Hometown: Shreveport, La.
For Fans Of: Ray Lamontagne, M. Ward, Ryan Adams
Son of a country music songwriter, Dylan LeBlanc spent his childhood tagging along to a studio in Muscle Shoals, Ala., where he played his guitar and dreamed up his own songs while his father worked. This head start to his creative development and exposure to the music industry offers some explanation for his remarkably mature debut, Paupers Field, which the 20-year old released this summer. But it can’t all be attributed to legacy—the depth of insight that marks this record is rooted in LeBlanc’s propensity for introspection, perhaps cultivated during the frequent eight-hour drives through the hills of Alabama from his hometown in Shreveport, La. when he was old enough to drive himself.
His speech as quiet and woozy as the pedal steel and subtle folk harmonies that texture his debut, LeBlanc caught up with Paste from London, where he was touring with a four-piece band of long-time friends from Muscle Shoals.
Paste: How are you liking London, Dylan?
Dylan LeBlanc: I like it. I love it. I think it’s beautiful. I love the old architecture, and I can see how a lot of creativity comes from here. I love it because the sun doesn’t really shine. I like the dark clouds. There’s something about that that makes me feel good.
Paste: I imagine it’s pretty different from your hometown.
LeBlanc: Yeah, it’s pretty different.
Paste: Tell me about Shreveport.
LeBlanc: It’s just an old run-down city. Not really—it’s not really just an old run-down city. There’s good things about it and bad things about it, like every town. We’ve got a bunch of casinos, we got a bowling alley, we got schools, and we have really good barbecue there. My family lives there. That’s good. Relatives and such.
Paste: The credits in your album insert make it seem like you have great relationships with your extended family members. There are a lot of “thank yous” to aunts and cousins.
LeBlanc: I do. I try. They practically raised me. I kind of got tossed around to each family member, so I had many people to thank. I was mostly raised by a bunch of women there. They’re insane. But I love them anyway, and they would call me crazy as well, so it’s okay.
Paste: I understand your father has been very important for you as a musical influence. Is that right?
LeBlanc: Yeah, he’s a good guy. He has been important for me musically because I got to talk to him about music and stuff like that growing up and it was really interesting.
Paste: Did you play with him a lot growing up?
LeBlanc: No, not a lot.
Paste: I understand he was a session musician in Muscle Shoals?
LeBlanc: He’s a country music songwriter. That’s what people keep getting mistaken. He did do some session work, but his job is to write songs for country music artists and get them pitched and see if they like them or not.
Paste: Did growing up around that give you an understanding of the business end of music as well as the creative end, or was his influence mostly creative?
LeBlanc: Yeah, there’s a lot of business I learned about. I definitely learned that business is business. It doesn’t matter how much you feel like family to somebody; they will take you for all you’re worth. I definitely learned that.
Paste: Did you learn that by watching your father, or have you learned that in your own experience?
LeBlanc: I definitely learned that in my own experience. You can’t tell me anything. I’m gonna do whatever I want to do most of the time. I suffer sometimes for decisions that I make, but it’s okay. I’m like any human being, I reckon.
Paste: Has the musical community that you grew up in because of your father poured into the group of people you’re working with today? Is there any cross over?
LeBlanc: It’s a new crowd. New people. I mean, I’ve known these guys that I play with now for a long time. I have pretty personal relationships with all of them, and I like to keep it that way with the people who are close to me. They’re people I can trust, and I know that I can be out on the road with for a really long time and won’t end up hating. They’re people I’ve already suffered with for a good deal of time.
Paste: Did you grow up with those guys?
LeBlanc: All of the people in the band are from Muscle Shoals.
Paste: Where is Muscle Shoals in relation to Shreveport?
LeBlanc: It’s in the Northwest corner of Alabama. Where Shreveport is in Louisiana is exactly where Muscle Shoals is in Alabama. It’s about eight and a half hours. You just drive all the way across Louisiana to Mississippi. You cut up through Tuscaloosa and straight up 43. It takes about two hours from Tuscaloosa. That’s when I know I got two hours left on the trip. That’s my favorite part of the drive, because I remember being so excited when I would finally get there. It’s a nostalgic feeling, because I used to drive back and forth a lot when I was growing up. When I finally got my car, I would leave all the time. And it was so good to get to the destination I was headed, which was mainly from Shreveport to Muscle Shoals. That last two hours, you ride through the mountains—the hills of Alabama—and it’s kinda pretty, and you get to see all the trees and stuff. I really like that.
Paste: How did you end up getting connected in Muscle Shoals from eight hours away? It’s certainly not a natural, easy transition to make, especially at such a young age.
LeBlanc: Well, like I said, my father is a country music songwriter, and they have a publishing company there called FAME, which is the Florence Alabama Music Enterprises. It’s their little publishing company and it’s an old studio where Etta James and Wilson Pickett would record. So when my father was young, he was trying to get a publishing deal because he wanted to be a songwriter. He finally got one there at FAME in Muscle Shoals, and started making a lot of money. That’s what my father did for a living, so that’s how I got connected to it. I would go up there to see him. I didn’t have anything to do all day so I would just sit there nine-to-five and watch everybody. I would sit on the couch and play my guitar and go back and into the studio and write songs.
Paste: You got an early start to songwriting—around 11 or 12 years old?
LeBlanc: Yes.
Paste: What’s the earliest song you wrote that you still play live?
LeBlanc: I don’t know. The oldest one I can remember writing is a song called “Battle,” about a family feud. Just for kicks sometimes I’ll pull that out and play it. That was one of the first songs I ever wrote.
Paste: Having written for such a long time and therefore having a lot of material to choose from, was it hard to decide what would end up on Paupers Field, or was it very clear based on what was newest? How did you make those decisions?
LeBlanc: Exactly. It was the new stuff. I felt like that was the best stuff to put on there. I mean I had songs from the catalogue that date back to when I was really young. It’s kind of funny, really. Really embarrassing. If they ever got out, I’d probably shoot myself.
Paste: What’s the most embarrassing song you’ve ever written?
LeBlanc: It was a song that I had heard in a video game. I ripped off the chorus of it. I did it on purpose. I wanted to impress my dad, so I wrote this song, and I used the same chorus of the song that was in the video game. He is a frequent video game player, so when I played it for him, he was like, “Hey man, this is the song that’s in that video game.” I was so humiliated. That was pretty embarrassing. I learned my lesson.
Paste: I read in your interview with Details magazine that one of the things that you love most is just to hear peoples’ stories—”to listen to people and hear them talk.” Does a lot of the material for your songs flow out of others’ real life stories?
LeBlanc: I think I just take a little bit of everything with me. Every songwriter is like a sponge. He is constantly observing everything that’s going on around him, trying to be aware of little things. I could make up someone’s life in my own head—like a woman that walks out of the grocery store with her child in her hand, I could map her life out in five minutes to what I think it would be. I’ve done that a lot before, and then written a song based on my idea of what somebody is. I guess that’s wrong. I guess that’s a bad thing to do, in a way.
Paste: Well, that’s like fiction writing, isn’t it?
LeBlanc: Yeah, I think so. I think it’s like fiction. And then I put a little bit of my own experience into it, to try to keep it true to myself.
Paste: As you’re taking in peoples’ stories, do you do that as a quiet observer, sitting in a room and listening to someone talk and just taking it in, or are you somebody who is proactively drawing that out of people by asking questions and being attentive to their answers?
LeBlanc: It depends on who the person is. I’m really not into people that I don’t know. It’s really hard for me to talk to people. But the people that I do know, I do have proactive conversations. I like to try to drag certain feelings out of my drummer, or drag certain feelings out of my friend, like Jesse, my bass player. I want to know if people feel like I do. I know that they do, but I always want to know to what degree. I want to know how deep a person thinks. Because I can get so deep into my own thoughts that I feel like I am going insane. It’s really kind of scary in there. It’s frightening, and I try to stay out of it as long as I can. But when I do go into that spot, I need somebody to pull me back out. So I do dig with the people that know. But not with people I don’t know. People that I’m not comfortable with, I just sit back and observe them. I’m trying to see the beauty in everybody, to see the most wonderful things that I could possibly see in anybody.
Paste: Does that come naturally to you? Are you someone for whom it’s easy to see the better in people rather than the worse, or is that something that at this point in your life you’re trying to be intentional about?
LeBlanc: I’m definitely, um…
Paste: Maybe that comes down to optimism and pessimism.
LeBlanc: Yeah. I’m a very optimistic kind of person, but in a really offshoot kind of way. I don’t know how to explain it.
Paste: It’s more complicated than, “Just an optimist”?
LeBlanc: Yeah. I do intentionally try to see the best in people.
Paste: You mentioned earlier that sometimes you’ll make up someone’s story—that there’s a lot of fiction in your writing. Can you talk about a specific song on Paupers Field, and point to some of those elements of fact and fiction?
LeBlanc: I’m not going to get completely deep into it, no, but I will tell you a bit about it. Take “Emma Hartley,” for example. It’s a fictional take on a man that I knew who was struggling with addiction. He happened to also love a woman, but he couldn’t pull away from the addiction long enough for her to stay. That song is about his love affair between the two. That’s kind of a fictional thing but also very true to life and the things that I’m familiar with.
Paste: Given what you mentioned about how it’s not super easy for you to talk to people that you don’t know very well, has traveling been exhausting or energizing to you?
LeBlanc: Just trying to be really kind and polite, and not seem fake about it, that’s been kind of hard. When people come out to my show and support me live, no matter what kind of mood I’m in, I always try to be professional and thank them and make them feel like they were wanted there and that I really appreciate them, because I do. But yes, that gets exhausting every now and then. But it’s real important, I think, so I try to do that when I can.
Paste: One of the most common things that critics are saying about Paupers Field, and that I hear in your music too, is that your artistic voice sounds “weathered” and “wise beyond its years.”
LeBlanc: I just wish people could step into my life, and could’ve seen my life growing up. That’s the only way they could ever understand. It’s so hard and it’s so ugly. It’s so nice when people say good things, but then again it’s so ugly for people to say things that they don’t know about first-hand because they were not there to witness it. You have to take into consideration all of somebody.
Paste: Do you feel wise beyond your years, or when you hear that comment, do you think, “Hey, whoa, I’m only 20.”
LeBlanc: I mean, I definitely think that I’m smarter than everybody on this planet—No I’m just teasing. But I do get surprised often when I meet older people and I realize how unintelligent they are. I do feel old. But you could call that teenage angst, as well. I could get stuck with all of those stereotypes. But, when you spend a lot of time alone digging deep into your thoughts and experimenting just how far you can push yourself and push your mind, I think that makes anybody intelligent. Self-education is something that I’ve become really, really good at. That’s the best education you could ever get.
Paste: Does that all come from within, or do you read a lot and take in a lot from external sources as well?
LeBlanc: It’s 50-50. If there is something that I absolutely need to know about that I do not know anything about, I’ll pick up a book and read about it. Emotions are like potential energy. Say you have a necklace that you wear around your neck, and you take that necklace and you hold it at a 90-degree angle. It doesn’t matter how long you hold it there, it’s going to have potential energy. When you finally let it go, it’s going to swing at exactly the same height as you let it go at. Your emotions are the same way. That was a kind of interesting thing I learned. It’s just basic psychology. You can figure it all out on your own if you think hard enough.
Paste: But that’s something that you’ve been learning about through reading?
LeBlanc: No, I mean, I already had a pretty good grasp on it. What I’m saying is that if you think about things long enough or hard enough, you’ll eventually figure it out, and you’ll eventually find out that it’s true. You can do it by yourself. Everything I read in books it’s like, “well, I already know that.” That’s why sometimes I feel like I can’t get help from people, because they just keep tellin’ me things that I already know or that I already cleared up in my head ten years ago. I don’t know. That sounds really self-centered. I’m not a self-centered person, I don’t think. Maybe I think too hard sometimes.
Paste: Are you writing anything now, or just focusing on promoting and playing?
LeBlanc: We started doing some new songs in our set on this tour. We’ve been working up new material, and yeah, I’ve been writing a lot lately. I took a break for a six-month period, knock on wood, where I couldn’t really write anything and it was scaring me a bit. I think that was time for me to gather my thoughts and try to write something new.
Paste: It’s great that during a season of intense touring and promoting, you are also able to write.
LeBlanc: It’s not constant or anything—I’m not going to sit here and lie and tell you I’m completely prolific or anything, but I definitely have been getting two or three out every couple of weeks or so.
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