When Marcus King dropped Darling Blue last September, he viewed the album as a personal retrospective. It was a record about growth, sobriety, and keeping demons at bay. King told Rolling Stone about choosing an even-keeled lifestyle, and the South Carolina native had a handful of tunes that reflected the impact of that decision.
At first, those songs landed on the cutting room floor, but King couldn’t let them go. Now, he’s released them on No Room for Blue, a companion album that drops on Friday.
King and his band began recording Darling Blue in Macon, Georgia, at the venerable Capricorn Studios — often cited as the birthplace of Southern rock — before finishing the project at Blackbird Studios in Nashville. Working with producer Eddie Spear (Zach Bryan, Brandi Carlile), King ended up with enough tracks to span two albums. He views them as complementary sides to the same story.
“We’ve got alternate versions of songs,” King tells N, “ones that didn’t quite make the cut, or that I thought should have made the cut but that got cut because we had so many to choose from. The name was our cute little way of saying that. The initial release was most of the Nashville stuff. This one makes me feel more like it’s Macon. All the shit on here, we recorded in Macon.”
Blue Drew Smithers, who plays guitar for King, says the studio time in Macon gave No Room for Blue a heavier slant toward Southern rock than Darling Blue.
“You were just trying to soak up as much as you can that would have played between the walls,” Smithers says. “Capricorn Studios was home of early Allman Brothers, Marshall Tucker, all that stuff. That label was a thriving label in the South in the Seventies, and I think a lot of the music that we listen to came out of there. We tried to take what they did and spin it our way.”
The LP will land on streaming services as Darling Blue/No Room for Blue, but savvy fans of King will note that it dropped in a physical format last November — as a Record Store Day vinyl release. The 12 tracks (including three of those alternate versions of Darling Blue songs) are all written or co-written by King.
Both projects were backed by the Marcus King Band, the first records for the group since 2018’s Carolina Confessions. Playing with his group, King says, was a driving factor in the decision to record in Macon.
“It was an immersion of all the things that inspired us,” King says. “Being in the space that had such a major role to play in the birth of Southern rock, it was important to us. It was our first band effort in several years.”
King and his band showcased their range and influences last weekend at Stagecoach, playing a set heavy on Darling Blue/No Room for Blue but highlighted by King inviting his wife Briley onstage to cover Little Feat’s “Willin’” as a duet.
The showstopping moment brought to light a part of King’s life that is as impactful as sobriety has been: Whether they want it or not, he and Briley are something of a modern power couple in country music. Briley, in particular, draws frequent attention from fans on social media both as an artist and a creator. Combined, they have more than a million Instagram followers. The consequence is a life, and a still-budding marriage, that often plays out in the public eye, with their moves monitored in social media replies or Reddit forums daily.
“Honestly, earnestly, it’s one of the toughest things,” King says. “Being in that public eye and trying to ignore the things that people say about you or say about your partner — especially the things that are just untrue — but not wanting to validate somebody’s nastiness by trying to dispute their allegations. The court of public opinion is so fucked, because there’s no check and balance. Your sentence for whatever they have perceived you to have done is the sentence in their mind. There’s no judge or jury.”
If there is a benefit to a marriage under a microscope, King says it is that it forces both him and Briley to find ways to simply be a couple, and it keeps their relationship fresh. “Date night is really important. You gotta keep a date night,” he says, “and you gotta keep romance alive.”
Marcus King Band is following the release of No Room for Blue with a short run in Texas, playing dance halls like Gruene Hall and Billy Bob’s, in early May. They’ll pick up their coast-to-cast headlining tour — Darling Blue Tour, Pt. 2 — in mid-May. The tour comes on the heels of an abandoned international run for King, spurred by the last-minute cancellation of the Byron Bay Bluesfest in Australia that was slated for early April. Part of that even-keeled outlook King is aiming to hold in his life and music is being able to roll with such changes. The goals he sets for his shows, he says, remain unchanged regardless of what happens at a business level.
“I want to walk off stage knowing that I was honest,” King says. “I’m being as honest as I can, every night that I perform. Some nights, maybe the truth just wasn’t all that worth listening to, but I still said all that I wanted to say.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose book (Almost) Almost Famous is available now via Back Lounge Publishing.
