How would you say Red Revelations is different from your previous albums? You released a self-titled debut, and then you also have Old New Borrowed Blues. 
The self-titled record was a kind of modern, mainstream country record I made for Sony. And then Old New Borrowed Blues was basically a live acoustic blues record. And then this new one is kind of putting all that together in one place, with some rock ‘n’ roll thrown in for good measure. I started writing songs for it last year, actually just before the True Blood thing happened. It just kind of became clear that, wow, these new songs and the fact that I’m involved in True Blood is going to give me the opportunity to stretch in a different direction for a little while and see what that’s like.

So tell me about how Bad Things ended up on a cult vampire series.
That’s actually a really cool story of synchronicity. Bad Things was on the Sony record back in 2005, and my friends at iTunes actually gave me the opportunity to be the iTunes Single of the Week in 2006. So Bad Things was downloaded by about 210,000 people, and one of those people happened to be Alan Ball, the creator of True Blood. 

Did you grow up in a musical family? 
My grandfather on my mother’s side is a guitar player, kind of a country-jazz guy. But he’s the only one in the whole family who’s played anything. I started singing before I started talking, when I was, I guess, 2 or so, singing along to Rhinestone Cowboy by Glen Campbell, and things like that. I grew up enjoying really listening to country music, primarily as a young kid and then as a teenager got into rock and funk, and onto college got into jazz and soul and reggae. I was 20 years old when I first started touring Europe, playing bass in a cover band. We did everything from Garth Brooks to Deep Purple in the same set. 

So it wasn’t a cover band for one specific group?
Oh, no, no, not a tribute band. I don’t have the discipline for that. I can’t even be myself every single night, let alone somebody else. I did that for a year, year and a half, right up until I knocked up a waitress in the south of France. Then I had to quit. We got married and had a baby.

And what did you do then?
Started doing construction again like I had through high school. Started a dump truck business — just didn’t play at all for a few years. [Eventually] I started playing in bar bands again, down in Texas. When my marriage fell apart, I decided to go to the original scene of the crime, which was Nashville. I had left Nashville for Europe in 1994, so in 2001, I decided to go back to try to get a do-over. Even moved into the same apartment building. Very superstitious.

I had heard that you had also done some ditch-digging and bartending. Do you feel like all your varied experiences, and the different jobs that you had, affect you today in your musical career?
Yeah, I do. Even just in general, it’s kind of a family trait — we just don’t like to do the same thing over and over and over again. I’ve had 29 different mailing addresses in my 37 years. We moved a lot. And we weren’t in the military. We get bored. So I’ve been touring with country legends like Guy Clark in the past couple years, and I love doing that — just me and a guitar.  But I also love playing with a full-on rock band, just blasting it out loudly. And I’m gonna continue to do both at the same time, even if that makes record executives and marketing people frustrated.