add 1031 jason Isbell

Jason Isbell was one of three first-class songwriters in the Drive-By Truckers, along with Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, and each of them had (and has) his own spin on the kind of raucous Southern soul-country that band specialized in. When Isbell left in 2007 to pursue a solo career, there was every reason to believe he would continue in the same vein. Instead, Isbell produced work that still had some Alabama country twang, but was really closer to the folky singer/songwriter side of the spectrum, full of graceful melodies with thoughtful and literate lyrics. On this outing, Isbellstrips things back even more, going with, for the most part, sparse, moody arrangements and songs that muse on the responsibilities of his newfound sobriety, an atonement of sorts, and they tell of lost weekends, drinking mouthwash when the alcohol ran out, and other sordid personal tragedies, all with an eye to how it seems to work out when problems are embraced, addressed, and finally owned. As such, this is an ultimately positive set that doesn't pull punches. Highlights include the beautiful opening love song "Cover Me Up," the elegant and sort of baroque country-rocker "Stockholm," the blast-along "Super 8" (which wouldn't sound out of place on any of the Truckers albums), and the love ballad "Relatively Easy," which closes things out here. The overall tone of this fine set is one of quiet and thoughtful honesty with one's life and past and the knowledge that personal redemption has to be earned again and again each and every day. It is, quite frankly, Isbell's best solo album thus far.

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add 1030 Jason Isbell

Not long after Jason Isbell released his first solo album, 2007's Sirens of the Ditch, he released an EP, Live at Twist and Shout, which documented an in-store performance by Isbell and his band the 400 Unit at a Denver, Colorado record shop. Just four years later, Isbell has delivered another live disc, Live from Alabama, a full-length album culled from a pair of August 2012 concerts, and if one wonders why Isbell seems so keen to record his live sets, one listen will tell you why: Isbell and his band are at their best in front of an audience, and Live from Alabama demonstrates Isbell's impressive gifts as a singer, guitarist, songwriter, and frontman. While his work with the Drive-By Truckers was impressive, he's grown tremendously as a singer since striking out on his own, and with a crowd to cheer him on, Isbelldelivers the goods on Live from Alabama, sounding richly soulful on "Heart on a String," rueful and evocative on "In a Razor Town," and full of bluesy swagger on "The Blue." If the 400 Unit lack the volume and firepower of the DBTs, the smaller, more dynamic combo leaves more room for dynamics and subtlety, which works well for Isbell's songs (the versions of "Decoration Day" and "Danko/Manuel" here rival those he recorded with the Truckers), and like his vocals,Isbell's guitar work is all the more impressive when it doesn't have to fight for space. As a storyteller, Isbell's tales of dashed hopes and Southern pride are powerful, realistic, and keenly intelligent, and he and the band bring them to life with just the right touch. And the closing cover of Neil Young's "Like a Hurricane" is a barn-burning finale. If you haven't seenIsbell and the 400 Unit on-stage, Live from Alabama will likely convince you to show up the next time they play in your area, and if you already have, this will remind you why you walked home impressed.

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add 1029 Jason Isbell

During his time with the Drive-By Truckers, Jason Isbell always sported the least grizzled voice of the bunch, a surprisingly radio-ready baritone that sounded smoother than Patterson Hood's sandpaper croon and more streamlined than Mike Cooley's twang. That voice carries more weight in Isbell's solo material, where melody and lyrics are emphasized over the swaggering guitar riffs of his previous group. Credited to Isbell and his new backing band, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit finds the songwriter reprising the same formula showcased on 2007's Sirens of the Ditch: a mix of Southern rock and rootsy, melancholic country-soul that manages to both elevate and commiserate during its 52 minutes. The result may be fairly similar to Sirens' sound, but 400 Unit marks Isbell's final move away from the Truckers, whose influence permeated Sirens in its production (helmed by Patterson Hood) and host of backing musicians (includingShonna Tucker, DBT's bassist and Isbell's former wife). Here, Isbell and his four bandmates close the studio doors to outside help, allowing several horn players to make a cameo on "No Choice in the Matter" but essentially playing everything else themselves. The result is a smart and tasteful record that sees Isbell training his songwriting eye on subjects of wartime romance, memory, and dead-end small towns. There are rock songs here -- including "Soldiers Get Strange" and "Good," both of which seem to take more influence from Tom Petty than Lynyrd Skynyrd -- but Isbellsounds most comfortable with the midtempo numbers, from the subdued shuffle of "Sunburn" (sample lyric: "I never meant to get bored with you but I never meant to stay") to the instrumental strains of "Coda." "I saw her in Roosevelt Springs, where time doesn't touch anything," he sings in "Cigarettes and Wine," a seven-minute homage to a bartender who takes in downtrodden men and selflessly suffers their despondence. Just barely out of his twenties, he writes with the well-worn weariness of someone twice his age, but Isbell's youth nevertheless breathes energy into a formula that's been revisited by many Southern-born songwriters before.

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add 1028 Robert Ellis

Since New West released Photographs in 2011, Robert Ellis' reputation has spread internationally. These days he plays European festivals as well as Texas honky tonks. He moved to Nashville from Houston in 2012. Given the growth in his songwriting on The Lights from the Chemical Plant, it was the right choice. The album is exquisitely produced and mixed by Jacquire King; it's refined, not slick. He illustrates Ellis' elusive, emotionally evocative songs, expanding their sonic reach to blur genre boundaries. Though he and Ellis embraces the sounds of Nashville's and Americana's pasts, they look forward, making use of rock and pop wherever it makes sense. "TV Song" is be a novelty tune, but it recalls the savvy of of Roger Miller and Tom T. Hall. "Chemical Plant" narrates a story of young lovers who cling together as life changes around them and years pass; but there is no escaping death. Electric guitars, tom-toms, and strings elevate the song to near cinematic proportions, but never indulges them. The melody in "Steady as the Rising Sun" suggests Harlan Howard. A tender yet almost melancholy love song, the rhythm section's syncopated backbeat on the coda introduces a whining pedal steel, sweeping strings and a backing chorus by Dawes' Goldsmith Brothers. "Bottle of Wine" paraphrases Billy Joel's "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant." Fueled by a reverbed, slightly out of tune piano, the protagonist sings to an absent other in an empty room, accompanied only his beverage and a bag of cocaine. Paul Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years" is poignantly and darkly rendered with a killer guitar break. "Pride," "Only Lies," and "Houston" (the last with a knotty, screaming, extended prog rock outro!) make use of country and blues in the same way Danny O'Keefe did on his first two albums: tangentially, integral parts of a larger musical palette. (Ellis' voice also bears a spooky resemblance to O'Keefe's.) Narratively, these songs paint haunted silhouettes of emptiness, loneliness, and desolation. "Tour Song," the sparse acoustic closer, features is a traveling musician protagonist. He confesses paranoia and fear speculating about possible infidelity from his wife while he's away. He's ultimately resigned to it as the cost of his chosen profession, butdeals with it by way of nightly oblivion. The Lights from the Chemical Plant is an inspired, mercurial record, by an artist who cares deeply for tradition, but refuses to be bound by it.

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add 1027 cash

Rosanne Cash's catalog on Columbia is nothing if not formidable. Her pioneering meld of country, rock & roll (with an emphasis on "rock"), folk, and even blues, her topical concerns (which went deeper than most songwriters who came before her in taking on the tough topics of life), and her insistence on working outside the Nashville box scored her a number of hits and blazed the trail for many women who came later. King's Record Shop followed by two years her flirtation with the kind of pop coming out of England in droves, the radically underappreciated Rhythm & Romance.King's Record Shop -- produced by her then-husband and longtime collaborator Rodney Crowell -- is a granite-solid collection of covers and originals that delve deeply into the traditions that informed her life and created her as an artist, while revealing the trouble in her marriage to Crowell. The opening track, Eliza Gilkyson's "Rosie Strike Back," is a real feminist country anthem, and contains killer backing vocals from Patty Smyth (of Scandal) and Steve Winwood. Her read of John Hiatt's "The Way We Make a Broken Heart" is the kind of torch and tang ballad that will stand the test of time simply for its gender-bending take on relationships. Her collaboration with Hank DeVito, "If You Change Your Mind," is a jangly folk-rock ballad that expresses romantic longing in the face of a wayward lover; in its choruses one hears need as well as generosity. "The Real Me," a song that offers the vulnerability, truth, and flaws of a life in the process of transformation, is a preview of the type of material that would appear on the nakedly revealing Interiors. And it just goes deeper, from her rollicking and rebellious rocker "Somewhere Sometime" to the stellar cover of John Stewart's heart-wrenching "Runaway Train" to the straight-ahead country of her father Johnny's "Tennessee Flat Top Box." With its faux soul R&B chorus, Crowell's "I Don't Have to Crawl" is as full of want, cracked-heart honesty, and determination to keep standing as anything in country music. Ultimately, King's Record Shop is Rosanne Cash's classic, a work that transcends production and songwriting styles and the pop and country music of the time.

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Add 1026 ADN Cash

In the 22 months that passed between the release of Rosanne Cash's wonderfully articulated Rules of Travel and Black Cadillac, she became an orphan. She lost her stepmother, June Carter Cash, in May of 2003; her father, Johnny, passed away in September of that same year; and in May of 2005, her mother, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin, left this world as well. According to Cash, she began writing the songs for Black Cadillac in spring 2003 and ended in spring 2005. She began recording in November 2004. In other words, the album is the aural documentation of a process of grief, loss, and acceptance. And though her family was not the typical American family, this set is universal in its concepts. Certainly, it is an elegy; her father's presence is everywhere here. It is also more than that; it is a reckoning, with memory, anger, love, joy, grief, pain, and resolve. The set opens with Johnny's disembodied voice calling her: "Rosanne, c'mon." And the title track kicks into gear with a rumbling bass, a drum kit, and guitars emerging sparsely, surrounding her voice as she sings, "It was a black Cadillac/That drove you away...Now one of us gets to go to heaven/While one has to stay here in hell." The guitars explode into the mix, carrying the refrain, breaking open not only the tune, but her heart: "It was a black Cadillac/Like the one you used to drive/You were always rollin'/But the wheels burnt up your life/It's a black heart of pain I'm wearin'/That suits me just fine/'Cause there was nothin' I could do for you/While you were still alive." These lyrics, the swirling six strings, a funky Fender Rhodes, the crashing of drums, and the distant, tinny horns quoting their place in "Ring of Fire," as the track ends, while it opens up the focus of the rest of the disc -- it becomes the mission statement for the heart-rendering that follows.
Cash has a history of searing honesty; Interiors and The Wheel are just two examples. But Black Cadillac engages it in a different way. She disguises nothing. There are no extended painterly metaphors. These are open and direct songs without self-pity, without artifice. Writing about her parents, she expresses regret, but doesn't ask for more time; there is only the open, unbowed humility of gratitude and the weight and burden of history, and experience that results in wisdom. In "I Was Watching You," she recounts her history from youth to age 50 with Johnny, and amid the atmospheric arrangements, she states plaintively, "Long after life/There is love." It's the crack in the record that becomes the catalyst for her search for meaning after these experiences. There are rockers, too, such as "Burn This Town Down," which struts its country, rock, and roots simultaneously. Yet it's all beside the point. From "God Is in the Roses," a nearly straight-up country tune that re-engages faith in God not as a concept, but as a place for the soul to find solace and rest in life's most difficult occurrences, the question of faith looms large on Black Cadillac. In "World Without Sound" she states, "I wish I was a Christian/And knew what to believe/I could learn a lot of rules/To put my mind at ease." "Like Fugitives" indicts religion -- and a few other things -- to a slippery trip-hop rhythm track and expresses anger purely and simply. The rocking "Dreams Are Not My Home" feels like it were written for Dire Straits. The poetic lyric is offered authoritatively against acoustic and electric guitars. This tune is a manifesto. Its refrain digs against the illusions of the past and the many temptations to escape the difficult present: "I want to live in the real world/I want to act like a real girl/I want to know I'm not alone/And that dreams are not my home." The bluesy country-rock in "House on the Lake" (referring to the old Cash home in Hendersonville, TN) evokes memory and the notion of place as a metaphor for passage and return. The guitars turn and wind around mandolin passages that underscore the determined declaration in Cash's voice.
Cash has always been a pioneer and experimented freely. Since the release of 1990's Interiors, she has distanced herself -- on records -- from her family's country roots; in the process, she's carved a small niche in the nebulous adult alternative "genre." Black Cadillac shows the songwriter coming full circle without compromise. Her signature brand of country music has become part of her mix again. She has always employed rock and pop sounds even on her early outings. Cash embraces country here as a part of the sonic tapestry that includes every kind of music she's interested in. This set was recorded in Los Angeles with Bill Botrell (the odd numbered cuts) and in New York with husband-producer John Leventhal (the even numbered ones), and it's an album that CMT and even country radio can warm to. (This is interesting, because in 2006 the music the genre consciously employs and strives to include is something Cash helped to pioneer as far back as the 1980s.) This album is extraordinary. It is brave, difficult, and honest. It is utterly moving and beautiful. Because it so successfully marries all of her strengths as a songwriter, singer, and musician, Black Cadillac may be the crowning achievement of her career thus far.

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add 1025 ADN Cash

Nearly eight years after Rosanne Cash last released a set of original songs, 2014's The River & the Thread finds her in a reflective mood, and just as 2009's The List saw her looking back with a set of classic songs recommended by her father, the late country legend Johnny Cash, The River & the Thread is dominated by thoughts and emotions that occurred to her as she was involved in a project to restore Johnny's boyhood home. This doesn't mean that Cash has returned to the spunky, country-accented sound of her most popular work -- this is still Rosanne Cash the mature and thoughtful singer/songwriter we've come to know since the late '90s, and the tone of this album is unfailingly literate. But though this music isn't country, it's certainly Southern, and road trips from Alabama to Tennessee, visits to the Tallahatchie Bridge and Money Street, and vintage gospel music on the radio embroider these songs as Cash immerses herself in the places that were once close to home as if she's reuniting with long lost family. And two of the songs cut especially close to home -- "Etta's Tune" was written in memory of Marshall Grant, a longtime family friend and member of Johnny Cash's band, while "When the Master Calls the Roll" is a tale of love torn apart during the Civil War that Cash wrote in collaboration with her former husband Rodney Crowell and current spouse John Leventhal -- and they rank with the best material on the album, genuine and heartfelt, and written and performed with a genuine passion that never sinks into sentimental histrionics. Just as Cash's songs are crafted with a subtle intelligence, her vocals here are superb, getting to the heart of the lyrics without painting herself into a corner, and the production is rich but elegant and to the point. Rosanne Cash hasn't been especially prolific in the 21st century, and at under 40 minutes, she wasn't crafting an epic with The River & the Thread. But she's learned to make every word and every note count, and this album confirms once again that she's matured into a singular artist with the talent and the vision to make these stories of her travels in the South come to vivid and affecting life.

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