Mike Campbell Enlists Graham Nash, Lucinda Williams, Chris Stapleton, and Heartbreakers on the Dirty Knobs’ Third Album ‘Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits’

When Mike Campbell finished interviewing Graham Nash on his SiriusXM podcast The Breakdown, he mustered up enough courage to approach the Crosby, Stills & Nash legend about adding some harmonies to a song he was working on. “I sheepishly asked if he would consider doing a harmony, and he said ‘Yes,’” Campbell tells American Songwriter. “He [Nash] said, ‘Yeah, I’ll make your song better,’” shared Campbell of the song on his website. “And he did. It sounds like the Hollies.”

Later, Campbell would shoot a video for the Nash-featured track, “Dare to Dream,” in Tulsa, Oklahoma with snapshots from Leon Russell’s The Church Studio where it all started for him and Tom Petty in the early ‘70s and where their pre-Hearbreakers band Mudcrutch made their first recordings for Shelter Records, a poignant stop on the band’s trek from their hometown of Gainesville, Florida to Los Angeles in 1974.

With Nash’s backing vocals checked off, the wheels turned faster for Campbell and his band the Dirty Knobs’ third album Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits. When Chris Stapleton was in town, he laid down some vocals for another track called “Don’t Wait Up,” also featuring former Heartbreaker bandmates Belmont Tench, along with Lucinda Willams, who also joins the Dirty Knobs, guitarist Chris Holt and bassist Lance Morrison (Don Henley) and former Heartbreakers’ bandmate drummer Steve Ferrone.

[RELATED: 7 Songs Tom Petty’s ‘Heartbreaker’ Mike Campbell Wrote for Other Artists]

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On its surface, Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits shadows nomads, innocence (and loss of it), and some miscreant behavior, but Campbell’s lyrics prod a deeper revealing turning of events and absolution. Founded in 2000, Campbell worked with Dirty Knobs as a side project until they put it on record two decades later with their 2020 debut, Wreckless Abandon, followed by the band’s follow-up to External Combustion in 2022.

The songs on Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits are a combination of new and older tracks Campbell already had demoed and locked away for years, spanning the nearly 25 years of the band’s existence. The first two albums were the band “trying to find their way as a rock and roll band,” said Campbell, whereas their third album navigates a “depth in the lyrics and chords.”

Bookended by cheers from a live audience, the jangly rocker “The Greatest” opens Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits on a hopeful outlook, and the recurring motif of changing one’s story—All that heaven will allow / Amazing grace / Voices raised, together. “Angel of Mercy” was the oldest track Campbell dug up, one he kicked around for more than 20 years around the start of Dirty Knobs.

“I’m kind of a song hoarder,” Campbell tells American Songwriter. “I write a bunch so I have tons of things piled up. We used to play that [‘Angel of Mercy’] in the bars out here in LA, and I tried to record it a couple of times for the first two albums, but we just never got it right.”

He continues, “I wasn’t going to do that song, but I always liked it, but [co-producer] George Drakoulias really pushed me to do it.” He said ‘Why don’t we give it another shot,” and we finally got it.”

On the pensive “Hands are Tied” Campbell pleads Save me now, she cried / Fill these holes inside. “‘Hands are Tied’ is probably the darkest song on the record, and the most spiritual,” says Campbell, who used the original vocal from his older recording on the new album. “I actually used the vocal from however young I was young. I like the delivery of the vocals, even though I’m not a great singer. That one just had a nice age to it, and I wanted to get the same character out of it.”

The song also applies to the album title, says Campbell. “In this case, it’s a damaged woman who needs help for whatever reason—it could be medical, it could be drugs and this guy is trying to help her but he can’t because his hands are tied,” he shares. “It’s a very emotional song, and it doesn’t have a happy ending like some of the other songs.”

Before two of the harder tracks, “So Alive” and “Shake These Blues,” “Hell Or High Water” adds crackling country and a feminine touch Campbell wanted with Lucinda Williams.

“All of the guests on the record are afterthoughts,” reveals Campbell. “The record was approached as the Dirty Knobs playing live on the floor. When I was listening to ‘Hell or High Water’ it was like a movie, and there’s a female character in the story and I was kind of tired of hearing my voice and thought it might be cool if a female voice came in and answered me, and make the song deeper. So I convinced her to sing that verse, and she made the song so much better.”

Campbell says it was the same with Nash on “Dare to Dream,” a song he called one of “hope and redemption”—These are the best of times / This is the good life / And all you dare to dream can come true—and Stapleton’s contribution. Before the Dirty Knobs, Campbell co-wrote “Arkansas” on Stapleton’s fourth album Starting Over in 2020. “I said ‘I have this song, could you maybe sing a verse on it,’ and he [Stapleton] was happy to do it,” says Campbell. I thought, ‘Well, this is rocking. Now, it really could use a piano, so I called up Benmont.”

Drakoulias, who has co-produced each album with Campbell and the Dirty Knobs since their inception and worked with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ 11th album The Last DJ from 2002, is the only co-writer featured on the album, on “Innocent Man,” before Stapleton pumps up the tempo on “Don’t Wait Up.”

[RELATED: Mike Campbell and The Dirty Knobs Join Lucinda Williams for Joint Tour]

The album closes on more characters from Campbell’s well of songs with “My Old Friends,” and the closing mandolin-filled dance of “Amanda Lynn,” a piece originally recorded and used as the Dirty Knobs’ outro music at shows.

“I was thinking about the characters and the songs, and I seem to write a lot about desperate, damaged people trying to find a better way out of their predicament,” jokes Campbell of the album title. “It’s good if you have a character who’s struggling and can give them some redemption at the end. That’s the goal. I like the way it [the title] rolls off my tongue, and it applies to the characters on the record.”

For the album, Campbell and the band cut 26 songs, most of them written within the year with the other half pulled from his backlog of analog tapes—some dating as far back as 1990 and mostly finished—along with other fragments of songs, some he intended to share with Petty, who died in 2017. “I have all these demos and some sketches and things that I gave to Tom,” he adds, “and some that I never gave him since I had already given him too many things.”

Before chatting with American Songwriter, Campbell remembered Petty’s love of words, the English language, and how it translated into song and the unraveling of his own stories now. “Tom said, ‘I love the English language. There’s so much you can do with it,’” recalled Campbell in his liner notes compiled by journalist David Fricke. “I’m discovering that, too. Looking for rhyme schemes, the right word. At first, it was a struggle. Now that door has opened. I’ve turned a corner on ‘Vagabonds, Virgins and Misfits.’ The Dirty Knobs are still a rock band but growing into different feels.”

Even after writing through four decades of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers albums, as Petty’s other half in songwriting behind some of the band’s biggest hits—”Refugee,” “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” “Into the Great Wide Open,” and more along with their co-writes and individual collaborations with other artists—the songs still direct Campbell.

“Songwriting is my religion and is close to a higher power,” says Campbell.

“I write all the time, but I have to feel it,” he adds. “It has to come to me, then I go ‘okay, now I have this germ of a thing I have to go work on. It could happen in the car, in a dream. It happens in the backyard playing with the dogs or just noodling on the guitar. You just never know when it’s gonna come, but it’s a very magical thing.”

Photo: Chris Phelps / Courtesy of Sacks & Co.