EARLE CLIMBS THAT MOUNTAIN
* TALENTED ARTIST TURNS HIS ATTENTION TOWARDS BLUEGRASS
BY FISH GRIWKOWSKY
* 02/15/99
The Edmonton Sun
(c) Copyright 1999 The Edmonton Sun. All Rights Reserved.
* THE MOUNTAIN: Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band (ADA) -- If you
bought El Corazon in '97, one of the tracks you'll probably recall is I
* Still Carry You Around, Earle singing with a competent bluegrass band
in
tow.
This is an album full of just that, the band being Del McCoury's.
TD This is not Copperhead Road. Earle is a strange animal. A song such
as
More Than I Can Do from I Feel Alright, for example, showed just how
happy he was to be out of prison, rocking down the house.
Last album he spent more than a little time mourning the death of
folk
icon Townes Van Zandt. The result was great.
Now he's taken the Marty Stuart approach and immersed himself in a
musical project.
* If you like bluegrass, which you should, this a fine collection. The
usual all-star cast is there: Emmylou and Gillian Welch, along with
Stuart and Sam Bush on the subdued last track, Pilgrim.
The tone is varied and the playing competent. Though Earle works best
in a kind of Springsteen mode, harmonicas and guitars fighting for
* attention, his nasally voice suits bluegrass, especially when McCoury
joins him in harmony a la Bill Monroe or Flatt and Scruggs.
It's a good album, but at the same time it's not going to be for
everybody.
* Music's past is filled with wonderful genres, and bluegrass is one of
them, certainly better than the dorky anthems that proliferate the
radios of North America at the end of this century.
Earle told me once that he was going to do a CD this year about the
path music had taken since Jimmie Rodgers left the scene. Looks like he
stopped in the Ozarks for a while. Good on him. (4)
- - -
WHAT I DESERVE: Kelly Willis (Ryko) -- Kelly Willis is one of the
very
few artists (Emmylou Harris, Junior Brown, Lyle Lovett) who can please
ears on both sides of the country fence.
Her lyrics are straightforward enough to please hot country
sensibility and deep enough to deserve a "yup" from the y'alternative
pumpkin patch. It ain't all empty and happy, but it ain't all painfully
gritty and real either.
So what we have here is a sort of white flag, a truce between two
distinct and uncommunicative sides. Which mostly turns out well.
Kelly Willis is also a singer, besides all this labelling, and her
voice, though decent, can take some getting used to. She has a
meandering style, one that never strays too far, so there is also a
homogeny to What I Deserve that requires a second or third listen to
pick up on the subtlety.
But Cradle of Love really shows off her voice with a kind of
sentimentality (without the cheese) that Karen Carpenter often hit.
She sings mostly about relationships, ill and healthy, newborn and
gone, which is what all good country is about.
There's a track called Talk Like That that hits your heart in a very
different way than the next song, Not Forgotten You, but this is
Willis's skill and though her overall punch is a little soft, this is
still a hell of a record for any laid-back occasion. (3 1/2)
