The very day Yelawolf was born, his teenage mother strapped
him into a stroller and rolled him around the mall. The first week of his life,
she took him to house parties, and by the time he left high school, the family
had roamed to so many towns that Yelawolf had attended 15 different schools. “I
really never ever stopped moving,” he says while driving around Nashville, his
home of the past three years. “That’s my life story in a nutshell.”
With his latest release, Love Story, perhaps he can finally
downshift. Since 2010’s Trunk Muzik, his career has been on the fast track. His
appearance—his tattoos include a catfish swimming down his forearm and “Heart
of Dixie” stamped on his stomach—and raps about Appalachian meth dealers
might’ve made him a novelty act. But his rapid-fire delivery and intense live
show ensured no one considered him a joke. As Pitchfork marvelled, “Yelawolf is
a powerful new rap voice, one that draws from all over the map without sounding
much like anyone else.” Interscope Records agreed and within three months, he
had a major label deal. Later that year, the tape was re-released as Trunk
Muzik 0-60, and Rolling Stone praised him as “an MC whose liquid flow breathes
life into genre clichés.” In January 2011, he signed to Eminem’s Shady Records,
and his fan base grew even more rabid. Yet Wolf wasn’t satisfied. “The mullet
and Three 6 Mafia. How do you make that work?” he says. “What I’ve always been
trying to do is figure out how to make that into a good mixture of music.”
Yelawolf was born Michael Wayne Atha in Gadsden, Alabama,
where his two musical loves grew organically. His mom dated a sound engineer,
and Wolf remembers being onstage at age six with Dwight Yoakam, and Run DMC
coming by his house to party after their local show when he was seven. “I woke
up in this trailer park and figured out what was ironic about who I was and
where I was from wasn’t that what I was experiencing was new. It was just that
I recognized the extreme of it,” he says.
After being homeless in Berkeley and working on a ship off
the coast of Washington state, Yelawolf landed back in the South and started
making mixtapes. He was purposefully rowdy, wearing head-to-toe deer hunting
camouflage and gold teeth. In Atlanta, Wolf and his friend Malay (the producer
who later won a Grammy for Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange) started a “futuristic
country hip-hop rock band” that included both a DJ and a black fiddle player.
Their self-described “arena rap” became popular in Atlanta, pulling huge crowds
as well as the attention of Lil Wayne and L.A. Reid. But their idea was ahead
of its time and fizzled.
Wolf was poor, and his now ex-girlfriend and their child
were still living in Gadsden. Running out of options, he returned to Alabama
with producer WLPWR. “We got an 8-track recorder in the back of this shitty
house in this factory neighborhood worthy of any Harmony Korine film, and we
wrote Trunk Muzik front to back,” he says. He hustled back to Atlanta to record
it, and the tape that set his career ablaze and resulted in his working with
legends like Bun B and Big Boi was completed in all of a week and a half. “I
became that shit. I saw the power in it. [And] I felt fulfilled,” he admits.
“But I always knew, ‘Wait ‘till they hear the shit I did with Malay.’”
At long last, they’re listening, and the response is as
positive as he always believed it would be. Recorded entirely in Nashville’s
Blackbird Studios and executively produced by Eminem, his passion
project—fittingly titled Love Story—is a rootsy, country-tinged rock album
brimming with strong lyricism. Finally, he’s struck the right balance. “I’m not
reinventing the wheel. It’s nothing Kid Rock hasn’t done,” he says. “But what
is new is my deep appreciation for lyricism in hip hop, [my desire] to be a
great lyricist. And a deep appreciation for outlaw country, for raw classic
rock. I started to learn how to blend concepts together.”
Indeed he did. The album’s first single, “Till It’s Gone,”
is a driving barn burner of a song elevated by Wolf’s melodically sung hook.
Radio friendly without sacrificing its soul, it’s an undeniable smash that’s in
line with the country’s recent obsession with the culture of rural American
life. In fact, “Till It’s Gone” premiered last September on the wildly popular
FX drama Sons of Anarchy. “It might be simple, but when I decided to put down
sneakers and throw on some boots … it feels like I've come full circle ...
riding Harleys with my Dad ... it all makes sense, ” he says. A smile enters
his voice. “It’s the biggest exhale.”
* On 8 August 2016 American Hip Hop artist Yelawolf will be
performing at The Assembly (supported by P.H.Fat).
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