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There’s a moment in this week’s conversation with Waylon Payne that I haven’t been able to shake.
He’s telling me about a song called “Weed by the Wall” — a song that started with a single verse he wrote around 1995 and then just… carried. For decades. He knew the melody, he knew the words, he even knew how he was living them. What he didn’t know was where the song belonged, or how to finish it.
Then, after getting sober in 2012, Waylon went to Half Price Books looking for the classics — To Kill a Mockingbird, Walden, some Ralph Waldo Emerson. He sat down to read Emerson’s essay “Circles,” got about two pages in, decided it wasn’t working, and closed the book. Then he opened it again with his eyes shut and put his finger on a random page. It landed on the line: “I am God in nature. I am a weed by the wall.”
He had his title. He had his second verse. The whole thing came together that afternoon.
That’s the kind of story you don’t plan for in an interview — you just have to be listening when it shows up.
Who is Waylon Payne, if you don’t already know
His musical lineage is about as deep as Nashville gets. His mother is Grammy-winning singer Sammy Smith. His father, Jodi Payne, spent decades as a guitarist in Willie Nelson’s band. His godfather was Waylon Jennings, which is where the name came from. He’s also an actor — you may recognize him as Jerry Lee Lewis in Walk the Line — but music has always been the center of gravity.
For the past four years, Waylon has played guitar every night in Willie Nelson’s band, a gig he calls, without a trace of irony, his “wonderful side hustle.” He talked about what it means to sit next to his hero night after night, and how he considers Willie Nelson and Family one of the great rock bands of the last fifty years — not despite defying genre, but because of it.
The new record
Wayward is Waylon’s third studio album, and the first release on Big Loud Texas, the label run in partnership by his longtime friend Miranda Lambert and John Randall. It’s a 13-song, raw and honest collection produced by Frank Liddell and Eric Massey, recorded in about a week with a small circle of Nashville collaborators — Ashley Monroe, Pam Tillis, and Miranda herself among them.
He told me the title came from an old nickname — a friend used to call him “Wayward” back when he was living wide open in West Hollywood in his 30s. Years later, he looked the word up in Webster’s and found the definition fit almost too well: difficult to predict or control due to perverse or erratic behavior.
On family, and what it means to belong to one
One of the through-lines of this conversation is family — not just his own, but the extended one built around Willie Nelson’s band and the Nashville songwriting community. Waylon talked about growing up on the road, about a night at Skinny Dennis in Nashville where Ashley Monroe, Britney Spencer, and Karen Fairchild showed up just to listen, and about the way Nashville, for all its competitiveness, is still a town that wants to see its own succeed.
And, of course, the dream walk
We always end with the same question on this show: who would you take a walk with, living or dead? Waylon’s answer was Bobbie Gentry — a knock on an ornate door somewhere in the Delta, two scotches on the rocks, and a stroll along the Mississippi.
It’s a beautiful, cinematic answer, and it’s a fitting way to close out a conversation with a man who’s spent his whole life turning the specifics of his own experience into something universal.
Give the full episode a listen — And if you’re new here, welcome. This is Takin’ A Walk, and we’re glad you’re here.
Takin’ A Walk is part of the Buzz Knight Media Productions network. Check out our companion shows, Music Saved Me and Comedy Saved Me, hosted by Lynn Hoffman.
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