With five highly acclaimed albums, Shreveport, Louisiana-born artist Dylan LeBlanc will no doubt be familiar to our readers. What may not be commonly known is the musical talent within Dylan’s family. His dad, James LeBlanc, is a songwriter and session player at Fame Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals whose songs have been recorded by Rascal Flatts, Travis Tritt, Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney, Sara Evans and Martina McBride. James’ wife Angela Hacker (Dylan’s stepmom) is also a songwriter, musician and in-demand session vocalist in at Fame Recording Studios Muscle Shoals and the winner of the 2007 edition of Nashville Star, whose songs have been covered by Jason Isbell and Candi Staton. Angela’s son Bay Simpson (Dylan’s stepbrother) performs with the country rock band Outlaw Apostles and recently appeared in the reality television series The Voice. Given their combined workloads and parallel careers, it’s not surprising that the opportunity to write and record collectively escaped them until Covid 19 hit and the world came to a standstill. Fate would have it that the enforced lockdowns brought the family together musically, the result being the recording of their debut album DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR. The background to the project is quite extraordinary, as Dylan, James, Angela and Bay explained to Lonesome Highway via a recent Zoom interview.
James, I understand that your father also played guitar and sang. How did your relationship with him compare to your relationship with Dylan?
James – My dad was a guitar player and had a great baritone voice, but he passed away when I was twenty-three and so for starters Dylan and I have had a lot more time together than I had with my dad. My dad was born in 1941 and grew up in the 50s so there was more of a generational difference between my dad and I than there is between Dylan and me. My dad grew up in the time of crew cuts and sock hops and there is a larger gap from growing up in the 50s than when I grew up the 80s and Dylan grew up in the 90s and 2000s, plus I was nineteen when Dylan was born. My dad was older when I was born and he was a tough taskmaster, he was hard on me, taught me how to play guitar and was hard on me in ways, which I appreciate now. He never bullshitted me, he would never tell me that I had written a good song if I hadn’t, even though I was only a kid. I think telling people the way it really is tends to benefit them more in the long run.
In a previous interview with Dylan, he made the same point about how direct you were with him telling us that if he went to you with a half-written song you’d tell him not to be wasting your time and to come back to you when it was finished.
James – Either that or I tried to finish it with him and get a co-write.
This project kickstarted following a gig by Dylan in Alabama.
Dylan – Yes, I was supposed to play a solo show at a place called The Camp in Huntsville; it’s an outdoor venue. I invited them to play with me and Rodney Hall who owns Fame might have come out to the show. I’ve known Rodney most of my life and when the show concluded he said, ‘have you all ever thought about writing some songs together because you all should be making a record.’ I think this was right at the beginning of the pandemic and when everything shut down and nobody was doing anything. We started to take that concept seriously, every one of us has their own career but at that time everything had stopped. Angela and my dad wrote the song Hammer, and it got recorded. They sent it to our great friend Brad Crisler who plays a really big part in this album, and it immediately had a vibe and when Bay and me heard his production on that song we wanted our stuff to sound like that. That started a process of us writing and recording and getting this record started.
Had you all been in regular contact before that show?
Dylan – We were never apart, but we were all pursuing our own endeavours, which gave us a reason to spend more time together and get closer to one another on a musical level.
Were there a pre-agreed writing and musical theme given the involvement of the four of you and Brad?
James – It just developed into that. As Dylan said, Brad is our co-producer, a longtime writing partner of mine, and a brilliant engineer and producer. The sound eventually started to gravitate towards a vintage and retro sound and he helped shape that. In was kind of accidental and kind of on purpose but we loved the direction that the sound was going.
Bay – A lot of that did come from Brad. It’s interesting because we are all interesting musicians in our own right and somehow with Brad’s input and moulding it all into a cohesive sound, the magic happened. There wasn’t any cohesive formula, we were all used to playing and singing together but what this turned out to be was a little more than we could have imagined.
Another family member eventually supported the recorded album.
Dylan – Yes, my brother-in-law, Jesse Walker, whose regular gig is a lieutenant in the Navy, started an app called Whatnot, an online auction site. He made a large amount of money in a short time and started a record store called Big Black Cow Records. He enquired about our album to see if anyone was doing anything with it, which wasn’t happening, and he is serious about getting his record label off the ground and said he’d like to invest some money to put the album out. We only started that process in March, so we’ve come a long way in the past few months with his help.
The track Pick Your Poison from the album had previously been released by Dylan.
Dylan - I released Pick Your Poison because love that song. I was thinking of releasing the entire family album and released Pick Your Poison under my own name because I wanted it to have the best chance of being heard. I released it as Dylan LeBlanc and The Family not knowing that Jesse Walker was going to do what he ended up doing. I released it as an introduction to the family album which I was going to release myself, because it was just sitting there. The single got a lot of listens quickly on Spotify and people seemed to like it even asking me to play it at my shows in the tour I did in January in the U.K.
James – Dylan was playing the riff from that song around the house for years. I told him he ought to write a song around that riff, but he thought it sounded too metal for him to write a song to. I kept on hounding him about it and when the family project came around, I reminded him about that riff that he’d been playing for years, and we decided to write something around it.
Angela. What do you consider that you brought to the project?
Angela – The influence that I bring to any project is just my singing. It’s my favourite thing to do, singing and doing harmonies and a feel as a band that we have a really good blend. James and I have been singing together since 2003, he invited me into his band and a sang background vocals for a little while and we were both writers at Fame Recording Studios, we’re both still writers there now. Even though this is the first time we have all done a specific project together I’ve sang of James’ records, Bay’s record and James and I were all over Dylan’s first record, PAUPERS FIELD and I’m on his last record, COYOTE. I’m probably the Garfunkel on the group, singing the harmonies.
Dylan – She’s also an awesome songwriter, incredible lyricist and artist in her own right. She always plays the humble card, but she brings much more than just her voice to the table.
Did the recording took place at Fame Recording Studios during the pandemic.
James – Absolutely. When the pandemic arrived, the whole world shut down, Fame shut down and everything they had booked was cancelled. At Rodney Hall, the owner of Fame with his mom Linda and the late Rick Hall, suggestion that we all just come into the studio and see what we can come up with. That, along with Dylan’s gig that we spoke about earlier, started the process. We had time, we had energy, we had the facility and we had a couple of songs and as the project became more focused, we began writing specifically for this project. Ww basically had cart blanche to go into the studio and see what we could come up with.
I expect that the album title DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR is somewhat tongue in cheek?
James – Absolutely. I thought it was a great title because we have delusions of grandeur. However, if the big call came tomorrow and we got to headline Wembley Stadium, we’d be on the first plane out and ready to go. Seriously, if it never gets any bigger than this, we’re having a ball and grateful to be able to do this together.
Tell me about the song Everybody Loves You Now?
James – It’s a Bay, me and our producer Brad cut. We purposely tried to write that song about L.A. and a character that’s down on his luck. It’s got a lot of Los Angeles references and a seedy, underbelly downside of the silver screen scene. Some people go out there and immediately achieve stardom and others struggle for years and never get there. Brad had just visited there and those were some of his impressions of L.A.
Is The End a lockdown song given the times when it was written and recorded?
James – Probably. The whole record has a bit of a nihilistic, apocalyptic vibe, like the end of the world. We were just sitting there watching the news because it was such a weird time.
Dylan – You must also remember the riots in 2020. It was crazy in that year, riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The Kyle Rittenhouse case where the guy was shooting at people who were shooting back at him running through the streets. I went downtown one day, and they had surrounded the courthouse with AR15’s, there was a lot of craziness going on and the one time in my life when I really felt scared to be out in public. Everyone has the right to bear arms in this country, and it seemed like that everybody was and it felt like anything could pop off at any moment with all the political and civil unrest, plus the pandemic. A lot of that found its way into the record, either consciously or subconsciously; there’s a lot of that influence there.
The Dealer is also a particularly strong song, with a killer riff and lyrics that can be interpreted in several ways.
James – I like that song. We got really inspired and it’s not always like that. What I mean by that is the way the muse and artistry work, sometimes I can get my guitar in my hand strum a few chords and try to come up with a line and it’s like I’ve never written a song in my life. Other times I can play a few chords hum a melody and a verse and possibly a verse will fall out all at once. This particular project was like that; things were pouring out of us in a cool way.
Dylan – Inspired is the right word for the album, it came together so quickly which was not anticipated.
Have you had a formal record release show yet?
Bay – We did a prerelease show in our hometown; we had over 350 people show up and sold a lot of prerelease copies. We’re playing a show next week in New York that will serve as a release show.
Dylan – That show in New York is at Lucinda’s which, as Ben says, will serve as a release show and we’ll announce the record, we’ve got press coming out to that and are excited about that.
And touring?
Dylan – Yes, we’ve got late September, October and early November booked for family tour dates.
Congratulations on a great record, hopefully there will be more of the same to follow.
Dylan – There will. We have lots of material, are already a third of the way through our next record and have a live album coming out later this year.
Interview by Declan Culliton
More about The Family and their tour dates can be accessed at https://bigblackcowrecords.com/thefamily/
Dylan Le Blanc plays The Sound House, Dublin on Wednesday 18th November
https://thesoundhouse.ie/tc-events/singular-artists-presents-dylan-leblanc/