Nearly a decade after the release of his 2016 album Swimmin’ Pools, Movie Stars, and four decades after he turned the Nashville establishment on its head with his distinct brand of West coast honky-tonk, punk and rockabilly, Dwight Yoakam isn’t erecting creative boundaries anytime soon.
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His new album Brighter Days, out Friday (Nov. 15), was forged by years of life shifts, both personal and professional, and finds him moving ahead musically with a new set of inspirations. In March 2020, he wed photographer Emily Joyce and in August of that year, the couple welcomed their first child, son Dalton Loren. Meanwhile, like the rest of the world, Yoakam and his family weathered the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
His devotion to family is threaded through songs on the album, including the realistically romantic “I Spell Love,” and the title track “Brighter Days,” which developed from a tender moment with his son Dalton, whom Yoakam gave a co-writing credit on the song.
“He had a little Fender Telecaster-shaped ukulele he would wear,” Yoakam recalls. “He came bouncing in the room one day and said, ‘Get your guitar.’ I picked it up and he would attempt to answer what I would play and I looked at him and said, ‘You know what? The future is you,’ and I started singing ‘Brighter Days,’ and he kind of sang it back to me. I came up with the first verse just watching him and singing and having him sing back to me.”
The new album also comes after Yoakam parted ways with Warner Records, instead releasing the album on his own label Via Records, in partnership with Thirty Tigers.
“Everything had changed at Warner Brothers where I’d been the last couple of studio albums and we were kind of in flux,” Yoakam tells Billboard. “I left and wasn’t sure where we were going to do the next record. After the chaos of 2020 and 2021, David [Macias] at Thirty Tigers approached me and said, ‘Would you be interested in doing a record here?’ And I said yes.”
Brighter Days also finds Yoakam with more co-writing credits on the project, unlike many previous albums which have featured mostly his solo writes. As the world was still reeling from the pandemic, Yoakam found himself collaborating with California native and fellow hit country songwriter Jeffrey Steele (“What Hurts the Most,” “These Days”) on Zoom co-writes, ultimately crafting six of the album’s songs together, including “California Sky” and “I’ll Pay the Price.”
“I don’t co-write a lot. The first one was a very auspicious beginning, with Roger Miller in 1990. Most albums, probably 70% or 80% is my own solo writing,” Yoakam says, adding, “We had such fun discussing [Steele’s] relationship to all things California music. He was raised in the Valley and his dad owned a garage blocks away from the famous Palomino Club, so he grew up in the shadow of that. ’I’ll Pay the Price’ was a bit of an homage to the late ‘60s, early ‘70s when Linda Ronstadt put her first band together.”
The project wraps in covers of Cake’s “Bound Away,” “Time Between” from the Byrds, and The Carter Family staple “Keep on the Sunny Side.”
“If you think about what brought California’s version of country music, it was the Dust Bowl. It was another mass event in the 1930s and it drove hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people to relocate to California from the Great Plains. And the Great Depression, so you had two events, driving this displacement of large segments of our society to California and they brought their version of their colloquial musical expressions…It’s a winding story, but all of these tracks are connected in various ways,” he says.
His willingness to filter a range of sounds and inspirations through his own musical lens is what led Yoakam to his breakthrough in the mid-1980s. He first tried his luck in Nashville, coming up against roadblocks due to his retro-progressive musical style. He decamped to California, refining his music and further soaking in the influence of Bakersfield and Buck Owens. In 1984, Yoakam independent project Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. caught the attention of label execs, and he signed with Reprise Records. He re-released the project, earning acclaim with songs including a super-charged version of Johnny Horton’s “Honky-Tonk Man,” as well as the project’s title track.
Subsequent albums would yield success including top 10 Billboard Hot Country Songs hits with “Little Sister,” and “Please, Please Baby.” Three of his albums, 1986’s Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc., 1987’s Hillbilly Deluxe and 1988’s Buenas Noches From a Lonely Room, reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart. The two-time Grammy Award winner was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019.
Yoakam finished recording Brighter Days in 2023. Just as he and his team were gearing up for its release, Yoakam got an unexpected invitation from Teas native Post Malone, known for his swirl of pop songs such as 2019’s “Circles” and “Sunflower,” to collaborate.
When they were planning their collaboration performance of Yoakam’s “Little Ways” during the Stagecoach country music festival earlier this year, Post Malone asked if he could join Yoakam on his album. Yoakam and Post Malone’s friendship stretches back to 2018, when Post Malone joined Yoakam for an episode of Yoakam’s SiriusXM Greater Bakersfield show, where they performed songs including Merle Haggard’s “The Bottle Let Me Down.”
“I had literally just finished the album a week and a half earlier, and I was unaware that he had done the F-1 Trillion album at that time,” Yoakam says. “I knew he was doing stage shows and I knew something was afoot about duets he was doing, but I didn’t know how extensively what it was all about.”
Yoakam had already been toying with a song idea, and quickly wrote the Western swing- soaked “I Don’t Know How to Say Goodbye (Bang Bang Boom Boom),” and adjusted the album’s releases schedule to accommodate the Posty collaboration. It turns out Post Malone was working on not only his country-leaning F-1 Trillion, but collaborating with another superstar.
“We delayed the release of the album by about six months,” Yoakam says. “I didn’t realize Post came in [to record his vocal] between days of shooting the video he did with Taylor Swift [“Fortnight”] . We rescheduled the album release because we decided it was something we wanted to put on the album.”
Outside of music, Yoakam is known for a plethora of creative pursuits, notably his film and television career, which has included roles in Sling Blade and Wedding Crashers. His Sling Blade co-star Billy Bob Thornton “has agreed to work on a series I wrote, called ‘A Thousand Miles From Nowhere’ — it’s not about the song, though it sort of is. It’s a period piece that takes place in the 1870s. So that’s afoot, and there are a couple of film roles I’ve been approached about that we are seeing if they make sense to do.”
But currently, as evidenced by Brighter Days, Yoakam has set about crafting an album for those seeking an emotional uplift, as he was when he wrote the title track.
“I thought, ‘When the fog of all this rises, brightness is what we’re hoping for — the brighter days,” Yoakam says.
