authenticity and set hisself apart at the same time. If you like your music a little grittier and rough edged than what you hear on mainstream country radio, and let’s face it – if you didn’t you probably wouldn’t be here – then it’s a pretty safe bet that Hayes Carll is someone you’ll want to check out. And keep an eye on.