Compulsive disclosure never gets as good as in the verses of a Robert Earl Keen song. The man has a lot of words at his disposal, and he uses them well. The storylines play out, each step is given its due and Robert Earl Keen gives every footfall a reason for landing. The lines rumble on but they never ramble, in Robert’s hands the bit players, and their decisions, are clear, if not a little blurry as they move between good and bad. There are cheers for the winners and a way of looking at the poorer choices as a sidetrack and not a dead end.

‘Ready For Confetti’ is Robert Earl Keen’s latest release. Like its namesake, the album fills the air with bright light sounds and colorful characters. The songs sparkle musically as the notes flow under Robert’s cushion of a voice. His vocals have a way of becoming so familiar and inclusive that the words can just as easily be coming from inside your head as out. Words of comfort are a distant radio signal drift in on “Lay Down My Brother”, and then come so close that they can be a whisper in your ear. Coming of age and coming to grips with the way life slows down is laid out in “Paint the Town Beige”, peeling back the outside layer of settling down to show that inside desperado whose colors have gone pastel  but still come up sharp in the light from an inner fire.

Robert Earl Keen debuted with ‘No Kinda Dancer’ in 1984. The Austin scene was giving birth to a singer/songwriter community that would see its songs land in country by default. The lines were hazy as the music took on a variety of folk, rock, blues, soul and country forms. Luckily, songwriters do not need to have a stamp on their work that grants it a genre, unlike radio programmers and sign makers. Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett, Gurf Morlix, Lucinda Williams, Blaze Foley and Robert Earl Keen joined the Texas outpouring of talent that emerged during the 1980’s and 1990’s, with songs that could claim lineage from different ways of setting music to beats. ‘Ready For Confetti’ keeps the meter rolling while cruising through rock, reggae, soul, country and blues licks and grooves.  

Robert Earl Keen takes the lead role in “Who Do Man” and provides a laundry list of exit plans in “I Gotta Go” but when his words shoot arrows in the other direction, the power of the pen looms large. The guy at the receiving end of the finger-pointing judgments in “The Road Goes On and On” get an earful and the poor sucker with the “Top Down” may be riding along on a pink bubble of a pedal steel but you can bet he or she has ears burning and the hairs on their neck standing at attention.

The title track comes in on a Caribbean wave beat and deals out good examples of why you may want to take things a little less seriously and seek out the glasses that are half full.  Robert Earl Keen can see a story in a shadow and has the knack of re-telling the tale so that the heroes can feel as good about their lives as those that live like the lead character in “Play A Train Song”. He knows where he stands in life, “I am a runaway locomotive out of my one track mind”, but damn, the scenery looks fine.

Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.45!

Reason and Rhyme: Bluegrass Songs by Robert Hunter & Jim Lauderdale  (SUGAR HILL)

Reason and Rhyme: Bluegrass Songs by Robert Hunter & Jim Lauderdaleis the second and latest collaboration from Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter and “Mr. Americana,” Jim Lauderdale.  On this record the duo proves to be a match made in heaven, with the former’s alluring verse providing a nice counter to the latter’s irresistible melodies.  After a casual listen it might sound as if they’re trying to take bluegrass to a place Further than anyone’s tried to take it in a good long while, but shrug off any perceptual expectancies about what Hunter brings to the table and it becomes apparent that Reason & Rhyme is really a traditional bluegrass album in disguise.  That is to say, as idiosyncratic as the songs are, one gets the feeling that Mr. Monroe would have approved. 

Of course there are darker moments on this record than one generally finds in contemporary bluegrass, but given Hunter’s shrewd pen and Lauderdale’s sagacious delivery, the songs never abandon their emotional core in favor of shock value.  Nowhere is this more evident than in “Not Let You Go,” a “haunted history lesson” about an Acadian family with deep secrets.  As the narrator explains some hard truths to the poor girl who married into the family and got more than she bargained for, his threatening, noxious obsessiveness never feels gratuitous or dishonest.  Every line pulls its own weight and it’s chilling in a visceral way.  “The husband of the 1st born daughter / Each generation is marked for slaughter,” Lauderdale sings sounding every bit as emotionally dissonant as Dock Boggs did when he invited Pretty Polly on that fateful walk.  So much so in fact, one gets the feeling that a new-dug grave with a spade lying by awaits the girl after the song’s end.  

In contrast, “Fields of the Lord,” an up-tempo barnburner that’s all hope and the promise of glory, sounds like the best Jimmy Martin song that Jimmy Martin never recorded while “Tiger & The Monkey,” marks the record’s surreal highpoint.  This tune at once recalls Hunter’s work with the Grateful Dead and the whimsical humor of Little Jimmy Dickens’ “May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose” as it puts a point on the absurdity of war.  “Tiger and the Monkey went to war / The Monkey rode in on a Labrador / The Tiger came on roller skates, did some fancy figure eights / Juggling a dozen plates or more,” Hunter writes before closing each verse with the cryptically nonsensical refrain, “You’re sweet as a buttercup with the gold side up / Don’t ever think of leaving ‘til you go.” 

But the place where Hunter and Lauderdale really shine is the one-two punch of “Jack’s Dempsey’s Crown” and “Don’t Give a Hang.”  In these songs Lauderdale’s pitch-perfect delivery connects with Hunter’s painfully astute character observations to great effect.  “Jack Dempsey’s Crown,” finds the protagonist struggling for relevance in a changing world that isn’t impressed by his past glory - beating Jack Dempsey.  Show me a modicum of respect / You know I wasn’t always such a wreck / Ever since I won Jack Dempsey’s crown / There doesn’t seem no place to go but down,” the narrator explains to anyone willing to listen.  It’s the personal bathos of a man whose first love was “the art of self-defense” yet who now finds himself defenseless against the present.  The despair is palpable when he proclaims that he didn’t waste his time “like some fool clown,” because it’s clear that behind the bluster, he’s trying to convince himself of it more than the young guys who spar at the gym he’s been reduced to sweeping up.  

The next track, “Don’t Give a Hang,” feels like it could be a continuation of “Jack Dempsey’s Crown” except now the lamentation of irrelevance gives way to insouciance.  And although the narrator is still disenfranchised, he seems less desperate than he did in the previous song.  Sure, he still prefers the blues, but he’s accepted that he’s no good and found peace by way of indifference in freeing himself form seeking the validation of others.  At times it even feels as if the poor guy’s developed a sense of humor about his situation.  This is due in no small part to the way in which Lauderdale manages to convey sadness, humor, and exasperation all in the same breath.  Frankly, it sounds as though the protagonist is talking to his shrink, whom he might even be sweet on.  “You think I’m proud to be this way / I ain’t proud, I’m just dismayed / Hang by myself / Don’t get around / Everyone I know just gets me down / Except for you / This much is clear / Except for you / I’m outta here / Except for you / I’d break and run / Except for you...”  Let’s face it; lines like this are best spoken on the therapist’s couch, lest one is looking to be carried off in a straightjacket.  Or maybe he’s simply found someone he can open up to?  Who knows.  Either way, it’s a fun song because it echoes what any sane person feels from time to time but dare not speak for fear of sounding crazy. 

As mentioned earlier, Reason and Rhyme is really a covertly traditional bluegrass record, and it’s worth noting that in spite of its roots, the album is a highly original work that stands on it’s own and holds up well to multiple listenings.  It is not derivative and in truth, it rambles down its own road with aplomb.  And that’s saying a lot in a genre that often places such stringent demands on its practitioners that it becomes difficult to discern one act from another.  Yes indeed, Mr. Monroe would have been proud.                                                         Robert Kimmel    (rk@goodminstrelsy.com)

Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.45!

With his recent release ’You.Must.Stop’ as a calling card, Rob Lytle lends advice and support, keeping an eye set on tradition and a clear understanding of human nature. His pen dips into the well and draws from temptation (“Like You Do”), confusion (“Watch Over My Heart”) and knowledge of self (“Love You As You Break My Heart”). Mood and meaning play out over finely crafted doses of American Roots that keep organic country as a target.

Rob Lytle came up in a tough musical neighborhood, breaking into and making a name in the Boston singer/songwriter surge of the early 1990’s. He worked the stage as Passim’s  and The Folkway as a solo, sharing the spotlight with peers Dar Williams, Martin Sexton and David Wilcox. Rob worked throughout the 90’s, growing his reputation for honest words and the smooth delivery to get the message across. In 1998, Rob Lytle took a break for the birth of his first son and kept the plan in place for the birth of a daughter and a second son. Now, he has picked up his guitar case and is back for more with the same warm voice and the same dedication to songwriting.

Talent can’t be changed, only improved, but topics shift. You can hear the father at the microphone singing for all to hear but hoping that one particular set of ears are listening on “Daddy Knows What Boys Want”. Rob Lytle got to hear the younger heartbeats in his family grow stronger but the ticking clock kept time going. “Finish Line” tags the process of aging and acts as an open letter to Rob Lytle fans, then and now, as  lines take a stand, “Looks I’m back in the race again, I got bored up on the shelf. Last time I did it for the world to see, this time I do it for myself” going on to stick with what he knows “I gotta keep moving toward the open road”.

Rob Lytle has a home base on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts and has once again become a staple of Northeast cafes and clubs. To find out more about Rob, and his wanderings, check out his internet page (http://www.myspace.com/roblytlemusic).

Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.45!

Manitoba lies out there in the middle of Canada, just above Minnesota and North Dakota in United States geography. The land is mostly flat. See yourself on the edge of an expanse of prairie, the earth version of moon landscapes, but a lot greener. Standing there, you can notice that nothing is closing you in, space. 

The Wilderness of Manitoba captures that feeling in their sound. Their notes are puffballs on the wind; the air fills with light flashes of music. As ‘When You Left the Fire’ begins life, the listener becomes part of day breaking over the prairie. As the opening tones and textures of “Orono Park” fill the air and ear, the sound rises like fog being burned away by the first light of the sun.

A harmonica introduces the “Hermit”, releasing a tale that looks to the inside caves in which we remove ourselves from the world. Freckles of notes playfully scamper as “St. Petersburg” comes into audio range, sharp angles force and form a united barrage of an attack that sets “Summer Fires” alight and as the sonic climate changes, they reveal “November”. The band takes a slight diversion from the prairie for a trilogy on the water, channeling their inner deck hands for the shanty air of “In The Family”, maintaining the theme through “Sea Song” and “White Water”.

Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.45!

The voices we hear in song make us laugh, cry, nod in agreement and, most importantly, think. The words are from the songwriter, beyond that the lineage gets hazy. Where do the stories and the experiences come from, whose life bared its soul, shared its secrets and outted those who walked through. The songwriter safe space may be having the benefit of letting out the ghosts or hinting that the skeletons rattling belong in other closets. Easier for some writers than others, listening to Rod Picott, you get the feeling that his blood and history course through his songs.

Rod has the ability to not only get into the being of his characters but he is involved. You can hear the depth as his voice bends around a hurt and can almost feel the smile for triumphs. On ‘Welding Burns’, he builds his characters lives with the hands of a craftsman, one who knows where the bricks go and how the structure looks when completed.  The teenager  wearing the “Black T-Shirt” to match the eye, whose real time is in the parking lot listening to The Doobie Brothers, not hitchhiking to work. The right age for decisions, weighing the words of Mama against the seductive plans and bullet loaded muscle of a dealer off the interstate.   The youngster waiting for Dad to come home from welding work at the navy yard in the title track, who learns at an early age that “some days you need something to knock the edges off”.  The Firebird driver, a laid off tire plant worker, who gets a new plan when he reaches the end of the line at the unemployment office, starting his own business based around the “410” in the backseat.

Over the simple honesty of acoustic Americana , Rod Picott constructs a song with the same stark faces that stare back from a Dorothea Lange depression era B&W photograph. Over soft/hard guitar strums, you clearly see better times shine and watch the clouds roll into a town planted in the “Rust Belt Fields”  and can almost see the green glow from a “Jealous Heart”. He sees a memory and gives some advice (“A Father’s Tattoo”), looks back at the potential of school and the reality of blue collar work, drinking money with friends (“Sheetrock Hanger”) and watches as love fades in a rear view that nonetheless still offers an image that is larger than it looks (“Little Scar”).

Rod Picott has released five solo albums, one with Amanda Shires, as well as having his songs recorded by Ray Wylie Hubbard, Slaid Cleaves and Fred Eaglesmith. The x’s on his calendar for gigs played total over one hundred and twenty dates a year and most of his roads are traveled behind the wheel of his Jeep Cherokee. Rod delivers  vocals with a bit of ragged soul in the notes and a clear eye for the way people move through the world, whether running from the past, standing on the shaky ground of the present or walking with hope towards the future.

Rod Picott will be touring the west and east United States through mid-September before setting off to Europe for shows that run throughout September to the end of October. For specific dates, and more information, look to Rod's website.                                                                Danny McCloskey

Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.45!

Buddy Miller. It almost seems too simple, but given his natural ability to make the link between passion, finger and notes happen as quick as a wink, it is entirely possible to write the name Buddy Miller and have an image, a feeling, a knowing clearly come into your head. Buddy Miller’s guitar takes up a huge amount of space in whatever song is lucky enough to have him on board. Notes and chords, bent, coaxed and nurtured, are the fabric. He has a way with the guitar that separates him from other players. Intuitive is a word that fits the nature of the sound’s appearance but it doesn’t really sum up the experience. His presence in a song is subtle. No over-the-top, look-at-me flash and fire, Buddy Miller tends to make his playing inclusive rather than stand out. His art is to add, fill in and expand on the song. A team player that makes a big difference but never as stand out. His playing is like a color that brings out your eyes. The presence of the color is not the star of the show; the spotlight belongs to the eyes. Without the infusion of the green, the brown or the blue as a catalyst, the eyes can blink, flutter and roll on full spin cycle and catch nothing more than light and the occasional bug if the window is down.

In between production collaboration and playing with Robert Plant and Patty Griffin as well as performing with a host of artists such as Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller found time to put together Buddy Miller’s Majestic Silver Strings. The album puts forty fingers of happiness to work at massaging out the wrinkles and bumps in the road of life. As familiar voices chime in, Buddy is joined on the project by Bill Frisell, Greg Leisz and Marc Ribot, forming the Majestic Silver Strings. It would be a lot easier to list names who have not been the recipients of these guys playing talents, both on record and in live performance. Like Buddy, they are musicians who are there for the song. Looking for grandstanding? Try looking, or hearing, someplace else. The blending of guitars pours off the album. The resulting sound moves like a stream ripe with the melt of winter snow. The course is laid out, the water follows the borders, but along the way its natural fluidity jumps, playfully leaps and maintains a determined path.

The sons of the silver strings are joined by an A list role call of vocalists, reinventing classic country songs. You may have met many of these songs long ago.....they have changed. Gospel singer Ann McCrary shares a mic with Buddy on “No Good Lover” as the guitar stutters, shakes and rolls up the carpet for a rockabilly rave up. The NYC collective Chocolate Genius lays a percussive groove across label grabbing vocals and rides alongside the guys strings on “Dang Me”. The retelling of the track is a world away from Roger Miller’s original hit and is masterfully reconstructed. The framework varies so much that I would be willing to bet you will ask yourself if that opening verse was in the original version.

Like kids, it is hard to pick a favorite on The Majestic Silver Strings album. The songs are vignettes, sketches of life. Balancing memories and future decisions amid an acoustic note tag, Lee Ann Womack weighs in on altering moods on “Meds”, Shawn Colvin foregoes options and comes to terms with reality in “That’s the Way Love Goes” and the benefits of basking in the glow of someone special is spelled out by way of a bullet point list as Patty Griffin duets with Buddy in “I Want to be With You Always”. Emmylou Harris (“Why I’m Walkin’”) and Julie Miller (“God’s Wing’ed Horse”) add vocal worth. The boys in the band are represented by the voices behind the strings as Buddy offers “Cattle Call” and Marc Ribot matches playing passion with vocal emotion on “Barres de la Prison” and “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie”. The two join up on the roof raisin’ “Why Baby Why”.

The Majestic Silver Strings have taken songs you know and made them into tracks that seem vaguely familiar. Like any invention, idea or forward thinking vision, the end result rests in the ability to perfect on what has gone before. This is not a re-visiting but a reforming. For more on The Majestic Silver Strings and a full rendering of the lineage these guys carry, the New West Records website holds the answers.                                                   Danny McCloskey

BUY NOW

Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.45!

Letters, the writing of letters, is a lost art. I can’t honestly say that I wrote a lot of letters even before e-mail. Probably more communication now, but it is not true letter writing. The kind where the use of language was something the writer took pride in delivering, the words furthering the reader’s perception of the person behind the pen. Each letter was crafted for news it brought, the sharing of experience and personal observations, the words generally up against what the traveler had left behind versus the sights that now presented themselves.

Think about the term regional music....okay, got it? Are you thinking of music from a certain region or music that points back to a specific place? Zoe Muth pleads a case for the second option as she and her band, The Lost High Rollers, debut their sophomore effort, ‘Starlight Hotel’.
If soundscapes were more landscape, Zoe’s songs would be covered in dry southwest desert dust, with the big eyes of the characters staring out from sepia toned photographs. The Lost High Rollers and their leader call the Northwest home. Washington’s fog and rain do not diminish the feeling of flat bed trucks on country roads, night skies filled with stars, honky tonk bars and honest people working their way through life. Zoe does her best to trace a line between where her muse takes her versus where she parks her car on album opener, “I’ve Been Gone” creating a word bridge that starts out “from the bread lines to the to the sound of the hard times, everywhere is just about the same”, and travels north back to familiar homeland, “from the LA smog to the San Francisco fog, to the dust that settles out on the plains, I’d rather be walking with you in that cold Seattle rain”.
Musically, The Lost High Rollers move between a soft background and a driving taskmaster that pushes forward, cradling and challenging Zoe Muth’s vocals respectively. Zoe’s delivery hesitates slightly before landing on a note, giving the impression that she is thinking about what she is saying. Those descriptions take her characters from their blue collar working class jobs in “New Mexico”, through the rigors of laborer, describing the hardships in a “Tired Worker Songs”, nighttime exits and long term decisions weigh their worth under a “Harvest Moon Blues” before taking a much deserved rest at the “Starlight Hotel”. The moods shift but the reality of the words, the starkness of the lives gets a makeover, color and light streaming in under the direction of Zoe Muth’s pen and paper. Though the lives may be lived in a foreign environment than what you may come across on a day to day basis, when the topics and tones become more personal, as on “Whatever’s Left” and “Let’s Just Be Friends For The Night”, seeing pieces of a life more familiar may just make the hairs stand up on your neck.
As much as listening to ‘Starlight Hotel’ is a pleasurable companion, I have a bone to pick with Ms. Muth. There has been some time spent in relationships worldwide that could have been avoided with the words of wisdom that Zoe scribes in “If I Can't Trust You With A Quarter (How Can I Trust You With My Heart?)”. It was all right there, nobody ever noticed. So simple, really....if the object of your desire plays music on the jukebox that makes you cringe, if you think that those quarters you handed over could have made a better noise being thrown against a wall and if the hands that took the coins don’t know who John Prine is, the best option is to turn and walk away. Now that Zoe Muth has broken down relationships with such ease, let’s hope she sets her sights on world affairs.
For more on Zoe Muth, The Lost High Rollers, her travels and her music, visit her website, zoemuth.com.                                        Danny McCloskey

Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.45!