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Ward Hayden & The Outliers put country spin on Springsteen songs
When Ward Hayden & The Outliers were driving across the Midwest on a tour, they decided to kill time in the van by looking into Aaron Lewis, one of their few Massachusetts country music peers. They found an interview where Lewis, who also fronts the hard rock band Staind, discussed his 2021 chart topper “Am I the Only One.” The song complains about “another statue comin’ down” before asking “Am I the only one who quit singin' along/ Every time they play a Springsteen song?”
Hayden said he felt Lewis was doing “an absolute disservice to his audience” in urging them to abandon the music of Bruce Springsteen, even if they disagreed with the Boss’ left-wing politics. Springsteen, said Hayden, “embodies the American dream. He took an idea and made something special and important. … These are songs that have been there for a lot of people.”
Originally, The Outliers planned on making a two-sided single of Springsteen covers, but once they started, they realized there was no shortage of Springsteen songs that lend themselves to the band’s sound. Last month, they released a collection of eight Springsteen songs called “Little by Little,” and later this year, there will be another volume called “Piece by Piece.” Judging by the first release, the project proves that the words and music of Springsteen can appeal to anyone who likes a soulful story in the form of a country song.
The album titles come from a lyric in Springsteen’s “Racing in the Street,” one of the songs that The Outliers didn’t record. Also missing: “Born in the U.S.A.” And while there are some true obscurities, there’s at least one song that even the most casual Springsteen fan will know: A somber version of "Dancing in the Dark."
“[Springsteen] does a trick that a lot of country music does, which is to take a heavy topic and make it joyful, make it so you can dance to it,” said Outliers bassist Greg Hall, who co-produced the record. Hall noted that while the song’s video featured Springsteen dancing with a then-unknown Courtney Cox, when The Outliers dug into it, they found “a song about desperation, about fighting blindly, but still persevering and moving forward.”
When Hayden, Hall and engineer David DeLuca gathered at The Record Co. in Boston to discuss the album, the paucity of hit country covers of Springsteen songs came up, even though Springsteen is a roots-rocker who is the ultimate musical champion of working-class America.
Regardless of whether a Springsteen song was famous or not, Hall said the band realized that they’d have to figure out whether a song was a match for their twangy Americana style. “You can't outboss the Boss! We knew that if we were going to do any of his songs, we’d have to process them through us.”
One of the obscurities is “County Fair,” an early 1980s outtake so rarely heard that when Hayden first nervously sang it at a gig in Maine, someone in the audience yelled out, “That’s not a Springsteen song!” (Hayden laughs that the episode caused him to “question everything in life at that moment.” The heckler has yet to resurface at any subsequent Outliers shows.)
DeLuca realized that while Springsteen and his E Street Band may have frequently cited the 1960s Wall of Sound as a production inspiration, less would be more for the Outliers, even when they added the textures of lap steel guitarist Sam Crawford and guest collaborator fiddler Jason Anick.
“Recording and mixing is not like painting, where you just add more things. It's more like sculpture, where sometimes taking away things works better,” he said. “So it was about stripping away the instrumental pieces that didn’t need to be there … and letting them all come together as a crescendo near the end.”
Ward Hayden & The Outliers mostly write and perform original music. Back when they were known as Girls, Guns and Glory, the band released a live album of Hank Williams Sr. songs, and the group still does an annual tribute to Williams around the anniversary of his New Year’s Day death.
While the world that Hank Williams lived in and sang about in the 1940s and ‘50s has largely disappeared, Springsteen’s chronicles of the glories and struggles of small-town, working-class America are as culturally and politically relevant as ever. Hayden, a Scituate native, and Hall, who hails from Brockton, say they see a lot of similarity between how the South Shore’s fishing and manufacturing industries have declined and the Ohio steel mills that Springsteen wrote about in “Youngstown,” another song on the record.
Even as Nashville has largely ignored Springsteen, his spare album “Nebraska” has become a foundation of modern folk. Another Boston-raised artist, Aoife O’Donovan, covered the entire album. The Outliers give the track “Used Cars” a fresh coat of country paint. “It’s a story song,” said Hayden, “and we just put a country soundtrack to the story.”
Ward Hayden & The Outliers celebrate the release of “Little by Little” on May 22 and May 23 at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge.
