Levi Foster

Levi Foster writes country songs about a sweating Elvis in New Orleans and sushi bought at a Circle K, and he will not tell you what they are about first.

He came into the McBastard Studio for a Salty's Live Music session and played before the interview, including Circle K Sushi, a song he has not recorded yet. It is already an anthem in Wiener, Arkansas, where he duck hunts every year with a friend's family. Brad heard it once, told him to release it and offered to print shirts with the royalties going back to him. It was Foster's first time playing Atlanta at all. He was on at Eddie's Attic the following night, with tickets left.

His father played old country and bluegrass around the house, so Foster was listening to Merle Haggard and Marty Robbins at two or three years old and assumed for a while that was the only music that existed. Growing up in Virginia he went to bluegrass festivals and pushed into the jam circles to pick up songs about trains and murder that none of his classmates knew. Roger Miller gave him the other half of it, the comic side, or at least the clever side. When he writes now he stops listening to anything, so nothing leaks in. He works in story songs, which is why the trend of captioning a track on social media before anyone hears a note gets under his skin. Fat Elvis came from a single line his co writer Alex Dooley had saved in his phone, and he and Dooley and Jamie Grooms built a whole bad night in New Orleans around it. He cut a record in Los Angeles with Shooter Jennings.

In Virginia he was playing cover gigs, where nobody wants an original unless they have already heard it. So he moved to Nashville to write, and lived in his van. He camped out at CiCi's Pizza, where eleven dollars bought him twenty four hours of pizza and Wi-Fi, and hung around Walmart waiting for the phone because he was on a fill in list for gigs around town. With no rent, his expenses were gas. He wrote as much as he could, went to every writers round he could get to and met every writer who would meet him, and says he never had time to stop and ask whether he was supposed to be there. On the cover gigs he found a workaround he still passes on. Play the original first and announce it afterward, because the moment you say the word original people stop listening. Do it his way and by the second chorus they are mouthing along to a song they have never heard.

He played a lot of nursing homes coming up, mostly gospel, and enjoyed it, though the residents have no filter and he heard some things. Asked what he tells an eighteen year old thinking about this, he says not to listen too hard to older people telling them to go get a job, because eighteen is a fine age to be broke. These days he reckons his crowd is roughly thirty year old dudes and sixty five year old women.