
|
WILLIE – THE WRITER
Tommy
Alverson’ Family Gathering #11 will
be held this year on Oct 2 - 4 at
beautiful Loyd Park in Grand Prairie on
Joe Pool Lake. To
make camping reservations call 817-467-2104. There
are 221 full campsites at Loyd Park. All have electricity and water
and a covered picnic table. All roads are paved. There will be plenty
of tent camping also. There are 8 cabins for rent,
1 and 2 bedrooms overlooking Joe Pool Lake. Loyd
park is located at 3401 Ragland Rd. just off 360 south of I-20.
Tickets will go on sale beginning May 15, 2008 at www.tommyalverson.com
and at all Tommy Alverson shows. Other ticket outlets will announced
asap. CD
REVIEW: Reckless Kelly - Bulletproof Bulletproof,
recorded at Willie Nelson’s famed Pedernales Studios just outside of Austin
on Lake Travis is a collection of ragged road songs, a few ballads and two
epic tributes. The album produced under the band’s new record label
Yep Roc Records consists of 14 tracks, all written or co-written by lead
singer and guitarist Willy Braun, and boasts guest musicians including Lloyd
Maines, Ephraim Owens, Brian Standefer and Micheal Ramos. The five guys
of Reckless Kelly, Willy Braun and brother Cody Braun, David Abeyta, Jay Nazz
and Jimmy McFeely have come together to produce what is arguably their most
impressive record to date. Kicking things off
is a rocking road tune, which is already getting a lot of radio time.
“Ragged as the Road” as it is aptly titled, is a culmination of energy,
guitars and descriptive lyrics which leaves you feeling the heat of the
“black-top gravel” and the glow of the “faded moonlight” and seems to
describe the place the band is in now. A rocking rhythm and vivid
imagery make this one of the best tracks on the record. “ A Guy Like
Me” and “Love in her Eye” carry on the revved up vibe of the first
track. The catchy rhythm and edgy feel of “a Guy Like Me” creates
the image of a bad boy attitude and a great guitar riff in the middle of
“Love in her Eye” make these two potential singles for the record. The two most
captivating tracks on the record, “American Blood” and “God Forsaken
Town” illuminate the reality of the roughest times in this life. There
is no mistaking the message of “American Blood” with lyrics like “Johnny
can’t drink cause Johnny ain’t 21/but he’s 18 and he’s pretty handy
with a gun/they sent him off to a foreign land, gave him a new pair of boots
and 13 grand/and he came back home with American blood on his hands.”
The song has an incredible message and a very Bruce Springsteen kind of power
to it. “God Forsaken Town” co-written by Willy Braun and long-time
friend Robert Earl Keen is a tribute to the survivors of Hurricane Katrina.
The song has a heart-breaking feel to it, yet shines light on the power that
we can find within our depths. “I’ll be goddamned if I’m leaving here
before the day I die,” and “we’ve got a sawed off and a red hot 44/so
all you looters best come heavy when you’re knocking on my door!” show
that imagery of inner strength. A heart-wrenching chorus alluding to an
allegorical “higher ground” and a beautiful trumpet provided by Ephriam
Owens make this song amazing, if very hard to listen to. Two love songs on
the record, “Don’t Say Goodbye,” and “Passin’ Through” were
co-written with Micky Braun, brother and lead singer of Micky and the
Motorcars. “Passin’ Through” starts as a ballad, then cranks in a
rocking rhythm that has a very “windows down, rolling down the black-top”
sort feel to it. “One False Move,” another tribute to love was
co-written with Dustin Welch, son of singer-songwriter Kevin Welch. The title track
for the record, “Bulletproof” is a tribute to 1870s Australian gangster
and namesake of the band, Ned “Reckless Kelly.” It lays stake to the
claim that nothing is ever “bulletproof,” but as they say, life goes on. Bulletproof
shows the guys of Reckless Kelly at their most musically mature and is sure to
be a musical library staple. The guys deliver excellent lyrics,
heart-engaging melodies, and as always the signature fiddle, provide by
incredible musical talent of Cody Braun. It is rough and rugged and will
leave you listening over and over again. I recently drove
up to San Marcos to see Adam Carroll at one of the best music venues in all
the land, Cheatham Street Warehouse. On the way, I decided to call my brother,
because it's still not illegal to do that. (Nor should it be. Make it illegal
to eat a Big Mac while driving, and then we can talk about cell phones.) My brother
answered the phone, we chit-chatted for a bit, and I told him I was driving an
hour to see Adam Carroll. He then said,
matter-of-factly, “You mean 'Adam Carolla,' right?” At that point it
became disturbingly evident to me that Adam Carroll's fame has not spread to
Snohomish, Washington — or, perhaps more disturbingly, that Adam Carolla's
has — providing proof positive that talent is not necessarily a determiner
of financial reward in our society. Whatever. If you've attended
an Adam Carroll show, you may have noticed the way he shuffles up to the
stage, shyly avoiding eye contact, taking his place at the front of the
audience, always seeming a bit surprised that people are actually there to
listen to him. I can feel that attitude as I listen to Old Town Rock N
Roll. The album is very unassuming, unmistakably humble. Bubbling beneath
this lowkey attitude, though, is an energy that has not been seen before in an
Adam Carroll studio record. Much of this album, in fact, was quite obviously
recorded live in the studio, as indicated by Adam's vocalizing “here we
go” to indicate to the other players that the end of a tune has arrived. The
live band feel helps keep the album exciting, while the variety of Adam's
vocal performances help sustain the interesting sound. The song “HiFi
Love” finds Adam vocally at his most vulnerable. His voice is sweet, but not
cloyingly so. He stumbles over the lyrics at one point, just as he does in his
live shows, often when he's composing new lyrics on the spot. Were parts of
this album really written as they were recorded? How great is that? There's a
bit in the song about “Cosby fearing, Oprah lovin', Fat Albert HiFi Love.”
Catch one oa Adam's live shows, so you can hear the story behind the lyric. Loosing himself
from the previously necessary reins of Lloyd Maines, who superbly produced
Carroll's first three studio efforts, Adam feels free to experiment a bit
more, and, by doing that, it seems to me that is able to establish a better
connection with the people paying his bills, his fans. Every minor misstep
endears us more to the man who writes those songs we love, reminds us that
though he may be able to write a song better than we can, he's just as human
as we are. He is, indeed, just one of us. I don't mean to
imply with these comments, by the way, that this record sounds like it was
recorded through tincan microphones on your dad's old cassette recorder. There
is an element of that, best exemplified in the album's coda, a raucous cover
of “Black Flag Blues” by the record's producer, Canadian singer-songwriter
Scott “Bad Liver and a Broken Heart” Nolan. But for the most part, Old
Town Rock N Roll sounds as good, if not better, than any of Carroll's
previous studio records. As you may expect,
wordplay, Adam's strongsuit, is very evident throughout Old Town Rock N
Roll. “Black Flag
Blues” finds Adam at his most playful, a song about pirates, that includes, “I know a
girl from Kentucky, What is notable to
me about the lyric is the last phrase, which fits the mood very nicely, but
doesn't fit the meter. Could it have been polished further? Sure. Did it need
to be polished before being published? No. I rather enjoy being given this
glimpse into the mind of one of my favorite songwriters, catching him in
mid-song with, perhaps, unfinished business. How about this
lyric from "Oklahoma Gypsy Shuffler": “Snorting
cocaine off a buck knife. Juxtaposing “3-2
drinkin'” with “4-4 time” is good enough, but then, wrapping it all up
with the women “hangin' on every line” is simply amazing. How does that
wrap things up you ask? Well, tell me this: is that last word, “line,” a
reference to a lyric or to the cocaine referenced earlier? Beautiful
songwriting. The song
"Rain" includes the phrase “sometimes two adds up to nothing.”
The meaning is clear, but the simplicity of the lyric merits further
examination. We may have expected the lyric to be, “Sometimes one and one
add up to nothing,” a phrase with the same clarity of meaning, plus, as we
all know, you must have something and something to add up to
anything. But Carroll chooses to simplify the equation and skips a step,
eliminating the “1 + 1” calculation and taking us straight to “two adds
up to nothing,” which delivers the same irony, but in a much more
imaginative way. It seems like a natural progression when I spell it out like
this, but who would come up with that? Adam Carroll, that's who. While I really
enjoy the slightly more polished sheen of Adam's previous releases, I like Old
Town Rock N Roll better than them all, because I am finally able to see
Adam for what he really is: a flawed icon, a shiny pan with a bit of rust,
plucking gold nuggets from the stream. Old Town Rock N Roll
puts Adam Carroll fully on display and he seems to be saying, “I'm really a
lot like you. Accept me as I am.” You needn't be concerned, Adam. We do, we
do.
If you have news, send it to us at
|
|||||||||