If you go
› What: Parker Millsap in concert featuring Courtney Holder in support.› When: 8 p.m. Friday, April 15.› Where: Revelry Room, 41 E. 14th St.› Admission: $12 in advance, $15 day of the show.› Phone: 423-521-2929.› Venue website: revelryroom.co.› Artist website: parkermillsap.com.
Discography
2012: “Palisade”2014: “Parker Millsap”2016: “The Very Last Day”
Parker Millsap's artistic ambitions are not what you'd call insightful or even especially deep. Yet there's something refreshing about his lack of pompous grandstanding.
"[Pablo] Picasso said, 'A successful man is a man who does what he wants to do.' I get to play music, and that was my goal from the start," the 23-year-old Oklahoma singer/songwriter says with a characteristic, hair-trigger chuckle.
"I usually don't set goals based on, 'I want to have a No. 1 single,'" he adds. "My goals are more like, 'I just want to keep playing music and not get a real job.'"
Reaching the top of the charts may not have been Millsap's plan when he entered the studio last year to work on his most recent record, "The Very Last Day," but that's precisely where he's ended up. As of April 7, two weeks after its official release, "The Very Last Day" is at the No. 3 spot on Billboard's Heatseekers Albums chart and at the peak position on the Americana Music Association's Americana Airplay chart.
The album is being received even better by critics than his 2014 eponymous release, which Popmatters praised for its "soulful, gravelly, whiskey-laced [vocals]" which Millsap "wield[s] like a world-weary prophet."
The songs on "The Very Last Day" were written during the winter while Millsap was still living Oklahoma. It was an easy place and a perfect time of year to be feeling miserable, he says, and that dour atmosphere inevitably found its way onto the album.
"It was [a] kind-of-bleak, kind-of-gray kind of winter, and I wrote some songs to suit that mood," he says, adding that the experience of writing them was cathartic.
"Part of it, too, is poking winter in the chest, like 'I can handle this,'" he laughs.
Now based in Nashville, Millsap is playing in support of the album on a tour that will bring him to Revelry Room on Friday, April 15.
Millsap says he came to love music through Americana songwriter Ry Cooder's 1972 album "Boomer's Story," which became a gateway to a slew of early blues musicians and singers/songwriters such as Lyle Lovett, Robert Earl Keen and John Hiatt, whose music often takes the form of character-driven songs. Millsap's own material often takes on a similar narrative structure.
And when backed into a corner, Millsap admits that maybe, just maybe, his career in music is driven by more than simply avoiding the drudgery of a 9-to-5 job.
"When you're making a record, for me anyway, it's always been about writing a bunch of songs, taking the best ones in and try[ing] to make it honest," he says. "Music is very close to my heart - to me. I'm very close to it, and it's important to me that the music I listen to and that I make is honest."
Contact Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6205. Follow him on Twitter at @PhillipsCTFP.