As we all know, success hardly has anything to do with talent. But artistic talent is the kind of opiate that counters the downer that is the music business. Take Thad Cockrell. He has never drawn even 100 people to shows in his own home base of Raleigh, North Carolina. He needs a booking agent, he says, a day job, perhaps, and he hopes to find a way to break through to the next level.

But that doesn't stop the singer-songwriter from thinking big. He's championed the slogan "There's No Alt In My Country" and has no trouble imagining his bittersweet music -- somewhere between the country rock of Whiskeytown (sans Ryan Adams' rock angst) and '70s country-pop -- finding a home on commercial country radio. (However, at least one such programmer feels otherwise (see below).)

In a more benevolent world, Cockrell's songs would be found on mainstream country radio. Nearly the entirety of his Yep Roc Records debut, Warmth & Beauty , goes down easy: songs make you feel a little happy, they make you feel a little sad. Produced by former dB Chris Stamey and featuring cameos from Caitlin Cary and Tift Merritt, Warmth & Beauty answers the promise of Cockrell's 2001 demo-compiling debut, Stack Of Dreams, more assured, more crystallized, and simply better sounding effort. Or, as Cockrell says, Warmth & Beauty "was meant to be a record."

Whether country domination for Cockrell is around the corner, or even down the highway, is a discussion perhaps not unlike pondering the sound of one hand clapping. Besides, the future could quite easily mean perennial left-of-the-dial cult status or even a migration toward spiritual music -- a legitimate potential path for this graduate of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University and former seminary student. The thing is, it's barely dawn in the Cockrell's career. He's still finding his way. MoMZine editor Neal Weiss goes along for the ride.

MoMZine: You have a slogan of sorts: "there's no alt in my country." What do you mean?

COCKRELL: The thing with the whole alt-country is, I hear a lot of records and they sound right, you know, but they're not right. They have the twangy guitar and you automatically know that this is edgy and it's way too twangy and edgy to get played on country radio. So they're like, "Oh this is a great country record." To me, it seems like people have been able to get away with that in the alt-country genre. But the things that make country records are great country songs. I'm not saying mine are great country songs but just lyrically they're really different. It's different. There's no alt in my country. Toby Keith, that's alt-country to me.

MoMZine: What's a good country song?

COCKRELL: Grab a Willie Nelson record, put it in and push play. Any track. The thing about country music, at its best it's really brilliant because it's incredibly simple. And the melody is really great, it's poignant and you can't believe the joker just said that. But it's also brilliant because it's clever. Like "Hello Walls," when Willie starts talking to the window and he says, "Oh look there, is that a teardrop in the corner of your pane, now don't you go and tell me that it's rain," every time I hear that line I just want to go outside and yell. That's so creative. But the simplicity of the song is that he's so lonely that he ends up talking to the walls. He spent eight Friday nights alone at home and you just don't think that any relief is going to be around the corner. So you start talking to things. I think more people do that than you think.

On "Funny How Time Slips Away," in less than 3 ½ minutes you hear a conversation with him and his ex-girlfriend, with her and her new lover, and Willie runs the whole gamut of the relationship, carries on a conversation with both of them, and then sings, "Did you say that you'd love him until the end of time…seems like you said that just the other day, gee ain't it funny how time slips away." Ahhh, I gotta go yell [laughs].

MoMZine: Another good Thad quote: "putting the hurt back in country." There is no hurt in country music right now?

COCKRELL: Oh man! No! I hardly hear it! Even like with the alt-country, you'd think you'd hear it. Chip Robinson got it with the Backsliders -- he was way into it. But it seems like more now these days with alt-country, like, people write songs about strange characters. And I'm like, alright, I can't relate to that. Sure I've met strange characters. But I just don't hear [hurt]. Like, 25 years ago, just in order to dry the eyes between all the great songs that were playing on the radio, they would have George Jones playing "White Lightning." There's a place for "White Lightning," but it was sandwiched between "He Stopped Loving Her Today" and you name it. But now it seems like everything is like "White Lightning" and nothing is like "He Stopped Loving Her Today." If that's what they want to do then it's great, but surely there's some guys who still cry because they lose their girlfriends and there's a girl that still gets upset because she's lost her man.

MoMZine: Can you imagine yourself on country radio?

COCKRELL: Completely. That's where I want to be. I mean, that's just the most un-cool thing probably to say but I want to make music for regular people. The thing that's frustrating, people come up to me and they're like, "You know what? I don't country music at all but I really like yours." And I just want to shake my head and say, "I'm sorry to break this to you, and I won't say it too loud, but [my music] is as country as it gets."

A couple weeks ago I went to our big country radio station here in town with the label and we bought them all dinner and they had all the DJs and the program director in there and everything and I played a couple songs for them and I pitched it to them. I said, "Here's the deal. Robert Earl Keen and this whole Texas country movement, they all say that had Texas radio not had enough guts to play their songs the rest of the world wouldn't know who they are. Like it or not." And, I said, because they did, you got the likes of Pat Green, who I'm not crazy about, but he's selling tons of records. I said, "We have a really cool chance here to play some stuff that isn't gonna sound like what is coming out of Nashville, it's gonna sound like what's coming out of North Carolina." Sure enough, we let them sit on and then we followed up and the program director was like, "You know, it's not upbeat enough and the songs are too long." I want to write her and I want to be like, "You know what? I hear you but have enough guts to try it. You don't know what they like." The thing is, radio listenership is down, but then when new things are brought up, they don't have enough guts to say, "I'm gonna give this five weeks of play. What's it gonna hurt?" I kinda want to tell her, "When you go into a perfume store, you smell lots of perfume and they've kind of got a palette cleanser that's a bowl of coffee beans, and you smell the coffee beans to clear the senses. So, play all the stuff you want and then, just for a sensory cleaner, play one of my songs." I don't think they'll buy into it [laughs].

I do see their point. The stuff is really not cool sounding. It's not edgy enough, 'cause I'm not influenced by punk rock. It doesn't have punk rock overtones. It is strange though, because our live shows are completely different from this record. I would feel comfortable following a punk rock band.

MoMZine: Why is that?

COCKRELL: Our live set is just completely rocking. Here's what happened with this record. The songs that sounded the best when we were done, that we thought we got really good takes of, are the songs that made it on the record. But this whole record could have been different if we would have gotten good takes of three songs that were really upbeat. But because of a limited budget, you just don't have time to go back in so that's the record that we have.

MoMZine: Are you happy with the record?

COCKRELL: Absolutely.

MoMZine: What about it pleases you most?

COCKRELL: At this point, I'm not sure. But I would like to think that if you ask me that question in six months, what pleases me the most about this record is that it allows me to go out and play music. It's just so hard to get in clubs right now, even with this release, to get a really great booking agent that has a big roster. But I would like to think that I released something that nothing sounds like right now. I think everybody thinks, when you're in the middle of it, "Oh, nobody's doing stuff like this."I don't think there are songs that are being written like "She Ain't No You."

MoMZine: Do you have a particular songwriting process?

COCKRELL: There's nothing I hate more than false humility... I know that I write songs but I don't consider myself a songwriter. I don't think I'm good enough to do that yet. But for some reason I try to be friends with songs and I think they're out there just kinda floating in the air. When it comes to me, I'll write it down. Sometimes the words come before the melody, most of the time they all come at once. To me, life happens and then songs appear. But no, there isn't one set thing. I rarely will have ideas that I want to write. I'm just not that smart, really, to be able to take an idea and make it into something. Usually they just come to me and I'm just happy as can be and thankful that they decided to.

MoMZine: How has being in the Raleigh scene helped you?

COCKRELL: There's really no scene here. It's really been over-pronounced. There's a lot of talent… I've been playing around here for four years, I've never pulled 100 people to one of my shows [laughs]. That's depressing enough to go bang your head up against a concrete wall. And that's in the midst of hundreds of so-called real music fans. I would venture to say I've never pulled 75 people. I don't play in town. It's too depressing.

MoMZine: What about having access to people like Chris Stamey and Caitlin Cary?

COCKRELL: Those two people there have been incredibly, incredibly important. I would say that if there is any reason why I felt like I was brought here was probably because of my relationship with Chris Stamey and with Caitlin and her husband Skillet, who was my first drummer. So it has been good in the sense that it has afforded me the opportunity to play with some really, really fine musicians. But as far as affording me the opportunity to make any kind of living, it just has not.

MoMZine: When did you realize you could sing? When did you decide that you could pursue this?

COCKRELL: I'm not sure I've decided that [laughs]. I always loved singing growing up. I was crazy about it. My parents had a lake house at Lake of the Ozarks, and we would drive down there from Kansas City, and we would listen to these Southern Gospel records and I would sing all the parts -- tenor, baritone... I couldn't sing bass but I heard it. But I think the thing that took me so long, once I started playing music, was that I had to get over the oddness of [the idea that] I could choose to do this for a living. Nobody in my family is artistic, and I don't anybody on both sides of my family, going all the way down, that have made any attempt at making a living at doing art.

MoMZine: What was your anticipated career path before this?

COCKRELL: I don't know if I've ever had a hardcore "this is what I'm gonna do." I've always been kind of open about it. I still am.

MoMZine: Do you currently work?

COCKRELL: No. I do odd jobs here and there. I have these lawns that I mow once a week. But for the most part, there's so much time that goes into this. It's a business. It's not a good business or profitable business for me right now but it's like anything else. But no, I don't have a job. I'm kind of hardcore about it. My mom, she'll say, "Thad why don't you just get a job to do on the weekend?" And I'm like, "Because that makes it a second option." And it isn't a second option for me.

MoMZine: Were you surprised by the attention the first record received?

COCKRELL: Oh my Gosh. We've got reviews of the record on my website, and if somebody were to hand me a pen and a paper and say, "You write your own reviews," there's no way I would have been so generous. Honestly, I don't think I can take the credit for a lot of that. I think Jeff and Corrie [from Miles Of Music Recordings] really helped out a lot and I think they had made so many wonderful friends that when they did send it out people listened to it. And I think, ultimately, it had to stand on its own musical credits, but I would have never have guessed that Mojo would have picked that record in their top 10 of the year.

MoMZine: It's not often in this business that we encounter an artist that attended Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. What was that like?

COCKRELL: [laughs] I mean, it has its problems. I think Jerry does a lot of great things that are never brought to the public, and I think he says a lot of stupid things. Right or wrong, half of everything is delivery. Sometimes I want to take to him "First Corinthian 13," the whole chapter, and just say, "You're talking pretty hateful here. And while I do understand if you want to talk against sin, that's fine. You can do that but you still need to read chapter 13." They call that the "love" chapter in the bible and it says if you throw yourself in the fire for the needy, if you do all these things but you know not love then it's worthless, futile.

But honestly, Liberty was an amazing place to be. Incredibly creative souls there, beautiful people. My friends at Liberty are the ones that turned me on to songwriting, to Neil Young and Bob Dylan. Here's how cool Liberty is: It's a Christian school but I could send you four records that have been made by my friends [from Liberty] this year that are probably among my top five favorite records that I've heard this year. That's pretty damn cool. I mean, it has its idiosyncrasies, but, honestly, it was kind of fun not to be able to go off campus after 12 a.m. because then you had to find a way to sneak off and then you've got something to talk about -- when you've got campus cops chasing you through the woods when you decided to sneak off campus naked. You can't have that much fun at a state college, nobody would care. Or you're supposed to wear a tie but for some crazy reason I was able to go all the way through college wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. All my friends, they would get in trouble if they didn't wear a tie -- the RAs would walk right by me and get on them. It gave me something to rebel against. I mean, there's hardly anything to rebel against anymore. If you're gonna do rock 'n' roll, the thing to do if you're gonna be a rebel is to completely not have any tattoos, no ear-piercings, no colored hair, completely clean-cut, gelled hair back… but then you'd look gay [laughs].

MoMZine: Would you ever make a complete gospel record?

COCKRELL: Absolutely. I'm not there yet because I don't think I have the songs. Also, I want to wait until I have a bigger audience. It probably won't be a gospel record for the church either. It won't be a gospel record for the CCM [Contemporary Christian Music] market, I'll say that much. The thing that sometimes disenfranchises me with the church is that they all act so perfect, or they don't talk about problems and struggles. Me, man, I'm a believer because I've got problems.

MoMZine: What's your idea of a good gospel record?

COCKRELL: The songs that John Fogerty did with the Blue Ridge Rangers -- you feel joy. That's pretty great. Most people wouldn't call it a gospel record but I think Julie Miller's Broken Things… that's what gospel records should be about. Probably one of the greatest records and it absolutely ticks me off that the Christian community doesn't even know it. It frustrates me and almost makes me feel like I have no hope. If that stuff doesn't penetrate, you know, I'm not sure what will. But what I would love to do is kind of like the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band -- they went back with Will The Circle Be Unbroken and they got a lot of the old players. I think there are a lot of really cool Christians that aren't trying to make music for CCM. They're actually trying to make music on its own merit and let it stand up on its own feet. And I would like to try to get them, and then some of the older songwriters that I grew up listening to, and do a record. I think that would be really cool.

The thing is, I've got connections, and I think, "Why don't I just do the CCM thing?" It would be no problem for me to make records and I think do well because of all of the people that you meet at Liberty.

MoMZine: Why not do that?

COCKRELL: Because I would have to completely change what I do. I would have to make compromises that I think I would absolutely never make. Like I said, what I would sing about probably they don't want to hear. But connections, yeah, I've got friends that run the two biggest CCM booking agencies. Like, I'm friends with CCM people, if not fans of their music. Like Michael W. Smith and these people, if I was to go to Nashville I could stay at their houses just as easily as I could anybody else's. But, phew, I couldn't imagine doing it.

MoMZine: You and Caitlin Cary have long threatened to do a duets record. Will that ever really happen?

COCKRELL: I think it would be no problem for us to do it. She keeps dipping into the reserve of songs when she does her records [laughs]. It's crazy, when we get together we just write a bunch. But she has been so busy and I've not been as busy as she has but busy enough so that we just haven't been able to get together. But literally, every time we get together we write two or three songs, which is quite a bit for an afternoon. We wrote "Thick Walls Down," which was gonna be on the duets record and then I wrote pretty-much all of "Please Break My Heart" -- I think I had her help me out on a couple lines on the second verse -- and Chris [Stamey] is like, "Ask Thad if we can put the song on the record." Heck, am I gonna say no? I want people to cover the songs I write.

MoMZine: But there's definitely a chemistry there.

COCKRELL: Definitely. And I love performing with her. There's also a really cool chemistry just performing with her.

MoMZine: Funny to think that the other person she often duets with is totally opposite of you.

COCKRELL: Ryan Adams? Yeah. But I'm gonna start being an asshole. I'm not so sure that being a nice guy it cutting it.