JOHN CONDON

CONDON@COMCAST.NET
615-385-0001

Sometimes you have to get lost to find your way back home...

When Don Hall left Nashville in the mid-90s, he turned his back on a fast-blooming career as a songwriter. For a few brief, intense years, he'd been up there with the best of them, wielding his pen and guitar on the front lines of Music Row. But along with a career, Hall admits he was also leaving behind some hard living and self-destructive habits.

"Things were going my way until I lost my way," he says. "I like Nashville, but there were a lot of things that happened to me there that I don't like. Nashville's a good-to-see-ya, nice-to-meet-ya town. Everybody's a producer, a player, a singer. You get caught up in it, until all you care about in life is playing a G chord. Then you can get anxious and desperate and you compromise your ideals to make a dollar. When I left, I thought I'd had enough. I quit writing and playing for a long time."

Back home in Salisbury, Maryland, Hall, a single dad, looked after his kids and ran a Laundromat. But deep down, a restlessness was gnawing at him. "I was always in a bad mood," he says. "Then my buddy said to me one day, 'You know what? You're a songwriter. That's what you're supposed to do.' He was right. I'm a songwriter, first and foremost. And I do it because it keeps me in a good mood. If I don't do it, I stay in a bad mood. It's an outlet. I tried to put it aside. But when I finally started doing it again, there was this feeling of release."

As Hall reconnected with his muses, he began to assemble songs new and old for his first-ever solo album. It became a way to make sense of his own life. With unflinching honesty, his lyrics address the big questions we all wrestle with: good and evil, freedom and responsibility, fate and free will. In thinking about his own journey, Hall says he can distill it down to one underlying theme: "The bad man, the holy man and me. That's what I write about."

Musically, he matches his hard-won poetry with a sound that's both accessible and deeply soulful. Kicking off the record with the windswept rocker "Down The Road" and the hushed, romantic "Desire," he takes turns through the raw, hard-grooving "To Burn" and delicate, finger-picked "Faith," before winding down with the hymn-like meditation on homelessness "Look At Me" and "Linger Not," a slow-burning country rock tune that addresses Hall's own struggle with the dark side. With his husky, confidential voice out front, there's a melodic plaintiveness throughout that calls to mind Springsteen's Tunnel Of Love and vintage Kris Kristofferson records, while still sounding contemporary and completely fresh.

"I hear a lot of my influences in there," says Hall. "You do sort of emulate the artists who inspire you, whether it's consciously or not. It's not like you're the first person to ever play music or make a record."

Born and raised on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Hall started playing guitar at age fifteen. "When I was a kid, my sister used to buy these soul albums by singers like Smokey Robinson and Jerry "The Iceman" Butler, and I got really inspired by hearing those," he recalls. "Then in high school, a friend played me a record by Gram Parsons and the Burrito Brothers, and I thought, "Yeah, that's what I want to do."

In short order, Hall was writing his first songs and cutting his teeth in local bar bands. But restless and hungry for more life experience, he soon left home and hitchhiked across the country. After knocking around for a few years, playing music and working odd jobs, he ended up in Nashville. Inspired by the ragged but right poetry of old guard country songwriters like Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury and Rodney Crowell, Hall zeroed in on where he wanted to take his own writing.  

While a staff writer at Praxis, a maverick publishing company that championed roots rockers like Georgia Satellites and Steve Earle, Hall started making waves in Music City. He forged a connection with Greg Kane, who worked with Tanya Tucker, Waylon Jennings, Dave Loggins, The Black Crowes, Stephen Tyler of Aerosmith, and several other notables, and soon began cutting demos.

"Some of the songs on the album were cut back then," Hall says. "And some more recently. It was recorded with three different bands, in sessions in Nashville, over a period of several years, written with long time writing partner Pam Hall Bradford - his ex-wife. Hall jokingly says, "The divorce didn't quite work out all the way. It's kind of a hodge-podge. I can listen to it and I can tell, but someone who didn't know, they might not be able to tell."  

Aside from the consistency of the writing, what helps make the album sound so cohesive is the tasteful playing by top Nashville session cats like keyboardist Tim Lauer, bassist Steve Mackey, the legendary Gary Burnett, and steel guitarist Al Perkins.  

"There's nobody else who plays with Al's sound," Hall raves. "Stephen Stills' Manassas is one of my favorite albums of all time, and Al's tone on that album is awesome. I wanted some of that old school sound on my record."

With his debut release ready to go, Hall is now wrestling with a small identity crisis. "I don't consider myself as a person who makes records," he says. "I'm a songwriter. When I write songs, ideally, I want somebody else to do them. I like to play a lot, but I don't really like the idea of going out on the road and playing clubs. I did that for years. So we'll see what happens."

In the meantime, what does the songwriter hope listeners will get from his record? "That some screwed up guy finally got his life together," Hall replies with a laugh. "Seriously, I hope that people can relate to the positive thought process in the songs. Like in 'Linger Not,' I say, 'I've paid a devil's toll, a debt my son, I hope you never know.' It's a song written to my kids. I don't want them to have to go through what I did, to experience some of the bad stuff I experienced. And to tell the truth, that's the real reason I even did this record. I wanted something for my kids. I wanted something to show for all the time I was gone while they where young. It doesn't make up for my absence, but it's a start."