Life Inside the Fishbowl

Eight years ago, BJ Barham was watching the results of the presidential election roll in with his wife when he grabbed a pen and wrote in real time, “She looked out the window and said, ‘The world is on fire.’”

It was the kind of lyric that the founder of the band American Aquarium has built a 20-year musical career on: personal, engaged, enraged. In his early days on the Raleigh club circuit, Barham’s penchant for turning his own life inside out allowed him to chronicle a calamitous period that saw him burn through bars and bandmates, even as his lyrics called to fans who were looking for more out of their lives—just like he was.

Then came the moment in 2014 when Barham stood on a barstool in Fort Worth, Texas, downed two shots of Jameson, and promised the crowd that he was going sober. Six months later, he’d turned his life and songwriting around and put American Aquarium on the road to becoming one of the most enduring bands in Americana.

Before that moment in Texas, the Reidsville native might have taken a line like the one he’d written about the election of Donald Trump and ratcheted up the rage. Instead, he waited for something more useful: insight. He loaded up his car and embarked on a 48-state tour with his wife, Rachael. Somewhere around Oklahoma, after talking to hundreds of fans at his merch table, he landed on a middle verse: “When did ‘The Land of the Free’ become ‘The Home of the Afraid’? Afraid of the world, afraid of the truth. Afraid of each other.” 

When the couple learned they were going to have a daughter in August 2018, the last part of the song fell into place: “The load is heavy, and the road is long. And we’ve only begun to fight. We just can’t give in. We just can’t give up. We must go boldly into the darkness. And be the light.”

“It was a very angry song,” Barham says, sitting in his home outside Raleigh while now 6-year-old Pearl is out shopping with her mom. “But if I’d have finished it [the way it started], it would’ve been far too pointed. The song would’ve had zero human kindness to it.” 

Barham, 40, tilts his head, covered by a black duckbill cap, and leans into what he’s learned on the road, where people approach him with tears in their eyes, thanking him for the songs that helped them get sober, too.

“Look, there’s a reason that kids write these very super-fast, chaotic songs,” he continued. “And those are some of my favorite protest songs. But as you get older, you start realizing that you’re not getting any kind of conversation started with them. As someone who holds an acoustic guitar every night and plays some form of bastardized country music, I have a rare ability to at least have both sides listen to me and listen to my arguments.” 

Country music has always been a proxy for culture wars (see Dixie Chicks vs. George W. Bush et al.) But its polarization keeps getting worse. Jason Aldean was accused of glorifying racist tropes last year with “Try That in a Small Town,” leading to its video being pulled from CMT. Meanwhile, Jason Isbell had a counter-hit with the song “Be Afraid,” a kind of rebuke to the MAGA-ization of Nashville, that contained the line: “We’ve been testing you/ And you failed/ To see how long that you could sit with the truth/ But you bailed.” 

Barham tends to nestle his views inside more straightforwardly biographic music. The Fear of Standing Still, his 11th new music release as American Aquarium, is full of love songs about marriage and parenting. But it’s also a chronicle of Reidsville, the town where he was raised, where his dad sold auto parts and where three grandparents retired with union pensions from the American Tobacco Company.

In the song “Babies Having Babies,” he recounts the time he took a girlfriend for an abortion at Planned Parenthood and had to pass through lines of angry protesters. “They called her names while they called themselves Christians, sort of hate that’s got no place in any faith of mine,” he sings with a wounded twang. Elsewhere, in a reckoning with parenthood, he recalls that the only time he saw his father cry was when Dale Earnhardt died: “Praise Dale, death is coming for us all.”

This might come off as maudlin if Barham wasn’t such a veteran at wiring a crowd. A former member of his Southern Baptist church choir, where his dad was a deacon, he enrolled in North Carolina State University in 2002 to study political science and history, expecting to go on to law school. Instead he taught himself just enough guitar to drop out in his junior year and launch a rock-and-roll decade. 

His slash-and-burn years around the Raleigh club scene were well documented, as was his knack for writing the kind of lonely, alcohol-fueled ballads that played especially well at 1 a.m., when he’d usually be looking for a fan who would let him crash on their couch.

The aughts ended with what looked to be Barham’s last stand, the Isbell-produced Burn. Flicker. Die. “We had fully committed to putting this record out, maybe playing some shows on it, and then calling it quits,” Barham said. “Like, after seven years, nobody cared. We were playing in front of 15 or 20 people every night. And there was a moment where we all sat down and said, ‘Maybe we’re not good enough. Maybe I’m not a songwriter. Maybe this isn’t what our calling is supposed to be.’ And that’s OK. Because, like, we really worked at it.”

Instead, the album became a breakout success, earning rave reviews just as Americana was being redefined by performers like Isbell, his former bandmates in the Drive-By Truckers, and Sturgill Simpson. 

“It was like the universe flipped a switch for us and said, ‘Listen, you guys get to play music for the rest of your life now,’” he said. On the band’s 2015 album, Wolves, Barham replaced his bluesy guitar with a more spare, haunting production that mirrored the personal inventory he was taking. (The signature line on the album: “There’s a southern sadness that won’t let go of this heart of mine.”)

Two years after that, he was tested again, this time when his band—burned out by their schedule and Barham’s tight control over business—quit. As the online publication Saving Country Music noted, “Over 3,000 live shows played, and Barham was back to Square One.”

His 2018 album Things Change became a chronicle of a reset: New band. New daughter. New president. 

“Before that record, I wasn’t hyperpolitical in my songs,” he said. “Twitter, Facebook, yes. In person, yes. My songs, I did not talk about it.”

The birth of his daughter prompted a revelation. “I realized I never want there to be a moment in history where she comes to me and says, ‘Dad, you had a platform of 60-, 70-, 80,000 people, and this massive social thing happened in our society, and you didn’t talk about it.’ I never want her once to think her dad’s a coward.”

The bigger revelation was that honesty opened more doors than it closed. “People on Twitter are never gonna be nice to you,” he continued. “They’re gonna be like, ‘Hey, libtard, shut up.’ Or ‘Hey, commie, get outta here. I don’t love your music anymore.’ But I’ve learned that nobody comes up to you at a show and says that. 

“Most people come up to you and say, ‘Hey, man, I don’t agree with a lot of stuff you post on Twitter, but I love your music.’ And that gives me a door to open.”

Barham’s COVID-lockdown-inspired follow-up, Lamentations, worked on another level, going further into “the things that break us as human beings,” which resonated with listeners burned out and beleaguered by the pandemic. 

“The hard part is looking in the mirror, seeing the broken version of yourself and admitting that’s OK,” he said. “We’re all broken. It’s about not trying to cover it up, not trying to run from it, not trying to drink over it. It’s about looking at yourself and saying, I’ve got a problem and I’m gonna fix this problem.”

Barham’s new album, which reunites him with Lamentations producer Shooter Jennings, expands on that theme. Its catchiest song is “Messy as a Magnolia,” about the shedding tree outside the office. He writes:

“Sometimes people do horrible things 

Sometimes those people need a reason to change 

So, honey take my hand 

What part of ‘I ain’t leaving’ don’t you understand?”

Elsewhere, he seems to be having a conversation with ghosts. On “Southern Roots,” he sings:

“If there’s one thing I found,

You can’t change the way you sound.

You can only change the words you choose.

So, I’m putting in the work and digging in the dirt.

And replanting my Southern roots.”

This isn’t new turf. Tom Petty wrote very similar lyrics 40 years ago. But Barham had a specific audience in mind. “These are my teachers. This is the preacher. This is my parents,” he said. “This is half my family. This is most of the kids I grew up with. This is a large group of people that I do business with. They find themselves right of center.” 

And they’re the very listeners now helping him headline the kinds of venues that he used to watch more anodyne acts play. 

“A lot of people in this business think it’s not worth speaking up if it means losing half their crowd. …They’d rather straddle the fence the rest of their life, play it safe, and go to sleep in their vacation home. During the pandemic, there were some days I lost a thousand followers on Twitter. And I slept just fine. Where I’m from, we call that the trash taking itself out.”

The Fear of Standing Still is the sound of Barham wrestling with success that was never supposed to come and of a family life that has put warmth on the menu in his shows. 

American Aquarium is back home this month, with stops at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh on August 29; Greenfield Lake Amphitheater in Wilmington on August 30; and the Neighborhood Theatre in Charlotte on August 31.