Some songwriters trade in easy answers. Fairhope songwriter Grayson Capps is more interested in the tension between opposites: beauty and horror, joy and sorrow, the sacred and the profane. In a wide-ranging 2026 interview, the Brewton native talked about the father who shaped his worldview, his decades in New Orleans, why he has chosen to make his home on the Eastern Shore and the philosophy that runs underneath his songs.
The thread connecting it all is an idea he returns to again and again: that opposing forces are not simply at war but can exist together, and that life itself grows out of that tension.
A Preacher’s Son in Brewton
Capps grew up in Brewton, the Escambia County town in south Alabama known for its timber heritage and the creeks that wind through it. Both of his parents were schoolteachers. His father, a deeply spiritual man, served for a time as a Baptist preacher before becoming disillusioned with the church.
“He was a Baptist preacher for enough time to know that he didn’t want to do that, long enough to realize it was all a show,” Capps said. His father remained “deeply focused on theology, but looking at it differently.”
After leaving the pulpit, his father studied many of the world’s religions and philosophies, passing that curiosity on to his son at a young age. “His true thing was to want to help people, and to help himself and to find God,” Capps said.
His father’s friends were equally influential. They were a rowdy crowd who searched for truth in art and literature and, often, at the bottom of a whiskey bottle. On weekends, the house filled with men who would “drink and tell lies, praise Flannery O’Connor, smoke cigarettes and philosophize,” a line Capps later wrote into his song “A Love Song for Bobby Long.”
Capps describes those men running around the house reciting Shakespeare, Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty and singing songs as the most formative influence of his youth.
Beauty and Horror
Among those friends, none loomed larger than the man named Bobby Long. Capps has told the story of his father waking him at 4 a.m. to watch Long, sick after a night of drinking, so the boy could see the other side of the coin.
“I had the realization early on of beauty and the horror of it,” Capps said. “It’s the things that make you who you are.”
Capps went on to study theater at Tulane University in New Orleans. His father had written an unpublished novel about Bobby Long, and Capps was instrumental in seeing it adapted into a feature film. Released in 2004 as “A Love Song for Bobby Long,” the movie starred John Travolta and Scarlett Johansson and was set in New Orleans, with Capps’ music woven into the story.
While at Tulane, he joined a band called the House Levelers, and he has been writing and performing ever since. He has released nine albums and is widely respected in the Americana and roots music world. His latest, “Heartbreak, Misery, and Death,” collects songs he grew up hearing with his father and those friends, and its title hints at the flip side he finds in them: the joy that can come from listening to and singing sad songs.
New Orleans, Katrina and the Road to Fairhope
Capps spent about 20 years in New Orleans. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he left the city and eventually returned to Alabama to tend to family matters, moving to Fairhope by way of Nashville roughly 15 years ago.
“I love being from Alabama…because you have the extremes, you have NASA, and you have Tommy Tuberville,” he said. “I mean, you’ve got some of the best in the world, and some of the worst in the world.”
The contrast between New Orleans and the Eastern Shore was stark. “I spent 20 years in New Orleans, where I was a minority. And Fairhope is just kind of, homogenous, you know.”
With his family matters settled and his children grown and doing well, Capps said he has thought about moving back to New Orleans or somewhere more eclectic. But he has stayed. “I kind of like being in a place where I am not preaching to the choir, you know, where I can kind of offer the cultural diversity.”
A Black Sheep, and a Beacon
Capps admits he sometimes feels like a black sheep on the Gulf Coast. “What I do is not typical of Lower Alabama. I’m doing original songs and I kind of push the envelope with stuff, but I try not to be overtly challenging.”
He has never shied away from political statements, and some audience members have walked out of local shows because of them. One of his post-Katrina ballads includes the line, “George Bush, George Bush, you’re a lying hypocrite.” A lyric from his latest single has also drawn pushback: “God, guts, and glory are what make this country great; I’m thinking God, guts, and glory are the very words that make men hate.”
Yet Capps does not describe his songwriting as an act of resistance against his surroundings. Instead, he hopes to be a “beacon of light” for like-minded people. “That’s the very reason I feel like I kind of belong here, because (they) need me here,” he said. He pointed to his friend J.D. Crowe, the political cartoonist, “who is making his statement,” as someone who “relies on me to be here.”
A Fixture of the Bay Area Music Scene
For someone who says he is “not like everyone else in the trailer park,” Capps is thoroughly woven into the local music community:
- Callaghan’s Irish Social Club: He considers the Mobile pub and music room a “home away from home” and was among the first acts to play there.
- Joe Cain Day: Each year he leads a second line from Callaghan’s, dressed as Ol’ Slac, and performs. Joe Cain Day, held the Sunday before Mardi Gras, honors the Mobile clerk who revived the city’s Carnival celebrations after the Civil War by parading as the fictional Chickasaw chief Slacabamorinico.
- The Frog Pond: With his friend Cathe Steele, he started a spring and fall concert series in Baldwin County where musicians trade songs and guests bring a covered dish for a potluck. Now in its 16th year, the Frog Pond has gained international recognition.
- Dauphin Street Sound: He recorded his last album and is working on the next with Ryan Avinger at the downtown Mobile studio, “because I want to support the local thing.”
His wife, a four-time Grammy Award-winning sound engineer, has also shared her knowledge with the young studio. “She wants them to succeed, too,” Capps said. His newest project also features local talent Simone French.
Soul and Math
“Cutting an album is all about finding the perfect marriage between soul and math,” Capps said, “but it also has to be true. There are a thousand ways to tell a lie, but only one way to tell the truth. So, fortunately, most of the songs that I sing are easy, because they’re truthful.”
Most of his songs are not political at all. They are closer to spiritual, carrying on the search his father began. “I believe in a force that unifies us, that we are all connected, and it’s kind of what motivates me to perform, because I’m not simply entertaining, I’m trying to offer hope, and a message, and to make the world a better place.”
He tries not to be heavy-handed about it. “It is what interests me, and what I throw into songs, and I try not to be too overt,” he said. His small pieces of wisdom tend to arrive in songs about street performers and trash collectors, graveyards and dive bars.
He shared lines from a song on his new album:
“The weight of the world is loosening, the mosquitoes are biting on my arm, it’s twilight here on the farm, I open the first beer of the day, and transition to a different place, the weight of the world is loosening.”
“It’s a fragile walk,” he said. “Some people use the adage of walking the razor’s edge of how to navigate this life,” moving “between whatever the opposites are… things are not black and white, hot and cold, good and evil.”
And then he arrived at the idea that seems to sit at the center of his work. “I really do believe that if there is a higher power, it’s not one thing. It’s the relationship of things. That’s the reciprocating energy…What causes us to be alive are opposing forces.”
For fans on the Gulf Coast, the practical takeaway is simpler: Capps performs regularly around Mobile Bay, and his shows at venues like Callaghan’s and at the seasonal Frog Pond gatherings remain some of the most distinctive nights of music in the region. Schedules change, so check his official channels and venue listings for upcoming dates.