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Today, we’re excited to turn our spotlight toward Fort Worth, Texas-based singer-songwriter Jack Barksdale.
While Barksdale is an accomplished multi-instrumentalist—proficient in everything from slide guitar and harmonica to mandolin and ukulele—he identifies first and foremost as a songwriter. Drawing deep inspiration from roots legends like Lead Belly, Guy Clark, and Tom Waits, he began playing original tunes at age nine and has already shared stages with Ray Wylie Hubbard and John Fullbright.
To understand the momentum behind his latest work, you only have to look at how remarkably prolific he has been over the last few years:
- Revival (2018): His debut EP
- Live From Niles City (2019): A live album recorded at the famed Niles City Sound studio in Fort Worth, Texas
- Death of a Hummingbird (2022): A breakthrough studio album featuring co-writes with several prominent singer-songwriters
- Phantom Trails (2023): A 7-song entirely instrumental EP
- Out of Order (2024): A gritty, expansive EP release
- Voices (2025): A studio album released via Truly Handmade Records (the label established by the estate of Guy Clark), featuring notable guest appearances, including Sarah Jarosz.
That brings us to last month’s release of the Battleground EP, a project that contains some of his most urgent and perhaps best work yet. It was recorded at the legendary Sam Phillips Recording Service alongside revered Memphis producer Mark Edgar Stuart. In my opinion, the EP’s best track is the EP-opening title track, which also features Canadian singer-songwriter Julian Taylor. You can watch the music video for the song below:
The song immediately stands out for its rich storytelling and striking timeliness. Addressing the friction of modern class warfare between the rich and the poor, the song wraps its heavy themes in a mysterious, deeply engaging atmosphere anchored by a militaristic drumbeat and glimmering guitars. Jack Barksdale’s raw vocals and unflinching lyricism give the track its piercing sense of urgency, grounding his songwriting in absolute sincerity and making his thematic commentary feel immediate and deeply earned. Taylor’s vocals further adds to the song’s power.
When asked about the conceptual inspiration behind the track, Barksdale offered a poignant breakdown of the systemic disconnect that drives the song’s narrative:
“It’s a song about class warfare. It goes through the story of someone caught up in that class warfare and how sometimes the way that things are set up where money can influence policies and get you lots of influence and all sorts of things. In the US, it makes it to where if you have money, you have more of a say in how things are. And so generally, people with a really big sum of money or wealth, if it’s not liquidated, whatever it’s called, just wealth in general, you tend to have a lot of influence, and people tend to act in their self-interest. So, it just makes sense that people who have influence generally put in policies or advocate for policies that benefit themselves.
And it tends to create sort of a disconnect where people who don’t have that wealth or those resources, they don’t have as much of a say in how things are run and how the country and its systems operate. And so, they tend to be disproportionately affected by a lot of policies and things tend to be a little bit worse or a lot worse for people who don’t have that wealth or those resources. And so that’s kind of where the song comes from is taking that class warfare style or that saying class warfare and taking that imagery of warfare and on the battleground of the class war, what does that look like? And so that’s one of the last lines of the song is ‘one knows justice only by name on the battleground.’ And I guess it’s just pointing out some of those injustices and inequalities that happen in that kind of system.”
Barksdale caught up with SWT to dig even deeper into the new EP and song, the recording process in Memphis, and his songwriting evolution.
Regarding the title track, is that something that you have personal experience with or was there a news story that kind of made you start thinking about those?
Well, funnily enough, what really got me sort of interested, or just really taking a look at that topic, was music and art because I started getting into the music of The Threepenny Opera, which is a play that was by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, a German playwright and composer. And because I had heard this song, “Pirate Jenny,” and I thought it was such a cool song, and it’s from The Threepenny Opera. So, I started finding out other songs about The Threepenny Opera and other things about Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. So, I listened to the Threepenny Opera soundtrack, the English version, the originals in German, and it’s so many interesting songs about interesting things. And Tom Waits has an amazing cover of this song, “What Keeps Mankind Alive” from The Threepenny Opera. And honestly, it’s on a very similar topic.
It’s saying that if you don’t take care of people’s material needs, like the food that they need to eat or shelter or basic needs that you need to just be a functioning, dignified person, human, if you don’t have those needs, then you can’t expect that person to be a perfect moral, ideal person. It’s immoral to expect that from that person. You really have to make sure that people’s really basic needs are taken care of if you want anything more from them individually or as a society. And so that was, I guess, one thing that kind of put me into that direction, but I feel like over the last few years, I’ve really been trying to get into understand my own philosophy and try and understand how the world works and how the universe works and how humanity exists within that, and try and understand what is right or wrong and what that even means in a way that philosophy ends up kind of going into the morals and ethics, which goes into the political side of things, and it all ends up being connected in that way.
So, that’s another reason that I’ve kind of gotten into this territory is through the philosophical, moral, ethical side of it. And it really has kind of made me realize, or at least at the moment, it’s my position that… And it should be our goal at least to make sure that everybody, or at least as many people as possible, have their basic needs met. And it seems really clear that when people don’t have their basic needs met, we all suffer as a society, and the person who doesn’t have their needs met suffers, and no good comes from that.
What was your experience like writing and recording that song?
Well, we recorded all the songs for the EP in one day, at least the bulk of it, at Sam Phillips Recording Service in Memphis. It was really cool. My friend Mark Edgar Stewart, he’s a great singer-songwriter and bass player and producer, and he produced this EP. So, he got the studio time at Sam Phillips Recording, and Kevin Houston engineered the session. He is a fantastic engineer. Anyway, we got a bunch of really cool musicians to come in, and we played all the songs. Well, at least most of the songs, live and did very minimal overdubbing or editing. “Battleground” specifically, we probably did the least editing.
I think that was the first song we recorded. We started rehearsing the song a little bit, trying to get the arrangement together, and then we finally went for a few takes and finally got the take. The musicians who played on it were just fantastic, and really, there was barely anything to fix when it came to mixing and editing time. And so yeah, “Battleground” specifically was really cool. And then later on, we actually… We sent the song to Julian Taylor, who’s a great Canadian songwriter and singer and musician, and he added some additional vocals to the track and sang along a little bit.
I was really honored to be able to have him on the song. So, it was a really cool experience. We only did a little bit of stuff, not at Sam Phillips. The last song on the EP “Ticket Home (For Phil Ochs”, we recorded my parts, the guitar and vocal at Sam Phillips, and then we overdubbed the harmonica and mandolin and bass with Kevin Houston who engineered. He has a house just outside Memphis in Mississippi, and he does some recording stuff out there, so we overdubbed some stuff over there, some bass and additional instruments, but the bulk of it was done just that one day at Sam Phillips, and it was a really cool experience. I really enjoyed it.
Were there specific lyrics that got the ball rolling with the title track?
Yeah. Interestingly enough, I didn’t go into that song with necessarily a clear goal of what I wanted to write, because I’ve been doing that more so lately where I come up with the concept of the song, and then I try and find a way to write about that concept or get that point across. And for that song, I was just thinking artistically. I was just writing stuff down, trying to get something. Eventually, I started writing some lines about “she was born in a small town in a time of war, war between the rich and poor,” and I started building the story, and then maybe after those first couple lines, I really focused in on that topic of class warfare and wrote the rest of the song. But I think I wrote it pretty chronologically. Sometimes you write the third verse, second, and the fourth verse, first or something like that. But I think it was fairly chronological, if I remember correctly.
I imagine you find a lot of inspiration through the folk songwriters, the protest songwriters, that kind of stuff.
Yeah. I mean, I’m a big fan of Phil Ochs, and of course the song, I wrote that song “Ticket Home” on this EP about Phil Ochs, and he’s just a super interesting person. I feel like there’s a lot to be learned from his life story and just a lot of interesting and some tragic stuff and some really inspiring stuff about it. But there’s so many great people from the ’60s folk revival and then protest kind of boom, and there’s tons of great singer-songwriters from that time period. But I’m also interested in all sorts of… It seems like that folk boom of the ’60s seemed to…
Some of the folk stuff, it gets into the Kingston Trio territory, and it’s a little bit cheesy for my personal taste. And so I think I realized that a lot of some of my favorite music in the world and favorite songs in the world were inspired by that original folk boom, but went in a slightly different direction, like Townes Van Zandt is one of my favorite songwriters of all time, and he was very influenced by early Bob Dylan, and he covered “Ballad of Ira Hayes”, the Peter LaFarge song, and very influenced by the folk songwriters. And he was a very folky songwriter but went in some really weird and odd and interesting directions.
Guy Clark too, there’s some early recordings where he does a lot of Bob Dylan covers, but specifically on the protest side. Using that as a way of using song as a way of portraying those thoughts, I feel like I honestly really took most inspiration from Bertolt Brecht in that regard. He started doing his stuff in the ’20s in Germany, and then did… I think he died sometime in the ’50s, but just very prolific and very interesting. And he wrote a lot of essays and things about his ideas about what theater specifically, but also art in general, how that could be used to convey a message, and how you can keep an audience engaged with the principles while you’re giving a performance. And I just find that so inspiring. And of course, music is a very different art form from theater, even though theater often includes music, but the way it’s experienced, especially as a singer-songwriter, is very different because in the theater, you’re expecting that the actors are portraying characters and that those characters might not necessarily be a good reflection of the actors themselves or even of the writer of the play or musical, and they can be storytelling devices, and there’s a lot more mask for theater, at least perceived mask.
And a lot of what Bertolt Brecht did or tried to do was to take away that mask and try and show his ideas in the theater just raw or as raw as possible. And the interesting thing with music and being a singer-songwriter is that you can really use the fact that a lot of that mask is gone to your advantage. A lot of times people expect when you’re singing a song that the opinions or the thoughts in that song are your own opinions or thoughts, and that’s why people like Randy Newman, who’s another inspiration for me, especially on writing political songs or anything like that. But often why Randy Newman would get in some hot waters. Because the majority of the time, he would write from a character’s perspective and wasn’t writing from his own perspective, and that’s not really what people expect from a singer-songwriter.
So, you can really take some of the ideas of someone like Bertolt Brecht and look at them in the context of a singer-songwriter in that art form, and you can take those ideas and try and figure out your own ways of accomplishing different goals. And in a lot of ways, it’s much easier as a singer-songwriter than as a theater or a theater actor or a playwright.
How do you think the title track connects to the rest of the EP lyrically?
Lyrically? Well, I guess all the songs are different musically and lyrically and topic-wise, and some are a little bit similar, but I think the one thing that really connects them is that they’re all sort of philosophy based in one way or another. I’ve written a lot of songs, and I’m hoping to maybe eventually do a full album of these songs that are about ideology and methodology, which is what morality and ethics and also the science and the universe and how all these things connect, understanding the universe, understanding humanity, understanding it through science, evolutionary biology and all these things, and trying to understand humanity and understand our place in the universe and the morality and ethics of it all, and trying to make sense of it the best I can. And then I have some other songs that are also talking about the methodology of how we should…
Well, I guess it’s the ideology and how to use it. So how to take your ideas and understanding of the world and use it to affect the world in a positive way, and then sort of a give and take, you take the world around you and let it influence your philosophy, and then use your philosophy to try and influence the world, and as well as thinking about what are the most effective ways to do all those things. And I think that is really the main focus of my writing over the last few years, and I think that’s sort of one thing that really strings a lot of those songs together, including the ones on the EP.
Do you think the songs are different battlefields, kind of struggling to connect people in different ways?
Yeah, I guess so, because the battlefield of class warfare, that’s one thing. And I guess “The Scam Song” sort of goes in a similar direction, but I guess that’s also the battlefield of perception also and understanding exploitation when you see it. And then “Don’t Have Children, Adopt”, that’s more on a moral or ethical battlefield and with more existential ideas. And then similar on the existential side is “God is Good”, and that’s more on an existential understanding of the universe, more fundamental, foundational place, battlefield. And then “Ticket Home”, that’s sort of a song about the battlefield of trying to, or the struggle of trying to affect the world in a positive way, and also what we can learn from Phil Ochs specifically. And so yeah, I guess that’s a good way to put it.
How do you think this EP is an evolution sonically compared to your past work?
Well, one of the things that I really wanted to try out with these songs is that I’ve really, over the last few years, or at least I guess since the pandemic, I’ve only really recorded in two places, which is Austin and Memphis. And my friend Mike Meadows, who’s a great percussionist and a musician and producer, he produced the album I did last year, and I recorded that in Austin, and also the album I did back in 2022 or 2023. We’ve done a bunch of stuff together, and I really enjoy working with him. It’s a bit of a different process, but when I’m recording in Memphis, I usually… My friend Mark Edgar Stewart produces that, and Mike and Mark have two different approaches to production and studio recording, and it can be really fun to explore different ways of doing that.
So, with Mike and Austin, I oftentimes will plan out the song and kind of the instrumentation and we’ll make an outline for what we want the song to come out being, and so I feel like there’s a lot more control over that. And for songs that I want a lot more control over, I really like doing that process. But when I record with Mark in Memphis, it’s a slightly different process where a lot of times it’s more focused on, instead of thinking about what instrumentation we want on this. Or specifically making an outline and sticking to that best we can.
We have a little bit more freedom and a little bit more dependence on the other musicians. It’s a little bit more collaborative. It’s more getting a band together of really good musicians that will fit this song and that will know what to do. And we know whatever comes out of this is going to be good. And if it isn’t good, we can try it a different way. It’s much more experimental in the moment, I guess. So, I feel like when I go to Memphis to record, I never exactly know what I’m going to end up with at the end, but I know it’s going to be really cool. I really enjoy doing that. And that’s kind of what I wanted to do that with this batch of songs is that I felt like I needed the room to maybe go a little bit more on the, I don’t know, have just a little bit less control over it and have it go into some weird places that I would’ve never even thought of, but that are still great nonetheless. So I feel like that is what happened, and I think it turned out really well with these songs specifically.
It seems like you’ve gotten more eclectic in how your songs sound.
Yeah. During the pandemic, I guess, I got into the music of Tom Waits, the king of eccentric music. And I feel like Tom Waits really made me appreciate oddity and obscurity and using different things to convey your point and convey your emotion. And the really interesting thing about Tom Waits is that a Tom Waits song can be really good, but it’s not necessarily going to be pretty and not necessarily going to be conventional. And something can be really beautiful and awe-inspiring, but not really be pretty. And another thing that I also got into somewhat recently is the music of Randy Newman and the music of Terry Allen. And both Randy Newman and Terry Allen really kind of disregard structure a lot of the time. And you can take a Randy Newman song; you can have a song like “I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today.”
And you’ve got a verse and kind of a bridge and then another verse and then it’s done. And you can have songs with no choruses. You can have songs that are through-composed where every new verse is something different. You can have all sorts of interesting stuff and all sorts of interesting styles and instrumentation as well. And Terry Allen, he has songs like “Crisis Site 13” where there’s some crazy rock guitar solo at the beginning, and then it fades out, and it comes in with a lullaby talking about a 13-year-old juvenile delinquent. And he’s talking about all the things that he’s going to do and how he’s so much cooler than you and how it’s everybody else’s fault. And it’s just an insane song. It’s got no real, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have anything that really repeats very much. It’s really strange.
And then we go back into the crazy guitar solo, some really off-the-wall music, but I really came to admire and respect some of these different ways of looking at music that really disregarded the usual structures and ideas of what a song could be and how much possibility was out there for all kinds of songs and all kinds of music. And when it comes to a song where you’re taking an idea or a thought, and you’re trying to convey it through a song, and maybe you’re starting with that concept before you even write anything or come up with any music, you’re just starting with the concept. If you have the freedom to disregard any kind of musical or lyrical or structural precedent and you don’t have to worry about that, there’s so many directions that you can go in, and it can make it a lot easier, and it can make it a lot easier to get into really complex stuff and to really convey complex emotions and stories and ideas. So, I think that’s a lot of the reason why some of these songs became very eclectic and strange.
You’ve been performing since you were nine years old. What about music still fascinates you?
Well, I guess there’s so much. Because the interesting thing with music is that there’s always something new to get into. Just recently I’ve started trying to get into the music of Thelonious Monk, and that’s a crazy rabbit hole right there. And there’s so much interesting stuff to get into, whether it’s musical or lyrical, or how to put those things together, or a new genre, a new style, a new technique, a new instrument. And there’s just so much interesting stuff to get into, and you know that you’ll never get into it all because there’s so much. And so that’s one thing I really like about music is there’s always something new to learn. So yeah, I think trying to find those new things and find those new things that interest me and that I can use in my songs.
I’m always trying to collect different ideas and different skills so that I can put them into songs and use them for my ideas or concepts or there’s so much stuff. You can get into a new rhyme scheme for a song. You can get into a new chord progression or voice leading and all this interesting stuff that you could get into. Instead of writing a song on an instrument, writing a song from a percussive beat or writing a song and making the music, doing more digital stuff. There’s so much to get into. So, I almost feel overwhelmed sometimes by all the stuff that I want to learn. So yeah, there’s so much stuff that interests me about music still and probably always will.
What’s it been like releasing music on the Truly Handmade Records label?
Yeah. So last year I recorded an album called Voices and released that with the Truly Handmade label, which is run by the estate of Guy Clark. And Guy Clark is one of my absolute favorite songwriters, one of the best songwriters of all time. “Desperados Waiting for the Train”. “Let Him Roll”. Just some of the best songs that you can find, specifically a Texas songwriting legend. So, I’ve always been a huge fan of Guy Clark. It meant a lot to be able to be a part of that label. And Verlon Thompson, who played guitar with Guy for a long, long time, he was a part of that endeavor and he’s one of the most just amazing people you’ll ever meet and been so kind to me. And he’s one of my favorite guitar players, but also a fantastic songwriter and just a great artist and a great person. And it was just really cool to be able to do that and be a part of that.
So that was just the album last year?
Yeah, it was just a one-album thing. But it was really cool.
Was the new EP released independently?
Yeah. Cloverdale Records is distributing this Battleground EP.
What are your plans for next year? Any plans to tour?
Yeah. I’m hoping to tour, but also, I’ve got a bunch more songs that I’ve written in many different styles. I’ve got a lot more sort of didactic or political or moral songs that I’ve written sort of in the same style as the songs on Battleground. So, I’m hoping to release those and record those, maybe do a project where I combine all the songs together. I’m not sure as of yet, but I’ve also got a bunch more personal songs and I’ve got a concept EP that I’ve written, but I haven’t recorded yet. And I’m working on another concept album that I haven’t finished. And let’s see, I’ve got some co-writes that I’ve written that I’m hoping to do some stuff with. So yeah, I’ve got a bunch of songs that I want to record. So hopefully next year I’ll get to do a lot of recording as well. But yeah, I’m hoping to tour and get to as many cool places as I can.
Take a good look at the cover art for Battleground:
The track list for the Battleground EP:
- Battleground (featuring Julian Taylor) [3:11]
- God Is Good [4:49]
- The Scam Song [1:33]
- Don’t Have Children, Adopt [2:38]
- Ticket Home (For Phil Ochs) [3:29]
You can connect with and listen to more of Jack Barksdale at the following links:
- Website: Jackbarksdale.com
- Facebook: Facebook.com/jackbarksdalemusic
- Instagram: Instagram.com/jackbarksdalemusic
- TikTok: Tiktok.com/@jackbarksdale
- Bandcamp: Jackbarksdale.bandcamp.com
- Spotify: Jack Barksdale on Spotify
- YouTube: Youtube.com/@JackBarksdale
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Joshua is co-founder of Scummy Water Tower. He’s freelanced for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including: Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Guitar World, MTV News, Grammy.com, Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, A.V. Club, SPIN, Alternative Press, Under the Radar, Paste, PopMatters, American Songwriter, and Relix. You can email him at josh@scummywatertower.com.
