We had the absolute pleasure of chatting to the wonderful Evan Bartels the other week at The Long Road! Join us as we chat his UK shows, latest EP and plans for an upcoming album!

How was your first set of the day?

Fantastic! It truly exceeded expectations. I thought it would be pretty good, but you never know when you’re at a festival with a bunch of other acts playing and you’re on at 12:30. But there was a couple of hundred people there, that tent was full! I thought ‘crap, this is crazy!’

Is it ever still nervewracking to go up there as a solo artist, especially at a festival like this?

That’s a great question! I would say sometimes. I’m never nervous in the sense of am I gonna mess up the song, it’s always more like, I hope people are receptive to this. But that’s another thing that you learn over the years when you’re building a set; it’s a lot like busking, doing a festival set as a solo artist where people don’t necessarily know you. When I was a kid I came up busking on street corners quite a bit. You’ve got to hit ‘em with some songs they won’t immediately walk away from. Then I find it’s just meeting people; you try to get to know the audience and let them get to know you and hope for the best! No one threw any rotten tomatoes, so that’s good!

Do you play with a band back home?

I do! I’ve had a band in the past that I’ve played with. Then when Covid hit and a lot of the touring opportunities dried up and a lot of the budgets froze it’s not been super practical sometimes to hire a band. That’s when I started touring more solo and focusing a lot on telling stories with the songs, try to make it a show that way. My goal is to be able to come back to the UK next year and have a band with me. We’re working towards it!

It would be fun to have a band. I’ve done it in the past and done full band records. It’s a different energy, there’s different tools you can use for the show.

You’ve been out here a fair bit this year already, right?

This is my third trip. I was here in March and did C2C, then came in May and did some shows with Charles Wesley Godwin. Now I’m back for the Long Road and doing a show at St Pancras Old Church in London.

We came into Long Road from Cologne, Germany, played a little festival there call Sound of Nashville. That was great because I met Nolan Taylor there, and Cameron Whitcomb, and he was great, we were all hanging out and drinking beers like ‘this is alright!’. Now the travel to get from Germany to the UK, I did not think that would be as harrowing as it was.

Did you fly out?

Yeah but we had to take a train from Cologne to Frankfurt, then flew, then a train from Heathrow to Paddington, then to Euston, then to Rugby. Like okay, that’s a long day!

Are there any comparisons you can make for here compared to back home?

I will say the one thing that’s mainly different is the way you do travel. In the US if someplace is 12 hours away, you’ll drive. I don’t know which one is easier. Here you might be on a train for six hours but at least you can sleep!

But the festivals, it’s funny how much the land here looks like where I grew up. It feels like we could be in Kansas right now! It’s beautiful!

You’ve got a busy rest of the year planned, right?

That’s the plan, yeah. I’ll be going out on the road in the States a few more times. Trying to sneak in another trip over here too. Doing a tonne of songwriting and starting to record the next album, There’s always something! Then on top of that you’ve gotta be a dad and a husband, mow the lawn and do the laundry! It’s an adventure, man.

You’ve had quite a busy year already, it seems! I saw you got played on Theo Von’s podcast which was cool!

Yeah, he gave me a shoutout for the new EP! That’s about as cool as it gets, honestly!

I also saw you were on tour with Brothers Osborne. Was the stage spinning?!

Yeah! I’ve done three or four shows with them so far this year and two of them, the stage was spinning. You were in the middle of the crowd and it slowly spins. They warned me about it, like ‘hey, just so you know, it spins, but it’s really slow’. And then you’re playing and it kinda messes you up a little bit! You’re looking out at the audience and you look down for a second and all of a sudden you’re looking at new people.

You touched on the EP before, and I remember being sold by the presser. Did you write it in a cabin, if I remember correctly?

So I wrote the songs in the tour van over the years. When we recorded it I built a little cabin behind my house and did it in there. I just did it as a passion project. I hadn’t put out music for a while so about a year ago I’d recorded some demos and my buddy Dave heard it (everyone calls him Squirrel). He was like ‘I’d love to help record this’. I didn’t know he was an engineer, we’d never really talked about work. Turns out he’d been like Rick Ruben’s house engineer for like 10 years. So he got these insane microphones and brought them out to the cabin and we recorded it all in there. We did a few takes of each of them and then picked the one that felt right. We recorded at night, I would just open a bottle of wine and play the song. There’s no metronome, no audio tuning, each track is the whole performance.

Once we got that, I had a few others friends; Paul DeFiglia, he played the organ and bass and double bass on it. Another great cat, Russ Paul, he’s a very renowned Nashville peddle steal player, so he did that. It’s funny, we recorded it in my backyard cabin, we did the bass at Paul’s backyard studio, the peddle steal we did at a buddies studio that was a backyard garage, and then we mixed everything in Squirrel’s studio which is a converted shed in his backyard! But I love the way it turned out!

What made you pick an EP over an album?

I knew it was going to be an album or an EP. I had 10 or 11 songs that I was considering for the project, and when I’d done demos of everything and listened back I didn’t want there to be any filler or anything that didn’t feel like it needed to be here. It was just a case of finding the songs that told the story that I wanted to tell. When we got done with that, where we landed was an EP. I’d rather put out a great EP than an okay album!

And you said you’re working on a longer release next, right?

Yes, we start recording next month! I’m hoping to land on between 10 and 15 songs because I currently have about 40. Whittle it all down and find the ones I love, not just like. That’s the goal!

Do you have a dream tour lineup?

Oasis. I wish I was on that tour!

You know who I’d love to do shows with? Jason Isbel. I’d love to watch him play every night on an acoustic tour. Or guys that are playing over here like The White Buffalo. James Bay too, I could listen to that guy sing the phone book every night and be happy! Those are a handful of them but if I start listing them we could be here all day and all night! You know who’s he sick actually, and I’d love to write some songs for her someday, is Adele. If she’s ever one of these pop artists that decides to make a country album, I hope she calls me!

It’s interesting you say James Bay as he’s had almost a mixed reaction to playing The Long Road.

I saw some of that! Crazy to me, good is good. I get where some people can be ‘well, he’s not country’, but by what metric? Compared to a lot of the bar-type bands, I’m not country. I think the thing that always shines through when you’re putting country or Americana or roots together is ‘is this authentic?’. When it comes down to it; if you don’t like James Bay you’re wrong! He’s got a great voice and great songs and I think it fits in in any country and any genre. And like, is Shaboozey everybody’s country? Or Morgan Wallen? Or cCharley Crockett? There’s so many different subsets and genres and opinions that I think a lot of people get lost on that. Music is like wine; if you have it and you like it then it’s good! The music part of country music is way more important than country. Everybody’s got a different opinion on these things.