Texas singer/songwriter Jack Barksdale has had a busy week. On Monday, the estate of Guy Clark announced the formation of Truly Handmade Records as a “home for songwriters’ that will be releasing an album with Jack in early 2025—his new EP Out of Order is available today (September 13, 2024)
“Guy Clark and his music have played a significant part in forming what I admire and strive for as a songwriter. To be a part of Truly Handmade and Guy’s ongoing legacy is an honor,” said Barksdale.
“Each song on the new EP has its own identity, but strangely, in a mystical way, they come together and work beautifully with one another,” singer-songwriter Jack Barksdale describes the variety of songs on Out of Order. “They all use different writing styles, genres, sounds, and have a particular uneasy, sometimes chaotic core, although they’re all (at least vaguely) about the world and humanity and all the nuances and hardships that naturally go along.”
“I’ve started to appreciate piano playing because the three artists I’ve discovered most recently — Tom Waits, Randy Newman, and Terry Allen — are all piano players. I don’t have a piano of my own yet, or know more than a few basic chords, but I’ve fallen in love with trying to imitate piano on guitar. So many of the songs I’ve been writing lately have come from that, including ‘Law and Order’ and ‘Insanity Defense Exhibit A’ on this EP.”
Newman and Allen’s flair for dark comedy also made a profound impression on Barksdale. “I wrote ‘Law and Order’ just a matter of days after I started listening to Randy Newman — especially stuff like his ‘Political Science’ song,” he says. “I was doing this writing exercise with the prompt word ‘law,’ and thought it would be fun to go in sort of a philosophical direction, just thinking about how absurd it is that humans have developed to a point where they need law and order just to restrain themselves from themselves.”
Fittingly, in the freewheeling “Insanity Defense,” Barksdale disregards restraint almost entirely, channeling Terry Allen at his most devilishly chaotic. “I fell in love with his abandonment of structure in many of his songs, and I leaned into that heavily on ‘Insanity Defense.’ That song came straight from my stream of consciousness, and I don’t think I ever even went back and edited it much.”
Barksdale co-wrote “Freak Show” with Alabama songwriter Matt Prater, once again with a clear sense of mayhem cooked into the mix. “Matt and I have this other friend, Abe Partridge, who has a couple of songs with this cool, chaotic energy to them, and we both wanted to write something rough around the edges like that. I’m delighted with how the song’s musical elements turned out.”
Lastly, there’s the ominous “Dead Man Walking,” something of an anomaly here only because Barksdale says he has no idea where the idea came from — certainly not, he admits, from first-hand experience. But the track’s spooky, slightly off-kilter vibe and lyrics fit right in with the rest of the EP, perfectly capturing the sound Barksdale sought when he decided to work again with producer Mark Edgar Stuart.
“Songs this good make it easy to produce. Recorded inside an old, battered mansion once owned by southern novelist Shelby Foote, we shared the space with ghosts,” describes Stuart, “Being an old soul, wise beyond his years, Jack was pretty much at home.”
Out of Order is available digitally today (September 13, 2024). Barksdale’s Truly Handmade Records debut via Guy Clark LLC is set for an early 2025 release. It will follow his 2022 full-length debut, Death Of A Hummingbird, and the recent EP Out Of Order and a pair of Tom Waits covers he collaborated with Canadian singer/songwriter Lindi Ortega.