There was something poetically fitting about the fact that homegrown country-rock star John Magnuson chose The White Squirrel Bar on West 7th Street in St. Paul to hold the release party for his new album Denial, USA.
That sweet summer evening, the last day of July, sun going down outside the pub’s neon stained-glass windows as the Tom Schaefer-Tim Hennessy-Erik Lillestol trio loped their way through an opening set of old-timey country tunes, most of the club crawlers were inattentive to the city’s sweeps on unhoused encampments, the Trump administration’s repetitive lawsuits against Minnesota, etc.
But in Denial, USA’s 12 songs, there’s more soul-respite than overt commentary. Sparked by a certain cool indifference, the title track could’ve been penned by any American road-tripping through these times and towns named Anger, Fear, and Remorse before finally settling in Denial:
I was on a road, but I must have lost my way
Now alls I knows is I’m stranded here
In Denial, USA
Denial’s supposed to be a brief stop along the path
You walk to turn your tears of pain and sorrow into laughs
It’s just some place you pass through before your journey’s end
It’s not supposed to be the state you finally end up in
It feels like freedom here, but I know what the real truth is
Denial is a prison with lots of acreage
I’m free to meander, but if I go too far
I stub my toe and bump my head into the prison bars
“This wasn’t really written in response to the whole ICE thing here or anything else,” said Magnuson a couple days after the release party. “But to some degree, I chose that title for the album from that song just because it sounded vaguely relevant. You could take it in all sorts of different ways. Really, a lot of these songs on the record are old songs. When I started [performing live and recording) again in 2018, I just had a big stockpile of songs because I got out of it for so many years but I had always kept writing.
“I carry a little notebook like a lot of writers of any sort do, and I would jot down thoughts in verse, or come up with a title and try to jot down a first verse. I was doing it all the time, and so it would be my way of, and it often is my way of, working out conflicts with other human beings without having to actually have the conflict. I just kind of work out disagreements that I have with people in the lyrics a lot of the time.”
In that sense, Magnuson is a classic country songwriter, toiling in the arena of lost lovers, cads, cheaters, and the broken-hearted. Story songs that feel lived-in, with a wiseman at the helm whose voice recalls Porter Wagoner, Slim Dunlap, and John Prine.
“Well, I came out of the womb loving John Prine,” said Magnuson, whose first band, The Carpetbaggers, sprang up amidst the fertile alt-country No Depression movement of the early ‘90s. “I was in third or fourth grade when I first heard [Prine]. My older brother had an eight-track tape that he’d made, and it was like this unquestioning thing. I didn’t decide to like him, I just did. I just went bonkers over him. I started listening to him all the time, and I’m sure I didn’t get a lot of what was going on lyrically, because some of the stuff is kind of weighty, or substantive.
“But I just loved to look at the lyrics and listen to his first albums on Atlantic over and over again. I don’t know as much about John Prine, the big star in the latter days, but the early ’70s John Prine was huge for me, and then I moved from him to Bob Dylan. And then in the Carpetbaggers, we just immersed ourselves in that late ‘50s, early ‘60s country-slash-rockabilly. There were a ton of great songwriters that no one really ever hears about, and I really liked a lot of them as well.”
Now a prolific songwriter himself (and a sweet-souled singer who cites Wagoner, Ira Louvin, and Irma Thomas as influences), the genial Magnuson is currently leading an ace band and loving playing live for new and appreciative audiences after a lengthy post-Carpetbaggers hiatus from the stage and recording studio.
His band The John Magnuson Trio (bassist and Denial USA producer Paul McFarland, singer Jane Meyer, drummer John Sandbo, and guitarist J.J. Benson) bolsters Magnuson’s tales that could make for a honky-tonk jukebox bender at the CC Club. They create songs that hit acerbic, funny, human, humane, snarky, and swing-dance sexy, all tender mercies sung in a twangy howl that echoes Prince, Slim, Hank Sr., and Ray Price. And the songs sound like the song titles: “You Don’t Want To Know Him Any Better Than You Do”; “A Stranger’s Just A Friend I’ll Never Meet”; “I’d Wreck Their Marriage (If I Could)”; “You’re In This Mess The Same As Me.”
Denial, USA is stuffed with juicy guest contributions from artists like Adam Levy, Dylan Hicks, Brian Tighe, Doug Otto, Erik Brandt, Jeremy Szopinski, Margaret Hegg, and Tom Schaefer, and features trippy Cold War-era cover art by Tod Foley. Magnuson is quick to laud McFarland as the MVP of the record. McFarland brought to the studio his experience as an engineer, producer, and connective musical cog and live player with everybody from Run Westy Run to Lolo’s Ghost. He later joined Magnuson as a duo.
“That guy is just really one of the greatest guys,” said Magnuson. “The sole reason that we made this record, and that I’m playing with him, that he’s in my band, is just because I don’t find it easy to approach people I don’t know. I didn’t know him back in 2018, but I did feel comfortable approaching him, and that says a lot. And it hasn’t changed.
“He’s just very easy and very helpful. He’s very willing to say yes to ideas and just see what happens. I can’t say enough good things about that there feller. And he’s also just very musically adept. It’s just cool. It’s been a great thing to have made his association, and that’s how this all started.”
Magnuson’s music is well-documented in the Minnesota Music Archive. I asked him to take me through his catalog:
John Magnuson, Waiting For the Water to Recede (solo, 2024). “We made it quick and [producer] Rob Genedak works quick, and he was great. I love how efficiently he works, and we brought in Jeff Victor, who was the man on the keys, and it’s really crucial. [The origin of the title song is I live in] Southwest Minneapolis, and one year some time ago, it was just a five-inch deluge of rain in a half hour. I had a flooded basement, a waterlogged drain, waiting for the water to recede, and I was kind of thinking of The Carpetbaggers, with the lyric ‘wading in/walking on the water.’ You spring on the scene, and you’re filled with optimism, and then next thing you know, you’re no longer walking on the water, you’re just wading, and then eventually, you’re just waiting for the water to recede.”
John Magnuson, Barely Noticeable (solo, 2020). “That title track was funny. Mike Crabtree, The Carpetbaggers guitar player, and I were talking about how nobody wants to be completely anonymous, no matter what they say. But it’s good to be just…barely noticeable. Because if you’re barely noticeable, then you have a lot more freedom.
“It sort of is my tongue in my cheek because, of course, when we’re doing this kind of thing, we want to be noticed. We’re putting these records out for a reason. So I just thought it would be kind of funny to call the whole thing ‘barely noticeable.’ That’s how I felt, actually. That was the first solo record.
“I had a set of songs that were kind of more new at that point, and only a couple older ones that fit with that collection, so that left a whole bunch of others [unrecorded], which were more kind of hard-edged and funny and cynical, and those are the ones that ended up on Denial USA.”
The Carpetbaggers, Sin Now… Pray Later (Hightone Records, 1996). “That was the last [Carpetbaggers album], and the first two were on Jill McLean’s own Clean/Twin/Tone label, but that one was on Hightone out of Oakland, California. I should say that [label head] Jill was so nice, and a huge part of the Carpetbaggers.”
The Carpetbaggers, Nowhere to Go but Down (Clean Records, 1993). “Brian Paulson produced this. He had just finished, before he came to us, Anodyne by Uncle Tupelo. At that time, they were just a name to us, but then they kind of factored in because all of a sudden Jay Farrar kind of plucked us from obscurity, and we ended up touring with Son Volt. But that’s after the fact. This was our follow-up to our debut, and I just had a blast. It was so much fun to put out a record, the first one, and so it made songwriting more purposeful and exciting because I knew that these songs were going to have an outlet.”
The Carpetbaggers, Country Miles Apart (Clean Records, 1992). “That [album] has ‘Always a Pallbearer,’ which is [a song] that we still do. We’ve got a cool version of it, but that’s the one that people remember from that. It’s just kind of a dark humor kind of song, right? We made it at Creation Studios [in Minneapolis] with [producer] Tom Herbers, and he was able to get us in there for just a weekend. We did it quick. We did it in a weekend. We did it without even having a label or anything like that.”
Lo these many years later, Magnuson’s new band is up and running, with a spate of end-of-summer dates at Uptown Porchfest (Aug. 15), the White Squirrel (Aug. 16), the Schooner Tavern (Sept. 2), and the Dubliner Pub (Sept. 6). Now that he’s back in the groove, how does it feel?
“It feels great, and I’m almost afraid to admit it,” he said. “It was funny, when I was out of it, people would say, ‘Oh, you must miss it’, and I would say, ‘No, no, it’s fine,’ but God, I really did. I have a burning need for [music], so all that repression and suppression during that period is not fun to look back on. I mean, I need to do it. Yeah, need. So that makes me think about how when I wasn’t, how did I even survive?”
Jim Walsh is a veteran singer, songwriter, columnist, journalist, author, and historian from Minneapolis. He can be reached at jim@demomn.org