Marty Stuart has been called country’s keeper of the flame so often it’s practically a subtitle. But on 2017’s Way Out West, he took that torch and ran it straight into the desert night. The album sounds like Buck Owens on peyote, Marty Robbins beamed in from the Mojave, surf guitars echoing off ghost towns. It’s a country record, yes—but it’s also a cosmic postcard from a man who never really left the American West in his imagination.
“Cowboy music,” he calls it at first. But then his eyes light up. “The more I thought about Way Out West, the more I realized it could be psychedelic. Flying saucers, Mojave Desert, seeing things upside down and inside out. It started with one song—‘Old Mexico’—but it became a love letter to the American West and everything that inspired me there.”
Stuart’s fascination with the West goes back to his childhood in Mississippi. “The first record I remember was Johnny Cash’s ‘Don’t Take Your Guns to Town.’ It transported me from my bedroom straight out west. Then all those TV shows—Gunsmoke, Have Gun – Will Travel, Wanted: Dead or Alive. California was a dreamland: surf songs, go-go dancers, the Batmobile, Lily Munster. By the time I finally got to see the West, I was floored.”
It’s why Way Out West can veer from desert rock to twangy instrumentals without ever feeling forced. “If you listen to Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, or Merle Haggard and the Strangers, what they were doing instrumentally wasn’t far from The Ventures or Duane Eddy,” Stuart says. “It was all twang-based instrumentals. Surf rock and desert rock are kissing cousins.”
The album’s title track is pure hallucinatory coyote-spirit territory, and Stuart admits it sort of wrote itself. “We’d just left Southern California. I’d asked Mike Campbell to produce—because I knew it couldn’t be recorded in Nashville—and on the bus to Idaho I started writing the words on a little Martin guitar. I thought, ‘This is nuts.’ I took a nap, woke up, wrote another verse. Played it for the band at soundcheck. Our sound man hit record. That became the song. I have no idea where it came from. That’s the folklore of the West.”
Campbell, of course, is the longtime Heartbreakers guitarist and co-architect of Tom Petty’s catalog. Stuart defers to him. “There’s a reason he’s in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and I’m not. We met back in 1996 when Johnny Cash was cutting Unchained with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Rick Rubin had asked John to do ‘Rusty Cage.’ He didn’t like it. Rick asked me and Mike to stay after the session and work it up. Two guitars, talking the words into a mic, trying to find an arrangement John would see into. That’s where our guitar friendship started.”
Way Out West landed in a fraught moment politically, with Native issues back in headlines over Standing Rock. Stuart says the timing wasn’t calculated but the connection is always there. “I’ve been going to Pine Ridge since the early ’80s. Me and Connie got married there. The Lakota people are like family to me. It’s one more chapter of them being overlooked and run over. They need all the friends they can get—and they have one in me. I can’t fix anything, but I can play music that waves the flag for them from time to time.”
That’s Way Out West in a nutshell: a record about landscapes, both physical and moral. It celebrates the mythic West even as it honors the people who were here before the myth. It’s twang and tremolo, but also ghosts and memory. Stuart laughs thinking about how surreal it all is. “There’s a Simpsons episode where Johnny Cash is the voice of a coyote spirit on a desert trip. I may have just written the soundtrack for that episode.”
Listen to the full interview above and check out the video to the title track below.
