Live in-studio: Dwight Yoakam

Among country superstars, Dwight Yoakam has always been a guy who didn’t fit in. A cool, mysterious dude in a crowd of boys next door. An Appalachian-turned-Angeleno who spurned Nashville. An actor with a penchant for playing creeps, psychos, and other unsavories. And in 2012, Yoakam enlisted Beck to produce a few songs on his album, “3 Pears.”

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“It’s an expression of the music I hear going on in my head,” Yoakam tells Kurt Andersen. “I feel free of genre boundaries.” “Trying” is Yoakam’s take on 1960s R&B; “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke” recalls the “cowpunk” fusion that peaked in the ‘80s; the record even features a few piano ballads.

Yoakam tells Kurt that the diversity of Los Angeles has had an important influence on country music. “There’s always been a great commingling going back to the Dust Bowl collision of cultures,” he says of Southern California. “It begat the hybrid forms of country music.”

Kurt asked Dwight Yoakam about his crossover success. His answer involves a “mosh pit pogo-sticking” punk rock kid, a somersaulting security guard and flying beer bowls. You have to hear it to believe it.

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The band in our session includes Eugene Edwards on guitar, Brian Whelan on mandolin and accordion, Jonathan Clark on bass, Mitchell Marine on drums and Yoakam on guitar and vocals.

Dwight Yoakam is now on tour.

(Originally aired February 15, 2013)