COVID roadblocks turn positive: A Kentucky musician’s journey home amid a record release

With summer at hand, Stoll Vaughan finds himself on the road again, but not in a way he had planned.

The Lexington-born songsmith who has maintained a critically lauded solo career for the past two decades, nearly two-thirds of which has been spent in Los Angeles, isn’t on his way to another gig. Like all touring artists, his concert itineraries have been decimated by to the COVID-19 pandemic. So he is instead hitting the road for home — specifically, his family’s farm off of Old Richmond Rd. Each stop along the cross-country drive reflects a different stage of pandemic — induced panic.

“I’m in New Mexico now,” he said recently by phone. “They require masks. Arizona was as loose as can be coming out of California, which is absolutely losing its mind. It makes you grateful to be heading to Kentucky.”

The unplanned trip home comes as a precarious time for the 41-year old artist. In mid-April, as COVID-dictated lockdown conditions were entering a second month, Vaughan released his fourth solo album, a starkly arranged, heavily folk-informed work titled “Desires Shape.” The recording was to have been the next chapter in a career that had branched out broadly over the last few years through his significant songwriting contributions to the Allman Betts Band. A subsequent collaborative tour with the group was even slated for the summer. It’s now off until the fall. The release of “Desires Shape,” however, went ahead as scheduled.

“People have received the record really well, so there are positives everywhere,” Vaughan said. “It’s funny, you know? In a way, I want to lick my wounds. But at the same time, I think, ‘The music works during this time, too.’”

Over the course of 10 songs, “Desires Shape” frames Vaughan’s confessional portraits with nothing more than acoustic guitar, piano and harmonica. The resulting sound is beautifully antique, although the songs themselves possess an unassuming clarity that provides the recording with considerable presence and immediacy.

“To make a record like this, it seems simple. When you listen to it, ‘Oh, that’s just Stoll sitting down, playing guitar, recording and adding some reverb.’ But it’s really quite hard. I’ve tried to do my record before this (2018’s “The Conversation”) the same way in my own studio. What happens, though, is you have to be very conscious of keeping the essence and looseness while remaining aware of the layers that you have to add. That means tempo. You have to be really willing to throw away whole takes and whole recordings and start fresh. You have to listen, and that takes a long time. It takes a lot of discipline.”

Of particular appeal to Vaughan’s home state fanbase will be “Weather in Kentucky,” a reflection inspired by discussions with his brother regarding the latter’s divorce but set to a sense of cautious hope. The song’s gist outlines how emotions during tumultuous times can shift as quickly and dramatically as the weather back home.

As if to prove his point, Vaughan shot an informal video for the song at his parents’ farm last December – in 65 degree conditions.

“It was 65 and raining,” he said. “We made it with this little hand-held camera we got from Best Buy and then just walked through the fields of the farm. I mean, you’ve heard that saying so many times (a variation of the famous Mark Twain remark about conditions in the north: “If you don’t like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes”). Now I get to tell everybody.”

A Lexington native, Vaughan graduated from the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan before setting off on a career that took him several times to Nashville, interspersed by a few years back in Kentucky before settling in Los Angeles. During that time, a friendship and professional alliance was struck with longtime John Mellencamp guitarist Mike Wanchic (also a Lexington native). He helped oversee Vaughan’s earlier recordings and instructed the young guitarist on the working environment of the recording studio. That led to touring alongside the likes of Mellencamp, John Fogerty, Journey and more.

The Allman Betts Band is Vaughan’s newest alliance. Led by guitarist/singers Devon Allman and Duane Betts, sons of Allman Brothers Band co-founders Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts, the group took quickly to Vaughan’s sense of songcraft.

“Stoll ended up a perfect corner of the triangle, so to speak,” Allman said prior to his band’s performance at the Grand Theatre in Frankfort last fall. “We respected his songwriting skills a lot. He was really cheerleading the process. If somebody had a hot hand, he would kind of push them. He was invaluable. He was a great teammate. It was a really cool collaboration between Stoll, Duane and myself.”

Still, Vaughan, like so many of his contemporaries, now sits at a crossroads no one could have predicted. With venues closed for the foreseeable future and touring plans either dramatically overhauled or scrapped altogether, his career sits motionless as the realities of a COVID-induced world begin to settle.

“For the first week, you’re kind of pissed off. You’re thinking everything is just a hoax. By the second week, it becomes real. But that’s when I realized it’s actually a real gift. This is how I have lived it. I realized how powerless I am. With something like this, either you’re going to have faith or just going to give up. I find the sane thing is to write songs, because any time before you write a song, you’re thinking, ‘I don’t have anything to say.’ Then you get through all the fear and insecurity and you get a place that’s like a meditation. You realize things are going to be alright. You don’t have to judge anything. So I kind of got to that place where it was like, ‘I’m going to let it go.’ I realized I was not in control and that freed me up.

“I was happy to release my record. I was happy to play live streams and give my music away. Of course, I’m not Beyonce, either, so I don’t know what that side of the business is like. That’s a totally different world. But for me, I feel like I was already in a meditative state anyway. I feel like my record represents how I would like to be during this time, which is patient and calm. I’m not that way all the time, but it offers a glimmer of hope that way.”