1. Like R.E.M. a generation before them, the Drive-By Truckers are telling a story about the South through rock music. I grew up in Georgia and Tennessee, and the characters that inhabit their songs are the people I saw at the gas station, the people I worked with on the golf course, and the people you heard hushed whispers about in church. Their latest, The Big To Do, finds them building upon the focus they found with Brighter than Creation’s Dark.
2. Opening with Patterson Hood’s story of a young boy who believes the myth about his dead father, “Daddy Learned To Fly” carries a careful Southern naivete, treading ground around something mysterious and grave, and dealing with it in a lighthearted way. Other songs do not get the same light touch, as they outline grim scenes from the front pages of newspapers. “The Wig He Made Her Wear” tells the story of an abusive preacher, whose murdering wife is forgiven when she takes the stand and tells all about their bedroom escapades. Told over a churning, angular Cooley riff, the song shows a bit of humanity behind a crime that “the locals couldn’t quite grasp”, though they may have identified with it in one way or another. “Drag the Lake Charlie” finds a few men hoping that they find their friend drowned, or his wife’s “gonna come and kill us all”.
3. Hood retreads some previous territory in lead single “This F**king Job” (whose radio-friendly retitle “Working this Job” seems to lessen the bite), as well as revisiting the narrative skill he honed with Southern Rock Opera, covering South Florida circus family “The Flying Wallendas”.
Though only represented by three songs, Mike Cooley makes the most of his spotlight moments. “Birthday Boy” highlights the hardened misery of a stripper, dropping this lyrical gem towards the end:
Cooley’s own style of storytelling gets a workout on “Get Downtown”, where Jimmy, saddled with the “unemployment blues”, is pushed out of the house by his girlfriend Kim, who is “too pretty to work”.
4. The real star of The Big To Do is bassist and relatively new songwriter Shonna Tucker. “(It’s Gonna Be) I Told You So” is a stomping Petty-esque rocker that perfectly displays the fury of a woman scorned. The fury is opposed with tenderness in “You Got Another”, a rare piano ballad that outlines the heartbreak of being replaceable to someone. Though she has only been given a few songs per record, Tucker makes the most of what she does, and the addition of a female voice to the band provides a welcome variety in perspective and sound.
5. Earlier in their career, the Drive-By Truckers gained notoriety for their “three-axe attack”, though it was seen more as a Skynyrd revival than an artistic portrayal of their home states. As they have clawed through their career (as wonderfully documented on the recent film The Secret To a Happy Ending), they have gained respect for their songs, putting the attention where it should have been all along. The Big To Do pushes that forward sonically and lyrically, with stories about real people that reach much farther than the bounds of the South.
Drive-By Truckers – (It’s Gonna Be) I Told You So
Posted: March 16th, 2010 | 1 Comment »
1. In case you have forgotten the power of an album, in this age of 30 second audio samples, digital only singles, and increasingly short attention spans, Adam Carroll and Michael O’Connor would like to refresh your memory. Hard Times, the new collaborative effort between the two, stands as a complete song cycle about one thing: Gulf Coast losers. Carroll has made a career of writing about wretched people who live off the beaten path, while O’Connor is better known for being a sideman for Slaid Cleaves and Susan Gibson, among others. This record finds them writing together on most of the songs, revealing the intricacies of those who live on the south coast of Texas and Louisiana.
2. “New Years Eve” finds Carroll sketching the figure of a hard luck musician “turnin’ water into wine” over O’Connor’s wailing slide guitar, before moving into “Bernadine”. In this tale, a man with slightly better luck becomes a winner, despite being a self proclaimed “run down low rent Gulf Coast loser” and begs a woman to “make [his] hard times shine like gold”. After losing all his money in the second verse, the whore becomes the saint Bernadine, and he promises to “cast his nets into the Galveston Bay” in exchange for a little help. O’Connor’s raspy voice outlines the often simultaneous desire for pleasure and salvation.
3. “Billy Gibbons’ Beard” circles around a drunk with a “bar tab twice as long” as the title who just wishes he had another shot at high school, when he passed up on an opportunity to touch the famed guitarist’s facial hair. O’Connor’ follows it up with “Throw a Nickel”, another character study that traces the money trail from the poor into the hands of the law and the clergy. Carroll uses the title track to follow another down and out loser whose friends seem to be the only ones feeling the effects, until he buys a round for the crowd of one at a bar that turns out to be BYOB.
4. O’Connor’s “Bottle Down” assures that “all the liquor in your veins”, presumably as a result of the recession, “has got you in the devil’s chains,” as he pleads with a loved one to abstain, while Carroll adds a smoldering harmonica, before lightening the mood with the bouncy “Tired Of Myself”, asking “can I be somebody new?”. The pair cover each other on the next two tracks, with Carroll tackling “Sleepy Town”, which follows two fallen stars who contribute a lot of action to their unsuspecting home. O’Connor takes on Carroll’s “Highway Prayer”, which previously appeared on his most recent record Old Town Rock and Roll. A stirring tribute to drifters, road warriors, and “those whose seeds in life are scattered”, all beautifully underscored by producer Gabe Rhodes’ harmonium. After a short harmonica interlude, they finish the record with the thesis statement, “Gulf Coast Losers”, penned with Gordy Quist of the Band of Heathens. The song looks out from the viewpoint of a man who knows his place in the world, “choking down hot boxed wine” but perfectly content with his social standing who enters an ill-fated battle of the bands (against some out-of-towners named “Billy Gibbons’ Beard”).
5. Carroll and O’Connor have crafted a complete record about a slice of life where there is little to do but laugh. Managing to realize the effects of an economic recession and combine it with a healthy dose of absurdity, they create a song cycle that entertains from beginning to end and reads like the best Larry Brown novel he never wrote. However simple life may seem in this part of the world, it is no less complex, and these two approach it with reverence. This is more than a collection of songs — it is a true album, full of inside jokes, references, and carrying themes from song to song. Releasing on the first day of 2010, Hard Times sets a standard for craftsmanship that is going to be tough to top.
Adam Carroll – Sleepy Town
Michael O’Connor – Highway Prayer
Posted: December 8th, 2009 | 1 Comment »
1. When I first heard that Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch were switching places in their informal arrangement usually billed as “Gillian Welch”, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would it be like the Esquires, the rare electric incarnation of the duo? Would Gillian sing at all? Now that I’ve heard A Friend of a Friend, I feel foolish for expecting Dave and Gillian to reinvent the wheel — what they have going is impossible to duplicate. Not that there aren’t new ideas on this record — a string section and a group of horns make an appearance, to great effect. On A Friend of a Friend, Rawlings and Welch show that they can let Dave’s fresh tenor lead the way and harness the frenetic energy of his solos and retain the same musical integrity that has defined their career.
2. “Ruby”, which opens the record, spins a Rapunzel-type tale over a vintage sounding string section topped off by the pair’s aching harmonies (aided by Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor). Secor’s fiddle slyly creeps in with the orchestral strings, as the song reaches an peak with Benmont Tench’s organ swells. The spectral atmosphere quickly ends as the band scoots into Dave’s take on “To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High)”, which he co-wrote with Ryan Adams. The song forgoes Adams’ thin wild mercury sound for a more traditional sound that keys off the tension between Rawlings and Welch’s voices. When they hit the bridge, there are few better sounds in music than the major seventh harmony (which they also contributed to Adams’ version on Heartbreaker).
3. Rawlings contributes a stripped down take on “I Hear Them All”, which makes the song more of a dream than the marching reality of the version recorded by Old Crow Medicine Show. A mashup of Conor Oberst’s “Method Acting” and Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer” follows, and they just sound good together. Young’s tale of imperialism and Oberst’s celebration of musical escapism don’t have a lot in common, but Rawlings makes that not matter so much, with the first (and only) extended guitar break on the record showing his raw mastery of the instrument.
4. The gentle “Sweet Tooth” and the rollicking “It’s Too Easy” celebrate the simpler things in life, while “How’s About You” deals with current economic uncertainties in a typical homespun fashion, as Rawlings sings “Used to have a dollar, gonna have a dime someday.” A bit of New Orleans creeps in with the horns on “Monkey and the Engineer”, which tells the childlike story about a stolen locomotive, and the album finishes with the dreamlike “Bells of Harlem”, which I went into detail about last week.
5. As Dave and Gillian have evolved their traditional sound to the primitive, near-rock heard on Welch’s last solo record Soul Journey, they have stuck to the music that they like — traditional songs that emphasize their powerful, raw approach to singing and guitar. A Friend of a Friend shuffles the deck, but doesn’t stop the force of their work. These songs aren’t fleeting, trendy, or subject to the outside world. Rather, they take time to create and, as this album proves, are worth the wait.
Dave Rawlings Machine – Ruby (live)
Posted: November 10th, 2009 | No Comments »
