Wendell Hale

Wendell Hale writes the kind of country that doesn’t flinch - hard-luck songs about debt, thirst, and the things a habit asks of a person, sung plain and left where they fall.

His debut album, That Demon Ain’t Dead, is ten of them: a thirty-day supply that never lasts thirty days, an account drank into the red, and the long arithmetic of a habit that always comes out owing. It’s led by the single Gotta Be Done, which runs that math down to its final two and follows where it leads. It does not editorialize and it does not look away.

Recorded in Boise with whatever was at hand. The single’s out; the record follows.