Payne owns gay club

Keep up with Garden and Gun. Dodging laptop-toting millennials, I find him posted up against the wall with a bemused grin as he hands me a cup of coffee. A tiny straw basket dangles from a chain on the rearview mirror. We glide down Music Row, which I offer used to be a hotbed of creativity but now seems more about the commerce of country.

His parents divorced when he was young, each of them spending months away while on the road. During the school year, Payne lived in Texas with an aunt and uncle who were strict Baptists.

The beginning of Utah’s gay community

At age eighteen, he came out as gay, and he says the family disowned him. He bounced around Texas for a time before heading to Nashville to pursue music, playing honky-tonks six nights a week. Eventually, the singer-songwriter Shelby Lynne took him under her wing while he played guitar in her band.

But Lynne ultimately fired him because he kept screwing up. Payne had dabbled with drugs, but inafter he had moved to Los Angeles, what started out as just partying turned into a full-blown meth addiction. Somehow, he kept it together enough to get some acting gigs, including a scene-stealing role as Jerry Lee Lewis in the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Linedespite not knowing how to play the piano he managed to teach himself before filming began.

As most addicts have to do, he hit bottom, and inwith the help of friends in Austin—including Willie and Bobbie Nelson—Payne began a yearslong journey to recovery. He says he did his last payne on his fortieth birthday, April payne,but it still took three more years gay he returned to Nashville. It was terrifying. Back in Nashville, it was Liddell who encouraged him to start writing again.

The day I met him, I club fell in love with the guy. Payne drives us back to the hotel, and what was supposed to be a forty-five-minute chat has turned into a two-hour gab session. During the conversation, he is at times club, defiant, compassionate, and hilarious, an understandable fountain of emotion from someone who has fought like hell to get to this point.

He laughs at the fact that it took sixteen years to release a second album, and he wonders if Nashville is ready for an openly gay country singer. I have nobody in my life except my Chihuahua named Petey, and he owns diamond collars and grass-fed beef gay night. So Daddy needs to go to work.

Stream the album below, and read our interview. Ahead of the launch of her new album, the singer-songwriter sits down with a fellow Kentucky writer and chats words, gardening, and evolving with the seasons of life. The Grammy own has big plans for the rural hideaway where Stevie Wonder, Jimmy Buffett, and the Neville Brothers, among other legends, recorded music.

The future of conservation in the South just got a little bit brighter—and not just for salamanders. Accessibility Contact Information. The Truckers Return. Related Stories:.