Musician Doug Levitt: Finding inspiration from travelling on the Greyhound bus

Many of us have taken a Greyhound bus while in the United States and maybe not really given it much thought, but American singer-songwriter Doug Levitt has taken things one step further by using his experiences to create a full-length album.

Titled Edge of Everywhere, the 12-track LP – Doug’s first – strikingly documents Levitt’s Greyhound bus travels over the course of more than a decade, with over 120,000 miles logged, and tells the inspiring stories of folks he has met along the way.

Doug spoke to the Cambridge Independent from Los Angeles, while preparing to fly out to the UK to perform at an Americana event in Kent called the Black Deer Festival, to support Laura Cantrell on her UK tour, and to take the stage at the Cambridge Folk Festival later this month.

Doug is a bona-fide ‘ramblin’ man’, like in the famous Allman Brothers song which also mentions a Greyhound bus, and says: “I’ll be in the UK for almost a month, and I love the UK – I actually lived there for a few years.

“Before I became a singer-songwriter, I had a career as a London-based foreign correspondent. So I was based out of London and I went to Iran, I went to Rwanda, I went to Bosnia – places like that.

“Then of course, as you do, I became a singer-songwriter because it’s just the next stop in a career progression! I moved back to the States, moved to Nashville, and began this journey.”

Produced by multiple Grammy Award-winner Trina Shoemaker, the producer/engineer behind albums by Brandi Carlile, Josh Ritter, Sheryl Crow and Emmylou Harris, Edge of Everywhere is drawn from Doug’s travels on the Greyhound and tells the tales of some of the people he’s come into contact with while travelling.

“It’s almost without fail on the bus,” says Doug. “Sometimes I’ll be on the bus and I’m travelling somewhere and I think ‘what kind of stories would there be around me, or is there anybody talking?’ It’s not like I’m interviewing people, people are just next to me, or you’re passing time between places…

“Each story I find, so many are as searing and affecting as the one before it, because for people who travel by Greyhound in America, everybody’s sort of living life on the edge, where any sense of security could have been counted in months or years, but more like days and weeks.

“So you have a real cross-section of people who are brought together – it’s just a very unique form of travel because you’ll sometimes be travelling with folks for days on end, and it’s bleary and you almost feel like you’re in a kind of Twilght Zone where you’re doing bus transfers at three in the morning… now you’re in a tiny, one-stop town and now you’re in a big metropolis – and you’re doing so on very little sleep.”

Doug, who previously worked for CNN and ABC while living in London, notes that once he started writing songs about his experiences and about people he met while travelling around his homeland on the ‘dog’, he found it hard to stop.

“Everything lends itself to that kind of rendering in song,” he explains, “and there’s obviously a very strong tradition in Americana music, or in country music, of ‘story songs’.”

All of the travelling was undertaken, Doug says, with the intention of writing songs. Inspired by the great storyteller Woody Guthrie, the friendly and outgoing musician reveals that he was fleeing a failed engagement and that he was broke at the start of his journey.

“It wasn’t like I had some massive plan,” he says, “other than I had seen what was going on in the country and a level of disparity and inequality, and I tried to think about what, if anything, could I do, and this seemed to be what I came up with!

“I got an initial six-week Greyhound pass and now it’s more than 12 years and 120,000 Greyhound miles on, and along the way I’ll perform in everything from prison shelters and veterans’ hospitals to the Lincoln Centre or the Kennedy Centre, and the bus has been the form of transport.”

The Greyhound is the cheapest means of travel in the US and largely serves the poorest in the community. Inspired by Depression-era projects, like that of the aforementioned Woody Guthrie, Doug has travelled to every single state in the continental US using the service.

“There’s something about being on a bus,” he observes, “where sort of moving murals are passing by you. There are lights from passing cars and streets of red and white, and there’s the hypnotic rumble of the wheels beneath you…

“It’s not some kind of halcyon view; there’s also drudgery and difficulty and it’s an arduous form of travel – it’s not like just some pastiche, but that also does exist, because the bus carries veterans and ex-offenders…

“In America, basically everybody who gets out of prison is offered a Greyhound ticket back to where their case was, and so I’ve met people who are an hour out of prison.

“You have a lot of people contending with mental illness and addiction and how those are intertwined, and like I said, veterans who are dealing with PTSD, and single parents – you just have a real mix of folks.”

Doug has certainly met some interesting characters. “I woke up one morning – it was like three in the morning – and there was a guy sitting next to me, shaved head, really imposing looking and I’d seen some tattoos on his left arm; they were like Nordic or something, and just to make conversation, I was like, ‘Oh, nice tats’.

“Then the lights came on and I saw his other arm and it was a Hitler tattoo on his entire forearm, like a pristine Hitler tattoo that had been done in prison, that he said he got because he put the ‘work’ in.

“I kind of wanted to go back and say, ‘Hey man, about the tats, the ones on your left arm I thought they were good, your right arm…’ but I wasn’t really in a position to. It was a packed bus, I couldn’t move anyway, and the unsavouriness of his beliefs in that area were quite obvious.”

Despite situations like this, Doug says he’s never personally felt unsafe on a bus. “I mean I did grow up in Washington DC and certain kind of big city rules apply when you’re travelling,” he says, “but the thing about the bus, and irrespective of this guy – that’s a totally separate story – I have found that rather than finding the areas of disconnection and how we’re different, people tend to seek points of connection when we travel. It’s a more natural thing. And it’s very different from any other form of travel.”

Doug has also made some very good friends while on his travels – he went to visit one in Galveston, Texas, who inspired his song Red Lights in the Sky (which isn’t on the album) about six months ago – and has enough ‘Greyhound’ songs for another album.

Expect to hear tracks from the yet-to-be-released volume two of Doug’s songs inspired by his travels and from Edge of Everywhere – I’m hoping to hear the excellent 40 West and Highway Signs – when he appears, on the new Stage 3, at the Cambridge Folk Festival on Saturday, July 29.

For more information on the Cambridge Folk Festival, go to cambridgelive.org.uk/folk-festival. For more on Doug, visit douglevitt.com.