Mac Leaphart struck gold with 2021’s Music City Joke, a record that found the award-winning songwriter cracking the Top 40 on the Americana charts, hitting the road with a full band, and earning a spot on nearly a dozen best-of-the-year lists. He wrote the album in Nashville, where hundreds of solo gigs and writers’ rounds had already sharpened his wry version of American roots music. Once Music City Joke found a national audience, though, Leaphart began spending more time outside of town, packing venues from Amarillo to St Louis.
“I was playing long shows with the band, trying to create the best set possible,” he remembers. “That’s where this new album came from. It came from me wanting to fill the holes in my setlist. It came from me wanting to write songs that were built for the stage.”
He’s talking about Motel Breakfast, an album that unfolds like the rowdy, amplified cousin to Music City Joke. Produced by Brad Jones, it’s a collection of songs that match Leaphart’s salty songwriting with plugged-in performances from a band of Nashville A-listers. Inspired by the greasy cool of the Rolling Stones, the primordial rock & roll of Chuck Berry, and the storytelling of Billy Joe Shaver, Motel Breakfast turns a new page for an artist who’s been running the roads for 15 years.
“It’s an upbeat honky-tonk rock & roll record that doesn’t skimp on the craft or stories,” says Leaphart, a South Carolina native who kickstarted his career playing the state’s Lowcountry bar scene. Not long after his first solo record, Line, Rope Etc, arrived in 2009, he moved to Nashville. There, he launched a recurring songwriter’s night called the Southpaw Social Club and strengthened his own writing chops, too, penning songs for other artists’ albums as well as his own.
RSVP INFO
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