If The Fear of Standing Still, American Aquarium’s 10th studio album, out July 26, carries an unmistakable theme of home and comfort, credit that to Pearl.
Pearl Barham is 6 years old, and when she sets her sights on something she wants, she usually gets it. On a Monday afternoon in May, as her kindergarten class was letting out, that’s her father. When she spies her dad standing outside the school, she takes off running, leaping into his arms and wrapping all four limbs around him.
BJ Barham, her father and the frontman-founder of American Aquarium, no longer craves the road like he used to. Again, credit that to Pearl.
“I spent most of my 20s really thinking I’d never have this,” Barham tells Rolling Stone. “It seemed like a very unrealistic goal — to have a family. But now, there’s nothing more important than this. That kid is everything to me, and I would never do anything to jeopardize this me-and-her relationship. I joke that every relationship I’ve ever had, I’ve messed it up somehow. The only perfect relationship I still have is the one that me and my daughter have.”
I wasn’t supposed to be there when Barham and his wife, Rachael, scooped Pearl up from school. I was driving through their neighborhood looking for their house, and my route took me past them at just the right time.
A night earlier, Aquarium played a theater show in Macon, Georgia. The band tours very little in the summer because Barham is determined to share in Pearl’s summer vacation. They won’t start touring in earnest behind The Fear of Standing Still until late August, and the Macon concert — on a Sunday — had been a late pickup, largely to keep the band fresh before a long layoff. As a result, they traveled to Macon without a tour manager.
As he’s done for most of Aquarium’s 18 years, Barham took matters into his own hands. He sold his own merchandise from the moment the doors opened until the opening act — Jonathan and Abigail Payton — finished playing. He directed the band’s setup in the afternoon and settled payment with the venue after the show. In between, he stood center stage for what turned into a two-hour set. The crowd at the Capitol Theater sang along with “I Hope He Breaks Your Heart” and “Wichita Falls.” They cried during the encore when Barham set up an acoustic rendition of “The First Year” by describing the impact the death of his mother, on New Year’s Eve 2019, had on him. When it was all over, Barham left satisfied with the show.
“Seeing that I affected somebody. Seeing emotion,” Barham says about what makes a good performance. “We get a bad rap about being the band that makes a lot of people cry, but I wear that as a badge of honor. Being able to make someone emote, because of words that I put down on a page in my living room…that’s the ultimate high for me.”
Afterward, Barham rode Aquarium’s tour bus back to Nashville. The next morning, he caught a flight to Raleigh, then drove to the town of Wendell — the modest suburb east of Raleigh that the Barhams call home — in time for kindergarten pickup.
This is where The Fear of Standing Still came from. Barham is 40 and spent most of his 30s fighting demons of his own creation. He had lived a rock & roll lifestyle reserved for A-list headliners on their private jets to Ibiza, but being the biggest partier in Americana music takes a toll. He cycled through bandmates — Aquarium has six current members and 31 past members — and relationships at a torrid pace. He pushed his marriage to the brink, did the same with his music, and then pulled it all back. Barham is sober now, with coffee his final addiction. He’s got a pool behind his house and likes to sit next to it drinking tea from a mason jar. That’s where I joined him after Pearl was home to talk about this record.
The roots of the album came when Barham took stock of his career at a time when country music was awash with rising-star artists writing deeply personal songs — he’s been doing that since forming the band in 2007, well before current emo-country kings like Zach Bryan were vigorously strumming their acoustic guitars.
“Every day, you get on Instagram, and you see bands that you don’t think are as good as you, or haven’t been around as long as you, or haven’t paid the dues, getting bigger, while you’re slow growing,” Barham says. “Then I had somebody tell me that the only thing you have to fear more than slow change is standing still. That resonated with me.”
That explains the title, but a spin through the 10 tracks on the album — produced by Shooter Jennings — adds more context. “Home” never meant much to a younger Barham. He needed the road.
“I was afraid that if I took my foot off of the gas pedal, it all falls apart,” Barham says. “If I’m not the one playing 300 shows, or if I’m not the one outworking every band in the country, we don’t get where we are going. I was afraid to slow down and start a family.
“That’s what made the title work so well for me. I didn’t think about it, but it’s about turning 40. I’m finding peace in the fact that I am 40, and I am not a superstar. Unless something drastically changes, we’re not going to be superstars. But I get to make a living writing songs that mean something to people. If the only thing wrong is, ‘Why aren’t we any bigger?’ I’m very happy. Eighteen years into this career, not only have I built something, but I can take my foot off the gas.” (One such foot-off-the-gas request from Pearl, as Barham prepared for another road trip, lent the title track its chorus of “Don’t go. Please stay.”)
To turn this frame of mind into a record, Barham, who says the band now only plays 80 shows a year but to larger crowds, reached out to Jennings, who produced Aquarium’s 2020 release, Lamentations. Counting live recordings and projects like the pandemic-era Slappers, Bangers and Certified Twangerscover records, the band has put out 17 albums in 18 years. Lamentations charted higher than any of them, so Jennings already had set a bar.
“I really love this band, and I think that they’re a bunch of really great players that have really great ideas,” Jennings tells Rolling Stone. “They know that the way I produce records is the collaborative way, where everybody’s working together towards a common goal. And BJ knows that his band is in good hands with me, and they’re going to be heard. That’s not always the case, you know?”
Over his career, Barham usually prefers to switch producers from project to project. But — and here’s that common theme again — he found a comfort zone in Jennings.
“Shooter brings something out of our band that nobody’s ever been able to bring out of us,” Barham says. “We are a band that goes into a room and plays the songs live. We just want you to mic us up, let us play the songs, and give some direction. I joke that Shooter is a coach and a cheerleader all in one. He’s giving you the game plan, telling you what he hears and what he likes — but also reminding you, ‘Hey, by the way, you guys are a really great fucking band.’”
The Fear of Standing Still then is the sound of a rock band at the top of its game, providing a playground for Barham’s intensely personal and decidedly country-bent lyrics.
On “Crier” — co-written with Stephen Wilson Jr. — he implores listeners to shed the notion that people, especially men, are meant to bottle up emotions, with lines such as, “The first thing we do when we are born” and “Hell, it’s right there in the shortest verse in the Bible.”
That verse is, “Jesus Wept.” “The machismo guys, they like to lean on politics and religion,” Barham says, “but it’s the shortest verse in the Bible! Your dude cried! It’s OK to do it!”
When Barham looked out at the magnolia tree in his front yard dropping cones and leaves — “This is what keeps me from winning yard of the year,” he says — he saw a metaphor for his marriage and wrote the song “Messy As a Magnolia.” “It’s a big anthemic rocker,” he says, “about real love. Not fake love. The real, dirty stuff.”
Barham pays homage to his rural upbringing on “Cherokee Purples,” a ballad about how easily memories can be triggered. In his case, it’s a tomato sandwich made from a Cherokee purple heirloom, topped with Duke’s Mayonnaise. “It’s my favorite thing to eat, and every single time I take a bite of it, it transports me back to 1993 in Reidsville, North Carolina, on Mark Road, where my grandma lived, running around her backyard,” he says.
The idea came to Barham while he was, naturally, eating a tomato sandwich, and talking aloud about how good it was. Rachael overheard and asked, “Why aren’t you writing that song?” Barham already champions the Duke’s brand on social media, and he says there’s a partnership brewing in the wake of “Cherokee Purples.”
“So many people want guitar sponsorships and pedal sponsorships, but all I want is mayo sponsorships,” Barham says.
But brand endorsements don’t come easy to a guy known to rock the boat. Over the last few years, Barham has increasingly taken public stances on broad social-justice issues to more artist-focused topics, like venues taking a cut of merch sales. A pair of songs on The Fear of Standing Still — ”Babies Having Babies” and “Southern Roots” (featuring Katie Pruitt) — showcase this side of Barham.
“I feel strongly about things. I don’t have ‘eh’ opinions. I’m pretty definitive on what I stand for,” he says. “I never wanted my kid to come to a point in her life where she realizes, ‘Hey, Dad there was a thing that happened, and you had a platform, and you didn’t say anything.’ I never wanted her to look at me like a coward. I never wanted her to think, ‘My dad kept his mouth shut when something big was happening, because he wanted to keep a few extra Instagram followers.’”
On “Southern Roots,” Barham takes aim at a part of Southern life he says is holding back progress. The lyrics refer to this mindset as “Hate disguised as reverie,” and, in the chorus, he asks listeners to consider, “You can’t change the way that you sound. You can only change the words that you choose.” In the studio, Jennings worked with Aquarium to craft a melody to match the message.
“Part of the idea of ‘Southern Roots’ is that it slows down in the middle,” Jennings says. “We had this idea that the ‘old you’ is kind of like the acoustic instruments and Southern-like motifs. Then, the ‘new you’ is reinvented as this kind of slower, more sensible and orchestrated sound, kind of like the change that happens in the song.”
A few days before our poolside chat, Aquarium made their debut at Red Rocks Amphitheatre outside of Denver to open for Turnpike Troubadours. They played a 45-minute set but still earned a standing ovation from the sold-out crowd.
A decade earlier, Aquarium and Turnpike were inseparable, touring together for nearly two years. Good times? Yes. But they were also fueled by alcohol. Jason Isbell produced Aquarium’s breakout album, 2012’s Burn. Flicker. Die., and Isbell’s sobriety a year later inspired Barham. On Aug. 31, 2014, he stood on the bar at the Magnolia Motor Lounge in Fort Worth, Texas, downed a glass of whiskey, and declared, “I’m done!”
“I’d be dead if it wasn’t for sobriety and recovery,” Barham says. “I’m fortunate. I got to see what happened to a friend of mine. We made a record with Jason when he was not sober. Then, within two years of him getting sober and putting out Southeastern, you got to watch a friend who was living the exact same lifestyle you were, make a life change, and then success happened. Well, a light bulb goes off: ‘Holy shit, maybe I should get out of my own way, too.’”
It took a few more years to fully right the ship. In 2017, Barham’s entire band quit. Looking back, he says he can’t blame them or any of the 31 prior members of Aquarium. It took a long solo tour and some soul-searching before Barham rebuilt the band. The current incarnation — Barham, guitarist Shane Boeker, pedal-steel guitarist Neil Jones, keyboardist Rhett Huffman, drummer Ryan Van Fleet, and bassist Alden Hedges — has been around nearly the entire time since that rebuild. Barham hopes it’s the band he plays with the rest of his life.
“This band is healthy. The previous versions of the band were toxic, in some form. There was always somebody being super negative, but a lot of times that negativity was justified,” he says. “Looking back, yeah, I was a dick. I was a drunk asshole. I was a boss. But now, the workplace environment has changed so much. And these guys aren’t living in a van 300 days a year, wondering how they’re going to pay their phone bill. These guys are on a bus. These guys get paid on time.”
With a four-hour drive ahead of me, Barham and I begin to say our goodbyes. But it’s easy to see him talking into the night or beyond, depending on what’s left on his mind. He insists that Poole’s Diner in Raleigh is where I need to stop for “that one meal” in his hometown, and in an hour, he’ll be proven reliable (beef tenderloin and brown-butter carrots). On the way out, he notices his wife and daughter at a table, working on some makeshift crafts. He asks what’s up.
“We’re decorating the house,” Rachael says.
Their cat, as it happens, is turning 16. The Barhams have a birthday party to throw.
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose third book, Red Dirt Unplugged, is set for release on December 13, 2024, via Back Lounge Publishing, and available for pre-order.
