Author: Americana Music News

Review: 2012 Houston International Festival

Ruthie Foster

By Paul T. Mueller –You couldn’t have written a better script for the opening day of the 2012 Houston International Festival. After a stormy Friday that saw high winds and thunderstorms rake the city, Saturday, April 21 was clear, cool and breezy – near-perfect conditions for Houston’s premier cultural and musical celebration. Festival-goers were rewarded with excellent performances by a wide range of musicians, including Jesse Dayton, Hadden Sayers and Ruthie Foster.

Up first at 2:30 was Dayton, a Beaumont, Texas native whose other job descriptions include music producer, actor and film director (he’s worked with musician and filmmaker Rob Zombie on a couple of projects). While Dayton’s musical career has drawn on a variety of influences, from punk to hard-core country, his set (the first of two he was slated to play on iFest’s opening day) was dominated by stripped-down rockabilly. “We’re not usually up this early,” he told the audience, but you wouldn’t know it from the high-energy set that followed.

Accompanied on the festival’s Americas Stage by bassist Rick Watson and drummer Eric Tucker, Dayton spent the next hour or so ripping through several of his own songs (“I’m at Home Getting Hammered While She’s Out Getting Nailed,” “Molasses Girl” and “Harris County Blues,” among others) and some well-done covers. Early on, a nice take on Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” evolved into Townes Van Zandt’s “White Freightliner Blues” and then Terry Allen’s “Amarillo Highway.” The trio closed with Dayton’s she-left-me lament “Kissing Abilene Goodbye,” with a nifty little snippet of “It’s All Over Now” thrown in at the end.

Texas bluesman and guitar ace Hadden Sayers was next. A few years back, Sayers saw a once-promising career derailed, but he’s made a nice comeback – his song “Back to the Blues” is nominated for Song of the Year at next month’s Blues Music Awards, and he’s currently touring as lead guitarist for soul and blues sensation Ruthie Foster (more on her later).

Sayers’ set featured most of his latest CD, Hard Dollar, as well as some older material, and he and his band (drummer Tony McClung and organist Dave DeWitt, doubling on keyboard bass), played with style and enthusiasm. Most of Sayers’ music is rooted in the blues, but other influences are evident as well. “Inside Out Boogie” and “Take Me Back to Texas” featured a roadhouse boogie sound, while a little jazz sneaked into “Trippin’ Down to Mexico.” Sayers is a fast and fluid guitarist and a pretty good singer too, as he proved on one song when he left the microphone and sang from the edge of the stage with only his cupped hands for amplification. Hey, when you’re having that kind of fun onstage, the audience is pretty much guaranteed to follow.

The final slot on the Americas Stage belonged to Austin’s Foster, and she and her band spent about 90 minutes proving they deserved it. Her powerful performance drew a big crowd despite being scheduled at the same time as shows by Jesse Dayton, Los Lonely Boys and others on the festival’s other eight stages. In addition to Sayers on lead guitar, Foster’s band included Tanya Richardson on bass (a terrific funky five-string), Stephanie Blue on keyboards, and Samantha Banks on drums.

Together they tore through an eclectic setlist that ranged from pop through blues, soul and gospel – most often a happy combination of some or all those genres, and all featuring Foster’s magnificent voice. What you’ve heard or read about that voice may sound like hype, but believe that she’s earned the praise she’s gotten.

The show included several covers, among them a poppy take on Los Lobos’ “This Time,” a soulful rendition of William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water Till Your Well Runs Dry,” a nice duet with Sayers on “Back to the Blues,” and, and in a nod to history, the old folk song “The Titanic,” performed a capella.

“I like to take things apart and put them back together,” Foster said by way of introducing Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” beautifully reimagined as a slow, soulful ballad. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but I have a good time doing it.” In this case, it worked really well.

Foster also performed several of her own songs, including “(You Keep Me) Hangin’ On,” “Truth” and “Aim for the Heart.” The show closed with an extended version of the traditional “Death Came a Knockin’ (Travelin’ Shoes),” featuring solos by each band member. It’s hard to imagine a better end to a beautiful evening.

The 2012 Houston International Festival wraps up April 28-29 with scheduled performances by War, Del Castillo, the Texas Tornados, Steel Pulse, Joe Louis Walker and many others.

Mountain Song at Sea: Bluegrass cruise set for 2013

We’ve raved about Cayamo, the annual cruise featuring top Americana artists. Now Sixthman, the company behind Cayamo, has announced a new cruise called “Mountain Song at Sea,” featuring top bluegrass performers.

Already booked: The host Steep Canyon Rangers, The David Grisman Sextet, Del McCoury Band, Carolina Chocolate Drops, Tim O’Brien and Bryan Sutton, the Kruger Brothers, Peter Rowan, Larry Keel and Natural Bridge, the Travelin’ McCourys, Shannon Whitworth, Della Mae and Town Mountain.

The cruise, scheduled for Feb. 1-4, 2013, will travel from Miami to Great Stirrup Cay.

If you’ve considered booking a trip on Cayamo, but wanted a shorter and less expensive trip, Mountain Song at Sea should be a good bet. Details are available here.

Charting: Steep Canyon Rangers, Lumineers

Last week we confidently predicted a long run for Lyle Lovett’s Release Me at the top of the Americana Music Association airplay chart. So much for that. This week Justin Townes Earles’ Nothing’s Gonna Change the Way You Feel About Me moved past it to the number one position.

Chart debuts this week: The Steep Canyon Rangers’ Nobody Knows You at #22, the Infamous Stringdusters’ Silver Sky at #30, The Lumineers album at #34 and Anais Mitchell’s Young Man in America at #40.

The most-added album on Americana music radio was Hank III’s Long Gone Daddy.

Re-issues: “The Red Bird Girls” in stereo


By Ken Paulson
–The Red Bird Girls Very First Time in True Stereo
is a stunning collection of pop songs recorded almost half a century ago on the Red Bird label founded by legendary rock ‘n’ roll songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

The title says it all: Girl groups and singers in impeccable stereo, taken from recently discovered masters. It’s historically important and sonically amazing.

Highlights include the Goodies’ “Dum Dum Ditty,” the Jelly Beans’ “The Kind of Boy You Can’t Forget” and Evie Sands’ recording of Chip Taylor’s “I Can’t Let Go,” later a hit for the Hollies.

The real find here is Ellie Greenwich’s never-released recording of “Call Me His,” a very early Neil Diamond composition.

Real Gone Music is an ambitious new re-issue label and The Red Bird Girls is one of their best collections yet. This is classic sixties pop and rock, with energy and attitude to spare.

New to chart: Trampled By Turtles, Dr. John, Mastersons

Lyle Lovett remains steady at the top of the Americana Music Association  Airplay Chart with Release Me, holding off Justin Townes Earle’s Nothing’s Gonna Change the Way You Feel About Me. It looks like a long run ahead.

New to the chart this week: Trampled by Turtles’ Stars and Satellites at #25,  Dr. John’s Locked Down at #27 and the Mastersons’ Birds Fly South at #28.

Most added this week: Nanci Griffith’s Intersection.

Review: Keith Moody’s “Dreaming Out Loud”

Keith Moody’s Dreaming Out Loud is an album of another era, colection of soaring rock with terrific hooks and strong melodies.

If Moody were 65, you’d call it classic rock, but this is a young man who learned from the masters. The most obvious influence is Tom Petty, but that takes the form of inspiration, not mimicry. There’s a hint of Gin Blossoms and maybe even the Spin Doctors, but it has a fresh sound throughout.

Favorite tracks: “Long Way Up,” “Up” (he’s clearly fond of that direction) and “I Don’t Know Who the Bad Guys are Anymore.”

Review: Matt Harlan’s “Bow and Be Simple”

By Paul T. Mueller

–Ever wonder where songs come from? At a recent in-store performance at Cactus Music in Houston, Texas singer-songwriter Matt Harlan described the genesis of one of the best tracks on his latest CD, Bow and Be Simple. Headed east toward Louisiana early one morning, he watched the sun come up in a profusion of colors. The sky reminded him of the colors surrounding a black eye, Harlan said, and from the bright colors of that sunrise he built “The Ring,” a dark song about a violent marriage and its sad consequences.

This is the kind of sharp observation and literate writing that make Harlan’s songs such a pleasure to listen to. Folky, but with a little Texas twang, Bow’s nine songs, most either written or co-written by Harlan, are brought to life by his gentle, expressive voice. They also benefit from the skilled backing of The Sentimentals, a Danish band with which Harlan has performed on both sides of the Atlantic.

Harlan tours a lot, with and without The Sentimentals – guitarist MC Hansen, bassist Nikolaj Wolf and drummer Jacob Chano. So it’s not surprising that many of his songs focus on travel and movement. “I walk humble and patient/Along down the road/And I search for the truth/In the stories I’m told,” Harlan sings on the title track. Fittingly, the CD was recorded in Denmark at the end of a tour last fall.

“Too Much Going On” is a nice duet in which Harlan and vocalist Rachel Jones lament the busyness that seems to get in the way of getting anything accomplished, while “Darker Shade of Grey” looks at what makes the world work and concludes that too often “it’s the darker things that get the moving done.”

The road shows up again in “Simple Song.” At his Cactus show, Harlan said the song started out as his attempt to write a hit song about things like beer and trucks, but ended up being more about the process of trying (and failing) to write that song. “I tried to write a simple song, something closer to the truth,” he sings, before later acknowledging, “But I ended up just ramblin’ on… Ain’t nothing changed… nothing’s changed.”

The traveling goes vertical in “Elevator Ride,” in which Harlan sings, “Headed to the office on the 22nd floor/You know my head is getting dizzy, I stumble through the door.” For many of us that’s just another day at the office, but for a musician it’s surely a nightmare. Guitarist Hansen’s ominous chords form an oppressive backdrop to this slightly over-the-top tale of the middle-class grind.

By contrast, the deceptively named “The Easy Road” is about those unwilling or unable to follow the straight path to financial security. For reasons both external and internal, the song’s three subjects are having a tough time getting by, never mind getting ahead. “[T]he easy road has taken us for granted,” each concludes. “Seems as though we’ve taken it the same.”

Hansen’s “Baby Blue” is the one song on the CD not written or co-written by Harlan. At heart it’s a kind of roundabout love song, but its lyrics wander from stars and rain to a house on a hill to “a dead skunk on the highway outside San Antone.” The playing is pleasant enough, though, and includes some nice harmonica from Harlan.

The CD closes strongly with “Long Ride Home,” essentially a love song, but one made a little sweeter by the loneliness of the road. “You’re a ghost in every room that I sleep alone,” Harlan sings. “Smiling at the end of every long ride home.” Bow and Be Simple isn’t an especially long ride, but it’s a sweet one.

Matt Harlan (Photo by Paul T. Mueller)

 

 

New to chart: Yarn, Bonnie Raitt, JD McPherson

Lyle Lovett is on top of the Americana Music Radio airplay charts again this week, and is actually picking up momentum, with a total of 486 spins of tracks from Release Me.

New on the chart this week: Yarn’s Almost Home at #34, JD McPherson’s Signs and Signifiers at #38, Bonnie Raitt’s Slipstream at #39 and Sirens by Sons of Bill at #40.

Most added albums: Trampled By Turtles’ Stars and Satellites, JD McPherson’s album and the Steep Canyon Rangers’ Nobody Knows You, reviewed here.

David Olney’s Solid “Stone”

By Tommy Womack

–I don’t always like modern Christian records. They’re often maudlin affairs percolating with manufactured ecstasy. But nothing captures my fancy more than a healthy dissertation on the Historical Jesus. Leave it to David Olney to marry the two notions without the fakery of the former or the dry academic tedium of the latter.

The Stone is Olney’s second installment of a series of six-song mini-albums Olney is planning, each one tied together by a theme. (The first was called Film Noir and was Raymond Chandler set to music.)

One of Olney’s greatest strengths is his ability to take on the roles of the characters in his songs and deliver top-notch first-person narratives. In The Stone , he takes on the roles of a small-time huckster posing as a faith healer, the criminal Barabbas, a Roman centurion and – seriously – the donkey on which Christ entered Jerusalem. (That last one isn’t so much a stretch when you consider how Olney once wrote a song about the Titanic from the perspective of the iceberg.)

Most of the tunes come across in their first verses as completely contemporary situations. For instance, in “Brains”, the “cops” drag a suspect down to the “station”, where they grill him under what you presume to be a white hot overhead lamp.

“I wanna know who’s the brains behind this operation!” the cop sings. The suspect gives up his boss, and walks out with “30 coins shiny and new.” Up until that line, the tune could have been a thoroughly contemporary piece. Such O Henry endings are prominent in the record.

This article, was written on Good Friday, a timely date. The subject of The Stone , of course, is timeless.

Review: Levi Lowrey’s “I Confess I Was A Fool”


by Paul T. Mueller

–Let’s hope that Levi Lowrey’s debut CD, I Confess I Was a Fool, is at least partly a work of imagination and not completely autobiographical. It’s easy to imagine that the excesses he writes and sings about so well might cut short his promising career, if not his life, and that would be a real loss for the music community.

Several of the 12 tracks on I Confess are first-person narratives of a troubled soul, afflicted by pain, self-doubt and alcohol, not always in that order. That said, it’s also a fine collection of well-written songs, tastefully performed by Lowrey and an excellent supporting cast.

Lowrey, a Georgia native and Zac Brown protégé who records for Brown’s Southern Ground label, sings in an understated, but rich and expressive voice that’s well suited to his very personal lyrics. He’s backed on this recording by several members of Brown’s band and other veterans of the Georgia music scene, as well as such Nashville luminaries as Jerry Douglas and Darrell Scott. Producers included Brown and Clay Cook, a well-known Atlanta-area musician who’s also a Brown band member.

The CD opens with the bluegrassy “The Problem With Freedom,” which considers the conflict between freedom and commitment and concludes that “the problem with freedom after all/is that no one’s there to catch you when you fall.”

The way love can fade under the pressure of everyday life is the subject of “Act Like We Are Lovers,” a gentle ballad that pleads for a revival of romance and features some nice dobro and pedal steel guitar from Jerry Douglas. “Wherever We Break Down” mines a somewhat similar vein as the narrator dreams of ditching the rat race and hitting the road with his lover.

Things turn darker in “Another Sunday Morning Hangover,” a slow country song with a bluesy vibe, about the bad times that sometimes follow good times. “I know the Lord turned the water to wine,” Lowrey sings, “but the Devil made me drink it last night.” That’s well-trodden territory, especially in country music, but Lowrey pulls it off with a style that recalls Kris Kristofferson.

The mood lightens a bit with “No Good Dreaming Kind,” Lowrey’s first-person tribute to dreamers and rule-breakers. It’s a nice bit of songwriting, with a chorus that goes from dreaming to rules to lines and circles back to dreaming.

“Whiskey and Wine,” co-written with Brown, is a slow, mostly acoustic ballad about an illicit affair between two people who find excuses for their actions in the contents of their glasses. “Freight Hopper” somewhat predictably uses trains as a metaphor for freedom, but when the narrator sings, “A train was made for leavin’/and I was made for dreamin’,” it’s not clear whether his threat to leave town on the first thing smoking is genuine or only a daydream.

“All American” is more or less an update of Charlie Daniels’ “Uneasy Rider.” Lowrey spins another funny tale of a long-haired outsider who finds himself in a tight spot in a small-town bar. He raises Daniels a few words you can’t say on the radio and throws in a twist or two to reflect some changes in the American way of life over the past four decades or so.

“Yesterday’s Fool” is pure country of the kind that’s too rare in Nashville these days. The lost-love lament is nothing new, but this one is redeemed by Lowrey’s writing. “Tomorrow’s a far cry from forever, but I guess it’ll do,” he observes, and ends the chorus with, “If you walk out tonight, then tomorrow I’m yesterday’s fool.” Tasteful piano and some nice a capella singing by Lowrey contribute to the mood.

“Roselee and Odes” is another love song, this one about a love that lasts instead of ending, but while pleasant enough, it’s not one of the CD’s standout tracks. “Space Between” is another lament about the things that keep us apart, and the effort it takes to overcome them. It’s pretty dark, but the album ends on a brighter note with “Hold On Tight,” a testimony to the power of love and optimism that starts out with a shotgun wedding and follows the young couple as they grow, mature and help each other through life’s ups and downs.

A photograph on the inside of the CD jacket shows Lowrey holding a burning picture of himself, presumably at a younger age. Maybe that’s a visual metaphor for Lowrey’s determination to break with his past; maybe it’s just a nice way to illustrate the themes that run through many of his songs. It works either way.

Tin Pan South Festival: Jimmy Webb, Jack Tempchin and Felix Cavaliere

Jimmy Webb

By Ken Paulson

–Tin Pan South is a weeklong festival in Nashville featuring fine songwriters and engaging songs, but there was no question that the event’s epicenter was at 3rd and Lindsley tonight, as pop and rock songwriting royalty performed.

Felix Cavaliere of the Rascals took the stage first, and he remains in astonishingly fine voice. He began with “It’s A Beautiful Morning” and closed with a rousing “People Got to Be Free,” filling his set with radio classics and a fine new song that inspired an audience sing-along.
Jack Tempchin’s hit list is not as deep, but he was very entertaining, reminiscing about the best year of the ‘60s (1972) and playing his Eagles cuts “Already Gone” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” plus the Johnny Rivers hit “Slow Dancin’”

The finale – and maybe the festival – belonged to Jimmy Webb. He began his set with “Highwayman” and closed with “McArthur Park,” told a very funny story about the inspiration for “The Worst That Could Happen,” saluted Vince Gill with “Oklahoma Nights,” and recalled praying as a 14-year-old that Glen Campbell would one day record one of his songs before launching into “Wichita Lineman.” Webb is certainly one of the top ten composers in pop music history, along with Goffin and King, Lennon and McCartney, Mann and Weil and Bacharach and David. Tonight’s performance was a reminder of Jimmy Webb’s singular talent.

Tin Pan South: Peter Yarrow, Roger Cook, Larry Weiss, Michael McDermott

Peter Yarrow and Roger Cook

One of the opening shows on opening night of Tin Pan South in Nashville featured three songwriters with some of the best copyrights in popular music.  Roger Cook, Peter Yarrow, Larry Weiss and Michael McDermott showcased their catalogs at the Listening Room Café.

McDermott acknowledged that he was the poorest of the four and the only one without a monster hit.  A little self-deprecation is helpful when you’re sandwiched between Peter Yarrow doing his “Puff the Magic Dragon” and  the always entertaining Roger Cook performing a ukulele version of his Hollies hit “Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress.)” Still, McDermott proved to be the most dynamic performer.

Weiss kept the crowd waiting for something familiar until late in the set, finally performing a mini-medley of “Bend Me Shape Me” (a hit for the American Breed) and “Help Me Girl,” an underrated 1966 single from Eric Burdon and the Animals. Weiss saved “Rhinestone Cowboy” for a crowd-pleasing finale.

Larry Weiss on “Rhinestone Cowboy” and songwriting

Larry Weiss, the songwriter behind “Rhinestone Cowboy” and “Bend Me, Shape Me” appeared at this year’s Tin Pan South Festival along with Roger Cook and Peter Yarrow. In this interivew, he talks about writing his biggest hits.

Lyle Lovett at #1, chart debuts by Andrew Bird, Cuff the Duke, Joe Pug

Lyle Lovett’s Release Me remains in the top spot on the Americana Music Airplay Chart, with Justin Townes Earles’ Nothing’s Gonna Change the Way You Feel About Me surging into the second position.

New to the top 10: Bruce Springsteen’s The Wrecking Ball at #8 and  Ray Wylie Hubbard’s The Grifter’s Hymnal at #9.

New to the charts this week: Andrew Bird’s Break It Yourself (#38), Cuff the Duke’s Morning Comes (#39) and Joe Pug’s The Great Despiser (#40.)

Tin Pan South Festival: Opening night preview

You’ll find great music in Nashville’s clubs all this week as they host the annual Tin Pan South Festival, a celebration of songwriters. Venues all over town feature singers and songwriters, typically in the round in groups of four. The performances are short on flash and high in talent.

The 2012 festival kicks off tonight. Among the evening’s highlights:

6 p.m.

Belcourt Taps and Tapas: Sally Barris, Don Henry and Tom Kimmel are all accomplished songwriters, but collectively they’re known as the Waymores, a vibrant new trio with an album due for release.  Plus guest Dana Cooper.

Listening Room Café – Roger Cook (“Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” and many more), Peter Yarrow of Peter,  Paul and Mary,  and Michael McDermott are joined by Larry Weiss, who wrote “Rhinestone Cowboy” for Glen Campbell and  “Bend Me Shape Me” for the American Breed.

9 p.m.

Commodore Grill – Walter Egan, Mary Gauthier, Ed Pettersen and Jim Photoglo span multiple decades and genres. Egan enjoyed rock stardom with “Magnet and Steel,” Photoglo has had huge success as a country writer and Gauthier writes compelling and often heartbreaking songs.

Eat at Loew’s Vanderbilt: Sherrie Austin, Steve Bogard, Lindsay Ell and Rob Hatch are a great line-up, but the special draw here is the appearance of Elliot Lurie, who wrote and sang the 1972 pop classic “Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl)” for his band the Looking Glass.

Concert review: Spanky and Our Gang

by Terry Roland

–The new Spanky and Our Gang played to a sold-out audience at Coffee Gallery Backstage in Altadena, California this month, not so much a reunion as an acknowledgement of the way Americana music connects us to our past and to each other.

With the exception of Elaine ”Spanky” McFarlane, the original players are gone. They included Oz Bach, Malcolm Hale and Nigel Pickering. They were important to the sound, the vocal harmonies and the arrangements that made songs like “Sunday Will Never Be The Same,””Can I Get To Know You” and “Lazy Day,” so appealing.

Indeed, their string of hits that made it to the Top 40 during a two-year period from 1967 to 1969, still can be heard on oldies and easy-listening radio stations today. During their active years, they were featured on national television shows like Ed Sullivan, the Smothers Brothers and The Hollywood Palace. But their legacy included much more than a few catchy hits.

With jazz and pop vocal arrangements that foreshadowed artists like Manhattan Transfer, they recast such songs as Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” and “Echoes (Everybody’s Talking)” by Fred Neil as intricate pop vocal symphonies. This work never found a long-term audience and eventually the band fell apart.  During a brief reunion in 1975, they released the album “Change,” which included songs by future Americana artists like Guy Clark and Tom Waits.

The current incarnation includes a collection of musicians who have joined  Spanky’s musical journey over the years. Keyboardist Bob Ebenstein joined her when she was taking Cass Elliot’s place in the ‘80s line-up of the Mamas and Papas. Lead singer and acoustic guitarist Jim Carrick, was a close friend of Nigel Pickering. Gospel singer, Karen Dupont lives close to Spanky in Ferndale, California. Percussionist Eddie Ponder of the Flying Burrito Brothers, worked with Spanky during her L.A. folk-rock days. Bassist Chris Matheos is an accomplished music theorist. To fill things out, Denny Dias of Steely Dan has been added to provide a counterpoint to Jim’s acoustic lead guitar work.

This new band plays an eclectic spectrum of music, much like an accomplished jazz band. Their repertoire is fearless, covering a wide range of songs, including the set opener, “Sinner Man,” which dates back over a hundred years, a tribute to Etta James, a nod or two to Tom Waits, Guy Clark and Fred Neil and some fierce and passionate gospel singing from Karen Dupont. Especially inspired was her cover of Springsteen’s “Cover Me,” which was transformed into a righteous gospel song.

All of this eclecticism would have seemed disjointed without Spanky at the center, rendering acoustic re-arrangements of songs like “And She’s Mine,” and “Sunday Will Never Be The Same.”

Spanky led the musicians more like the heart of a late-night jam session than a frontwoman for a band. While her voice has deepened considerably since the late ‘60s, she still has an achingly soulful howl,whether she sings blues, jazz, folk or country.

The strongest moment of the show came with the closing song “Give A Damn.” This song still resonates, especially with today’s political movements from both the left and right, symbolized in Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party Movement.

The controversy 40 years ago over the use of the word, “damn” overshadowed the message of the song, which speaks to the need for everyday humanity and compassion for the poor and displaced. But as the two-hour show came to an end, it was clear that taking a good wakeful look around is needed more than ever.

Review: Bruce Springsteen’s “Wrecking Ball”

by Terry Roland

Bruce Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball is the antithesis of his nearly 30 year-old Born in the U.S.A.  As a writer, he has always highlighted the dark edges and ragged truth found in an America that has more kinship with John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie than Ronald Reagan.

While this earlier classic was in many ways just as dark as Wrecking Ball, it still held a hopeful and sometimes nostalgic view of America even while he sang of wounded vets, the decline of his hometown and dancing in the dark. But with Wrecking Ball, there is no nostalgia. There is only the anger of our present circumstances. The songs illuminate how we got here.

The opening track, “We Take Care of Our Own,” is a clear statement of the times and an answer to the arch-conservative movement of today embodied in The Tea Party and the current Republican field of presidential candidates.

It’s an open call for personal and political compassion as a fundamental ideal, a reflection on what it means to be patriotic and ultimately, what it means to be an American today. “Easy Money”and “Shackled and Drawn” contrast the plight of the rich and the poor alike in today’s economy.

One of the most compelling songs on the album is “Death To My Hometown,” which rings out with Celtic anger and a punk-like energy. Again, it stands in defiant contrast to the surrendered despair of “My Hometown,” from the Born in the U.S.A sessions.

In terms of being The Boss, Springsteen has always been the front-of-the-pack when it comes to narrative storytelling. This album doesn’t let us down. After “We Take Care of Our Own,” which serves as a kind of foreword, the stories unfold from anger to sadness to depression, and finally emerge with optimism on “Land of Hope and Dreams,” which borrows heavily from the song “Bound For Glory.,” leaning on the refrain “This Train” to deliver his own rock and roll sermon of faith, straight from the First Church of E-Street. The plus on this one is the late Clarence Clemons saxophone sailing in like an angel. It’s an apt tribute one of the great musical partnerships of American history.

Ultimately, the strongest musical influences and reference point of this album are the folk music of the ‘40s and ‘50s and the civil rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s. This album is a clear call to return to that kind of unity. Like his entire body of work, Springsteen never seeks easy answers to his hope and faith in God, country and his fellowman, but instead asks us to take a clear-eyed look at our own despair and to find the will to return to  a patriotism based on truth, reality, compassion and humanity.

Lovett, Scott top chart; Janiva Magness debuts

It’s been a relatively stable week on the Americana Music radio airplay chart, with Lyle Lovett again holding on to the top position with Release Me, followed by Darrell Scott’s  Long Ride Home.

There’s only one new album on the chart this week, with Janiva Magness’ Stronger For It entering at #36.

Tommy Womack’s fine Now What!  is back on the chart after dropping off for a week.  It stands at #38.

Albums with the most adds:

– Justin Townes Earle’s Nothing’s Gonna Change the Way You Feel About Me, with 18 new stations.

– Andrew Bird’s Break It Yourself (13)

– Todd Snider’s Agnostic Hymns and Stoner Fables (12)

– Peter Mulvey’s The Good Stuff (11)