Gary Louris in Conversation with Mark Erelli

You probably know Gary Louris as the leader of The Jayhawks – or as they refer to themselves, “a band from Minnesota.” The Jayhawks are pioneers of roots rock, alt-country, and Americana. Whatever you wanna call it, they’ve been making records where rock, pop, country, and other forms of American roots music overlap since the mid-1980s.

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But Louris’s hidden superpower is that he’s kind of like a musical Swiss Army knife – he’s basically got a creative skill for any application. Want him and his band to serve as accompanists for some of the most distinctive singer-songwriters, like Wesley Stage and Joe Henry? He can do that. Looking for achingly-perfect, near-fraternal harmonies on hit songs like Counting Crows’ “Mr. Jones”? He can (and did) do that. If you’re the Tedeschi Trucks Band or The Chicks and you’re looking for someone to write you some catchy, melodic, roots-pop songs? Gary’s your guy. If that’s not enough, he has also produced records for artists like Dar Williams, The Sadies, and The Jayhawks, too. Whatever your musical need may be, chances are that Gary Louris can do it.

In between all these varied musical roles, Louris has also found time to release several solo albums, the newest of which – ‘Dark Country’ – was released earlier this month. He recorded it mostly solo in his home studio and the word on the street is that this collection of songs, inspired by his wife, is his most intimate and romantic album yet. I’ve been a big fan of Gary Louris for basically my entire adult life and enjoyed our wide-ranging Basic Folk conversation, touching on the way technical limitations can shape an artist’s style, what he’s learned from a career’s-worth of collaborations, his process working on his new solo album, the relationship between versatility and longevity, and what the influence of romance on his songwriting looks like now, in the fifth decade of his music career.