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.
