Charlie Overman Is the Young Kentucky Sweetheart Country Music Needs
On a horse farm with the 22-year-old singer-songwriter, talking about his sludge metal past and his bittersweet odes to his best friends.
Charlie Overman jumps the wooden posts on his friend’s horse farm and introduces me to a mare wearing a pink fly mask that makes her look like a superhero. “I haven’t climbed a fence in a while,” he says, half-apologetically, after some clumsy hoisting. The paddock is down in Versailles, Kentucky—pronounced “Ver-sales”—near Overman’s hometown of Lexington. If he’s not hanging around the storied Green Lantern bar or working a legal assistant job that he doesn’t particularly care for, this is probably where you’ll find him, amid wind chimes, braying donkeys, and a nearby apple orchard. As we chat via video on a clear summer day, he drinks water from a comically giant thermos. About an hour in, he excuses himself: “Do you care if I piss real quick?”
This farm is immortalized in “Gentle Understandings,” a homespun ballad in which Overman sings of feeding horses to pass the time in the wake of a breakup. His scratchy voice makes him sound older than his years, as does the song’s wounded sense of regret. It’s a feeling heightened by details that immediately welcome you into the songwriter’s country milieu. “You’re treasured more than fly sheets on old mares in the middle of July,” he sings, and one gets the impression that this is the utmost of compliments.
Winsome, scene-setting lyrics are found throughout Overman’s recent self-titled debut album—about sledgehammers “crawling with barcode stickers and deer ticks” and wild hogs that would “eat the poison ivy off the trees,” about limes in the urinal of a punk bar and tire swings that hang a little too low. In the spirit of the legendary John Prine, these details are all in service of Overman’s finely drawn character studies; it seems like a verse doesn’t go by without someone being mentioned by name. There are has-beens like Capps, who longs for his high school football glory days while “smoking weed in the garage.” But most of the time Overman is paying tribute to loved ones with lyrical portraits that can be both chummy and unflinching atop unfussy rock’n’roll, bluegrass, and country instrumentation. The rollicking “Canada Thistle (All of My Friends)” is inspired by his crew in the Lexington country music scene: “I care about ’em more than my own health,” he sings.
Overman is joined on that hook by one of his mentors, Linda Jean Stokley, who owns the horse farm where he’s sitting and plays in a band called the Local Honeys. The two became fast friends during the pandemic, when Stokley started giving Overman guitar lessons over Zoom, specifically teaching him how to play bluegrass and old time. Later on, after a late night of jamming amid a crowd of pickers, Overman shared an original song with her for the first time. “I was a few beers deep, and he came over and said, ‘You want to hear something I wrote for my best friend?’” Stokley remembers. It was an ode to a woman with a troubled late brother who’s tougher than shit but still gets sad on her dead dad’s birthday called… “Linda Jean.” Stokely couldn’t help but crack up when she first heard the forthright homage, which is also included on Overman’s album. “I was just rolling because I also have a pretty dark and twisted sense of humor,” she says. “I’ve written about my family’s dirty laundry, their mental health issues, and he put all of it in one song. It was just so funny.”
There’s a warmth in Overman’s music that makes it easy to understand why he’s so good at making friends. Stokley describes him as a gregarious presence reminiscent of her grandfather, who was also named Charlie. “I lost him when I was in high school,” she says, “but being friends with Charlie fills this sweet spot in my heart.” Don Rogers, who plays guitar on the album, remembers first meeting Overman, who was just a tipsy stranger in cut-offs, Corona slides, and a makeshift crop top at the time. “He came up to me like, ‘Don!’ He put his arm around me. I was like, ‘Who the hell is this?’”
With their lyrical depth and worn-in twang, the eight tracks on Overman’s album sound instantly canonical—which is even more impressive considering the fact that he only started writing country songs in the past two years. That’s said, he’s been playing music for over half his life. When he quit baseball around age 10, his dad encouraged him to pick up guitar. As a teenager, Overman joined a pop band called People Planet. At 17, he started an instrumental post-sludge metal group called Forrest.
“I started paying attention to lyrics listening to Death,” he says, referencing the influential ’80s and ’90s metal band, who wailed against the powers that be on blistering tracks like “Misanthrope.” So when Overman sings, “Pentecostal ladies probably think I’ve got some evil secret underground lair” on his song “Cutting My Hair,” he’s referencing his own roots in Eastern Kentucky. “That’s about when I was a teenager and bought my first Metallica T-shirt from Hot Topic,” he says. “My grandmother was concerned.” Overman and I both came up in Appalachia with Democratic mothers, so the conversation gets briefly spicy around politics and propaganda in the region. “Fuckin’ Christians, man,” he sighs. “Jesus Christ.”
When Forrest fizzled out around 2019, Overman joined his friend Jon McGee’s rock’n’roll band the Clap and started obsessing over classic singer-songwriters like Gram Parsons, Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, and John Prine.
Beyond his chops as a lyricist, Overman chronicles his life in prose too. He sends me an essay about a weanling being euthanized—some heartbreaking shit he had to live through during the two years he worked on a Lexington horse farm while studying writing, rhetoric, and communications at Transylvania University. In it, he writes about a tranq gun meant for thicker cattle hide and about the noise he made after successfully trapping the wounded creature.
While he worked on that horse farm, he listened to the music of John R. Miller, an acclaimed alt-country underdog from West Virginia. Then, in a twist of fate, Miller shouted out Overman’s album on Instagram and recently took him out on tour. Miller learned Overman’s song “Little Miami,” and they played it together every night, with Miller even hitting the guitar solo. “That completed me, man,” Overman says, still in awe. “John R. is one of my heroes, and to get to go up on stage, and he’s learned my fuckin’ song? That made my fuckin’ year.”
Moments like those let him know he’s on the right path. “Sometimes I think I’m the shit,” he says. “I wouldn’t have sank thousands into making a record if I didn’t.” He keeps getting follows and DMs from more of his heroes, and he’s eyeing a future as a headlining artist. “I really want to have 20 great songs so I can play an hour-and-a-half set,” he says.
When asked to dream bigger, possible futures come spilling out: the Ryman or the Opry. Austin City Limits. A late-night talk show moment. It all feels possible. For now, though, he’s out here in Linda Jean’s paddock, making his way through the same grounds where he takes long walks with friends, hanging out with the donkeys, and gazing toward the old barn on the horizon. You know, the stuff of great songwriting.
Check out more of Evan Minsker’s work at his punk and rock’n’roll newsletter, see/saw.
