It was the night before Jesse Welles was supposed to come down to Macon, Georgia, to meet with Marcus King. Deep in the weeds of making his sixth LP, “Darling Blue,” which was already shaping up to be a dazzling display of the Carolinian back in homeostasis, King was keen to keep his antennas up even while nestled in familiar turf. He was collecting roots-music risers from around the country, employing tools and tricks he picked up from the prod-god himself, Rick Rubin, while working on his last record, doing everything he could to re-center focus at the in both sight and sound for what was set to be a sonic homecoming. The only issue was that King had failed to put pen to paper, with twelve hours and counting until his next guest, who had never participated in a formal co-write to date, was set to arrive. In fact, the page hadn’t seen a drop of ink.
Naturally, he continued to procrastinate as the ticking of the clock grew louder. King threw on “The Silence of the Lambs” as a form of morbid relaxation, watching in awe as Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster bounced ideas of transience and its relationship to identity off one another, but what really struck him was one moment in particular. It’s the scene where Foster’s Clarice Starling stands shocked when Hannibal Lecter, the dictionary definition of evil, is revealed to have drawn an ornate, down-to-the-cracks accurate sketch of the Duomo in Florence, Italy. As to Lecter’s explanation, it’s almost too simple to reveal anything sinister. “Memory Agent Starling, is what I have instead of a view,” the killer says from behind a glass wall, enclosed by three more made of stone. It was all King needed to take into the studio with him the next day.
“That’s all it took for us to jump off,” King said. “All you need is like four or five words sometimes, and you can build something around it.”
The phrase eventually revealed itself to be “Somebody Else,” a personal favorite of King’s on the backend of “Darling Blue” as a track inundated with an identity crisis. Losing conviction with age, or relying too much on the blinders, seem to be his two biggest concerns at this point in his career. After a deliberate rejuvenation in the cavernous, carved-out spaces his “Mood Swings” record lived in, he made it a point to fill those gaps with something productive. Luckily for King, sometimes it only takes a few building blocks to craft a fully realized skyscraper of a song.
But he doesn’t just sit around perusing Netflix, waiting for inspiration to strike. Sometimes, it’s in the mundane —a shower thought turned sonnet or a crease in folded laundry — that may get his wheels turning. A lot of times, his stimulus is found off the couch, and in fact requires a bit of searching and even a recollection of the reverence he felt for the art form at the beginning of the career he’d been building since he was barely able to walk. “Sometimes to get into that creative mindset, I’ll go and speak,” King said. “I’ll donate time at a student center like LAAMP out in LA, or the Fine Arts Center in Greenville, South Carolina, and be able to see young people excited by music and just borrow some of that energy and get into a creative place.”
It’s not by accident that the Greenville native, taking notes in college classrooms and bouncing one-liners off of friends, sounds more carefree in his most recent effort than he has in years. “Mood Swings” was an almost two-year, two-man labor of love with himself and Rick Rubin, wherein King entered his own Lector-esque rendition of a sensory deprivation tank. Like most records that come with a credit from the biggest beard in the industry, the process was taxing, if not rewarding, in the payoff when it came time to move forward in a career defined by crowd-pleasers and rousers for the fans in the rafters.
“A major thing I took away from working with Rick is just abandoning the idea of music at all being any form of commerce,” King said. “Just allow it to be art and create it for yourself. There’s a lot of ins and outs to Rick’s philosophies, and some are easier said than done. He’s really helped me tear down the ideas of what makes a good song or how to write, and just kind of brought me back to just making art that heals me and just having faith that the audience will follow suit.”
The process wasn’t any easier when he paired up with Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach for “El Dorado” and “Youngblood,” who’s notorious for running a tight ship with in-house studio musicians hailing from the leather-rock circles he’s become an ambassador of. While there’s plenty of honor to be had in rubbing shoulders with giants, it was time for King to make a record on his own terms. The result is weightless, and the procedure picked up some of its former flexibility.
“I never really have had a set structure, per se,” King said. “I guess the closest thing to it would just be assembling a lot of little ideas and then forcing myself into a quiet place to kind of piece them all together.”
In the spirit of surrounding himself with more mellowed out collaborators, he employed the booth brains of Eddie Spear, the captain of several of the most sturdy sounding ships in country music, and famously one of the only producers Zach Bryan agreed to work with coming out of his ‘voice memo in a soundproofed hotel room’ phase. Spear and King had been casually acquainted over the years, with the now-producer being an engineer under Dave Cobb while King was working on “Carolina Confessions.” “[Eddie] would even step in on days when Dave couldn’t be there toward the end of those sessions, and we just really became very close with Eddie and had a great rapport with him,” King explains. The pairing, rounding the road all these years later, as King refocused his sights on a more pastoral point of view, felt like kismet.
“We immediately became excited,” King said. “We started stoking each other’s fire, lighting the fire under the idea of going down to Macon, cutting this record, and he was so excited to do the lab work necessary to make that happen.”
Part of that giddiness came from knowing that he had the foundation firmly in the ground, and the rest of the house could be contorted to fit bonus rooms and additions on a whim. Even as King inched closer to the institution of Nashville itself, he still felt like his black sheep reputation was giving him an edge, even in formal settings. “I’ll go work with writers like Hillary Lindsey or Johnathan Singleton, these massively successful songwriters, because when I show up, they know that they can get away with breaking the rules,” King said. In other instances, his more formal training works wonders, like with a run-and-gun writer like Welles, who had kept his process pretty insulated up until his business trip down to Macon. “In that situation, I was the one who had any semblance of structure, which was kind of a bizarre experience for me. But it’s fun, that collaborative element is really important to me, and sometimes you find really neat ideas when you let people take their hair down.”
A lot of “Darling Blue” feels and sounds like a group project in the splashiest of senses. There’s the signature, undefined flair of Southern steadiness that King uses to flit between the blues, soul, and down the middle cowboy crooners, all with the flick of a guitar pick. Part of that variety came with a comfort level in the record’s cast of characters. Kaitlin Butts was a longtime friend recommended by his wife, Briley. King’s wedding officiant, Jamey Johnson, has been a mentor figure since King first showed promise, and Noah Cyrus was almost a no-brainer, according to King, who had been admiring her talent for a few years now. Almost everyone came into town not only to record but also to create, as part of what King referred to as his “form to table” method for crafting a narrative around the album as a whole.
The process wasn’t strictly business, King explains. The studio walls were constantly illuminated with films of a unique, aesthetically succinct variety to get every visitor on the same page, vibe-wise. King cites Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, The Big Lebowski, “obviously,” he adds, Giant with James Dean, and even employed the help of a shared playlist between him and Spear. “That ranged from the Kinks to Waylon Jennings, like that mid to late 70’s period Waylon or Johnny Paycheck that was really kind of funky. There was a lot of backbeat to those records that I thought was really cool.”
The audiobook for East of Eden could also be heard playing when demos weren’t running. “I was really inspired by Steinbeck and his approach, and the first song that I wrote after reading [East of Eden] was ‘Carry Me Home,’ and I just wanted to try to write about the Blue Ridge Mountains in a Steinbeck-esque way. That kind of led us to the overarching theme of the record about feeling, and home, and a love letter to the mountains and to my wife that makes them feel like I’m at home.”
“Darling Blue” is a lot of things, but it is undoubtedly a record about recalibration and productive retreat in the face of tumultuous times. The first major project in seven years to have his touring band back in the studio with him, under the guise of a producer who knew how to play to his artist’s strengths, paired up with some of the finest and friendliest acts in the business, all while ingesting expressions of hearth and homestead. Humbly, King credits his wife and muse, Briley, for figuring out the hard part of that otherwise easy equation for him. Thankfully, there was no need to muster up a painstaking pre-write this time around; the inspiration was clasped in a gold band on his left hand.
“When I met her, I just felt like I’d seen the light, as people say,” King said. “And I just found a reason to keep living. And you’ve got to be able to want to live for yourself, but in finding her, she kind of helped me along that path.”
For now, King has his guard down and is keeping his friends close. He’s already setting up more collaborations with like-minded talents, continuing to cement his spellbinding stage presence with his touring band of fifteen years, all while continuously seeking solace in friends, neighbors, and Briley. “I love having company come over,” King said. “Seeing how other people’s brains work, it just beautifully disrupts the day, which I love. I like to chase an idea and see where the day goes.”
