Charles Wesley Godwin discusses career's next steps, performs at Nashville's Station Inn
Americana Music Award-nominated performer Charles Wesley Godwin made the most of his debut at legendary Nashville roots music haunt the Station Inn. An intimate acoustic show initially advertised as an EP release party for his new, "cathartic" and introspective seven-song release "Lonely Mountain Town" turned into a full-on 90-minute concert, complete with foot-stomping and hollering, in downtown Music City.
The Morgantown, West Virginia, native's latest arrives after a decade-long journey to achieve both full circle moments and unprecedented positive momentum for his career and life.
Foremost, he's grown from an indie-beloved favorite to signing to Big Loud Records as an artist and Warner Chappell Publishing as a songwriter.
Thus, he's personally and professionally arrived at a place where he's best regarded as the married father of soon-to-be three children and a passionate supporter of West Virginia University who spent parts of the last year as a 2024 Grand Ole Opry NextStage class member on the road with Grammy-winning country music Entertainer of the Year Luke Combs and his longtime idols the Avett Brothers.
Saturday's set didn't reflect as much the joyous uproar of watching a star being made in front of your eyes. No, that happened 15 months ago at the Ryman Auditorium when he headlined country music's Mother Church following another star-making set from Oklahoman Wyatt Flores. Instead, the Station Inn saw the developing, nuanced artistic breadth of where Godwin is at right now:
He's a little Simon and Garfunkel and when strumming and crooning on new track "It's Her Move," a whole lot of Bruce Springsteen. Most often though, he's a thoughtful countrified bluegrasser with a stunningly conversational tenor, singing songs that feel like they've existed for a lifetime.
Godwin showcases masterful storytelling skills
Godwin may be growing as a masterful live performer and singer-songwriter, but he's already a titan of a conversationalist. The best parts of his EP release show featured him alongside his producer and his backing Allegheny High band member Al Torrence, sharing quiet moments, taking in a room in rapt silence with occasionally full-throated exhortations and song requests piping up from the jam-packed crowd.
Between playing a dozen songs, he interwove the incredibly relatable story of being the son of a schoolteacher mother and engineering miner father, whose brother was a champion distance runner in the vein of '70s-era pop cultural icon Steve Prefontaine.
Godwin also was a football-playing lover of fishing and hunting who was a first-chair saxophone player in his high school band. However, by the time he entered college at West Virginia University, he was an undergraduate student no longer pursuing any of those passions, with a bunch of free time on his hands.
Watching the Avett Brothers, Bob Dylan and Mumford and Sons collaborate onstage at 2011's Grammy Awards inspired him to find his brother's old Takamine guitar. A year later, he was onstage locally in Morgantown, near West Virginia University's campus.
The rest, as they say, is history. It's history that hearing his fans lustily shout out the names of songs like the 2021-released "Cranes of Potter" made clear, in stunning relief, how powerful the connections are that fans made to the catalogs of artists like Godwin, Flores, Drayton Farley and more, during the COVID-19 quarantine. There are no "hits" here. Songs crafted by artists who emerged in this era arrived like troubadours, bequeathing a treasure trove for troubled times.
When Godwin brings up his manager telling him he'd be opening for Luke Combs and the Avett Brothers, his navigation to finally meeting the band in Buffalo and understanding that pairing with Scott Avett to cover "Hammer Down" by Jason Molina, the 2000s-era indie rocker who untimely passed away, arrived because — like his own fans are of him — he's a super-studied fan of the Avetts. He knew the song because of a 2014 YouTube clip of the band honoring the performer's memory.
Godwin's show proved another time-worn aphorism true — the stars are just like us.
'Lonely Mountain Town'
Godwin's new EP arrives during a two-year run where he's graduating to play two shows a week at arenas, festivals and stadiums worldwide for eight months of the year. Names associated with those tours include Country Music and Rock and Roll Hall of Famers and Grammy winners alike, including the Avetts, Combs, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and the Turnpike Troubadours.
Elevating his game, thus, required a deft change in creative strategy. Though much of his process will always include quiet introspection and working in rooms like Asheville, North Carolina's Echo Mountain Recording Studios and Al Torrence's Music Garden Studios just northwest of Pittsburgh, the seven songs presented at the Station Inn come from a different process entirely.
A jet-setting May 2024 week spent traveling from Hot Springs, Arkansas, to Flagstaff, Arizona, saw Godwin, Torrence and the band setting up a travel-ready TASCAM mixing recorder in hotel rooms and AirBnBs to capture "It's The Little Things" and "Then I'm Gone." The band found time near Denver a month later to record the EP's title track.
The result? When he sings, "A smile and a wave / Go a little out of your way / Or holding a door a second more / A spare dollar from a billfold / It don't have to be so bold / To make your own red letter day," it's the most adult contemporary radio-ready and "old time roots music" unwound modern Americana has ever sounded. It's a timeless corollary to the work of Gavin Degraw or Edwin McCain two decades prior.
Insofar as his work with ERNEST on "Dead To Rights," it's the influence of an October day working in Nashville with crafters like the multiple-time chart-topping streaming kingpin singer-songwriter that saw his high-minded concept of extending the story of Simon and Garfunkel's 55-year-old "The Boxer" into a sequel.
Four minutes later, "But you crashed into me / Like that damned left hook I never got to see" and "The way you land those kisses, you've got me dead to rights and I don't mind" are the kinds of simple similes — instead of more complex metaphors — that cut to the heart of the value of the word as amplified by the power of the voice and not the other way around.
The best of a class of newly christened stars
The afternoon event at the Station Inn closed with newer and older material.
Pairing with modern Nashville songwriting legends Scooter Carusoe and Tom Douglas for the unreleased "Street Advice" offers unparalleled storytelling in the tale of Godwin receiving heartfelt advice from a homeless man on a street corner while on tour. His creativity already placing him in the same rooms as the respective co-writers of Taylor Swift's "You All Over Me" and Miranda Lambert's "The House That Built Me" speaks volumes.
Insofar as the stomping barnburners, "Another Leaf," "Hardwood Floors" and his take on John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" feel like anthems of a generation of young people for whom life is hard, but maintaining a blue-collar work-ethic yields vast, joyous potential.
Much like the work habits he learned from his father, Godwin's superstardom is being handcrafted in real-time. At present, that work is expanding to include country's mainstream and rootsy rock's most connective ties, then contracts at an Appalachian bluegrass core. Ultimately, it's slowly beginning to represent the best of a class of newly christened stars, elevating the breadth of Nashville's pop cultural moment.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Charles Wesley Godwin on his career's next steps, performs at Nashville's Station Inn
