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Blues, Americana, guitar.

Produced by Neilson Hubbard, Rod Picott talks of how Starlight Tour, his 14th album, is raw and unvarnished, both musically and emotionally, the songs digging deep into his own story or what could have been. As such, thoughts of morality get things underway with the chugging Next Man In Line, written after seeing his father’s life diminish following his wife’s death and realising how his own life has more years behind than in front, asking himself, “ Did you get your share did you waste your time?”

Getting Tom Waits bluesy with throaty vocals and rasping guitar, Digging Ditches is a blue-collar gripe against a brutal manual labour life of torn shirts and rust, “decorated with scars and stitches” and where “nothing gets tossed/We keep it all make it work again/Ain’t nothing gets broken that you can’t mend”, a resentment of settling for what’s always been and not what you wanted it to be as he growls “You gotta punish what you’re not where I come from”.

The spare, fingerpicked arrangement belies the anger coursing through the ironic Television Preacher, which, evocative of Kristofferson and Clark, sets images of austerity and hardship (“We ain’t got much there ain’t much to lose/Money is tighter than poor boy’s shoes”) against the evangelist grifters bleeding their god-fearing marks dry (“Arms to heaven he starts to preach/Grabs ten percent of my old man’s check”), closing with the bitter line “Let Jesus himself find next month’s rent”.

The tempo picks back up for A Puncher’s Chance, a co-write with Brian Koppelman (the screenwriter of Ocean’s Thirteen and director of Knockaround Guys), which, drawing on a pugilist theme that’s been a  constant in his work, takes the idea of a boxer at the end of his fighting days, with the only thing left being his strength, as a  metaphor for giving it one last go in the ring of life and love (“Always the underdog and never the champ/Busted and broken a beat up tramp/Smart money’s on the guy who can jab and dance/But the long shot’s gonna pay off, darlin’ I got a puncher’s chance…Forget the short game we’re gonna play long If you are willing to go the distance with me I’ll be in your corner whatever may be”).

Koppelman also shares a credit on the lightly picked world-weary Combine, a song which shares a similar idea, this time in the form of a piece of farm equipment at the end of its working life, the narrator relying on it after a racing bet never paid off (“now I’m stuck with a broke down rig/And the damn thing is threatening not to start/I can’t afford to lose these crops and I can’t afford the parts”) praying “All I need is one more harvest from this old combine”.

Another co-wrote, this time with Amy Speace and gestating over several years, polished with pedal steel, Homecoming Queen returns to the album’s what was (“She had good friends in Junior High/Watching Little League games on those August nights/Read the dirty parts of Judy Blume/On a canopy bed in the afternoon/I heard one night up on the Tower Hill/She rounded third base with a college kid”) and what might have been theme  (“She ran to California without any plan/Married the drummer from a heavy metal band/Ended up a footnote in Rolling Stone/Licked her wounds and moved back home”), and of not living in the past (“Everybody wants to make a big show/But nobody ever tells you it’s time to put away your rock and roll clothes”).

The Guy Clark-like title track is Picott’s fleshing out of a lyric sent to him by Nashville singer songwriter  Nick Nace. The seemingly romantic title actually refers to the Saskatoon Police practice of supposedly driving drunk indigenous peoples out to the edge of town and leaving them there to die of hypothermia during the cold winter months (“They dropped him off on the outskirts of town/Twenty below two feet of snow on the ground/His crime was being drunk, brown and poor”). Opening with a scene setter (“She said he was my daddy but I ain’t so sure/He might have been just another bad night’s cure/But he was good to my mama and the liquor store/He don’t come around here no more”), it shifts to a reflection on prejudice, victimisation and judgement in “Habits come cheap and they sink in hard/A car on blocks in a frost bound yard/And you can’t escape the skin you’re in/A walking reminder of another man’s sin”.

The uptempo punchy drums rocking Wasteland was inspired by Bull Mountain, a Southern Gothic novel by Brian Panowich about a family of bootleggers and the black sheep who becomes a lawman, and the lengths men will go to protect it, honour it, or sometimes destroy it, the song written as the first person combined perspectives of its characters as it speaks of addiction (“The Florida line runs through here/OxyContin And Fentanyl/The only thing I know for sure/You got a pain we got a cure”), loyalty and belonging as it cautions “You ain’t one of us this ain’t your home/Our hands are clean we just grease the wheel/Take our cut and that’s the deal …If you think you’re better with your city lights/You best just stay there cause out here it’s dark at night”.

Ebbing back to ruminative picked acoustic,  Pelican Bay had its origins in a friend describing watching pelicans dive for fish, from which developed this bittersweet story of a  traumatised vet (“Two tours out in the jungle of Viet goddamn Nam/And it scrambled something in my head left me shaking down inside/In the place no one can see and it stripped of my pride”) finding redemption through the love of a good woman (“We were married by a justice of the peace/No family throwing rice just her and just me/The only thing that mattered in the whole damn world/Was the hand I held and my trust in that girl”) and their baby daughter, discovering peace “at the end of the day/Watching birds dive on Pelican Bay”, those memories clung to after his wife’s passing (“Now I walk the beach and carry a stick scratch her name into sand/Stand and watch the ocean come and take her back again”).

If that brings a lump to the throat, then keep the tissues on hand for the album’s closer, the intimately sung, slow waltzing lullaby It’s Time To Let Go Of Your Dreams, a number he describes as literally the saddest song he’s ever written, fuelled by a deep depression brought on by “a profound guilt and loyalty to my aging father and some sense of abandoned ambition in my work”, a sense of growing old and seeing those dreams of youth turn into ghosts (“Love came on wings but she no longer sings/’Cause you’ve driven too far off the map…It’s snake oil there in the bottle/And you try to smile as you swallow/It’s a bitter taste and it all goes to waste/When you’re running out of tomorrows”) and, ending with a valedictory trumpet, of letting them go and finding another falling star, as he whisperingly ends with “So go and make a new wish/Let it come soft as a kiss/old it close to your chest and there it will rest/It’s time to find a new dream”.

Rod Picott rightly reckons this stands alongside Welding Burns and Paper Hearts & Broken Arrows as the best three albums he’s ever made. If this is the first crop of him ploughing a new field of dreams, then future harvests should prove no less bountiful.

Tracks:
01. Next Man in Line (4:05)
02. Digging Ditches (2:43)
03. Television Preacher (4:31)
04. A Puncher’s Chance (4:42)
05. Combine (4:26)
06. Homecoming Queen (3:54)
07. Starlight Tour (3:47)
08. Wasteland (3.39)
09. Pelican Bay (4:02)
10. Time to Let Go of Your Dreams (3:21)

Staat er compleet op, 10% pars mee gepost. Met zeer veel dank aan de originele poster. Laat af en toe eens weten wat je van het album vindt. Altijd leuk, de mening van anderen. Oh ja, MP3 doe ik niet aan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdoT_Y9WlAI