Country hit maker Logan Mize is set to return to the W for an intimate acoustic show Thursday June 15th! Tickets and Tables on sale NOW!! CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE
LOGAN MIZE
“There's still a little America left in America...”
Ten years ago, when Logan Mize was busy being a Music Row staff songwriter, he'd occasionally feel homesick for Kansas, where he grew up. So he invented a way to get back there without leaving Nashville.
“My friend Blake Chaffin and I came up with this imaginary town called Prairieville,” Mize says. “Blake is from Kansas, like me, and we have this certain way of speaking, with similar quirks in the way that we say things. So over the years, we wrote about fifty songs together about this town.”
They based the characters on people they'd grown up around, and used stories they'd heard as inspirations for their sharply-observed portraits of heartland life. “Whenever we'd get together, we'd be like, 'What's happening in Prairieville this week?',” Mize says with a smile. “It was almost like our Lake Wobegon. It inspired us. Gradually, it morphed from writing about a town into a certain style of writing that we found to be completely our own, to where we could really tell that our songs had a certain stamp on them. We took the best of those songs and that's this project.”
Welcome to Prairieville, Mize's fifth album, may be based on a fictional place, but it's also his most deeply personal work to date. And while the project was first conceived in Nashville, he's now closer to a real life version of Prairieville, as he and his family recently moved back to Kansas, to his wife's family farm in Andale.
“This project probably never would've come out if I'd stayed in Nashville,” he says. “I think that moving back to Kansas gave me perspective. Once I got out here, and I'm actually immersed in this lifestyle, I found it much easier to be myself, to be the heartland rock dude who's singing these songs, rather than a Music Row writer. I think I was always worried that it seemed fake what I was doing. I farm up here. The whole thing's more believable. You listen to it, and I'm living that lifestyle. I think that's an easier sell for people, and it's easier for me to sell it because it's real.”
The album is real in the deepest sense of the word, articulating Mize's native territory with eleven songs full of rural color, one-take energy and a heart as big and wide as a wheat field in summer. Lead single “George Strait Songs” and “River Road” are three-chord magic tricks that drop you right into the midwest with its “fields of gold, rusty Chevys and old Coke signs,” and rousing choruses. The sly, winking rocker “Wine at the Church, Beer at the Bar” uses its clever title and nature imagery (“Barnyard cats, junkyard dogs, it's a jungle out there, don't get lost”) to hint at the darkness on the edge of all those idyllic small towns. And indeed, songs like “I Need Mike,” “We Ain't Broke,” and the coolly observed “Welcome to Prairieville” (“Benny's brother Joe sells firewood when he ain't passed out on the hood”) take honest, candid looks at the occasional desperation that goes hand in hand with the glowing nostalgia of the American midwest.