On a recent Wednesday evening, Waylon Payne stood on the modest stage at East Nashville honky-tonk Skinny Dennis, backed by a four-piece band. Dressed in a rhinestone-dotted Western shirt and worn-in jeans, the Nashville-based singer-songwriter explained that the next song he was set to perform was born of a self-conscious effort to be more well-read. “I walked into Half Price Books and bought Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, and a book by Ralph Waldo Emerson,” he said, cradling his acoustic guitar like a newborn. “Then I did the classic songwriter thing where I opened it up to a random page and pointed.”
As the story went, Payne’s index finger landed on an immortal line from Emerson’s transcendentalist essay “Circles,” published in 1841: “I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.”
“So I stole it,” Payne confessed. “And I wrote this.”
“Weed by the Wall” is the last song on Payne’s new album Wayward, which came out in July via Big Loud Texas, but it’s one of its most evocative. It has an outlaw country sensibility that blends the singer’s reedy vocals with clever wordplay, an earthen melody, and classic instrumentation. It’s also decidedly nontraditional, threaded with atmospheric wisps of pedal steel guitar and built upon structural experimentation.
I am a freight train
Forged out of steel
I am a highway rolling west in the morning
My hands on the wheel
I am a full-grown man
I stand alone
And I sacrifice nothing for the sake of the cause
I am God in nature
I am a weed by the wall.
There is an evident tenderness in “Weed by the Wall,” as well as a strong defiance, the two things that most often surface when broadcasting flaws, thievery, and all. Like Payne himself, “Weed by the Wall” demonstrates a great reverence for country music while also pushing the boundaries of the genre. It is both new and classic, expansive and intimate.
