Customer Reviews

Indians Cowboys Horses Dogs

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Tom Russell's new album is to other Western music what the HBO series Deadwood is to other Western movies: pretty much the antithesis. If Larry McMurtry were a folk singer, this is what he might sound like.

Russell's is not a golden-hued West but a dark, treacherous place full of characters whose self-destructive impulses often overwhelm whatever heroic ones they may possess. His daring reimagining of the Marty Robbins classic "El Paso" is a case in point. His version banishes all the romance of the original, focuses on the young cowboy's pain, and causes us to shake our heads at his suicidal stupidity. More, in other words, as the Old West was really like, a frontier as much psychic as geographic, populated in good part by men and women temperamentally unsuited to live amid civilized order.

Not that the romantic West is entirely absent. "Bucking Horse Moon" could easily be an Ian Tyson song, not the first of Russell's compositions of which that can be said (in any event, Russell and Tyson are occasional collaborators). That's okay. Tyson is as good as they come, and a new Tyson song, even if Tyson didn't happen to write it, is always welcome. More surprising is the stunning version of the mysterious Dylan Western "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts," which Russell performs in high theatrical fashion in collaboration with Eliza Gilkyson and Joe Ely. Improbably, Russell translates Linda Thompson's fairytale "No Telling" into a hardbitten Western ballad. There is not a single weak cut here. I could not possibly find anything serious to complain about in a singer smart enough to revive the greatest of all dog folk songs, "Old Blue," and then to do it with such good humor and inventiveness.

The most striking of the originals is "The Ballad of Edward Abbey," about the late author and environmentalist. Its first verse parodies the opening words of the grim 19th-Century "The Buffalo Skinners" before going on to portray, in crisp, perfect language, a complex man who championed the Western landscape against those who see it only through a haze of dollar signs. Russell admires Abbey but does him the favor of not sentimentalizing him.

Russell's actorish singing is occasionally mildly distracting, but no matter. He manages a seamless fusion of modern and traditional sensibility -- philosophical as well as musical -- and in the process creates something that can properly be called real art.

I had never heard of Tom Russell until about a month ago when he was on David Letterman. He sang "Tonight We Ride," on the show and I ordered the cd a day or two later. This disc is exactly what the title says, a collection of songs about cowboys, indians, horses and dogs.

It includes cover versions of some classic Dylan songs and new songs, and has playing in my car quite a bit. I'm not a big country fan, but to me this is not really country music, but a mixture of country, rock and even some folk.

I bought the disc based on one song I heard and was not at all disappointed. The song I had heard was the best song on the disc, but there are some other great songs on here, and not a bad song in the group. I will be adding more of his discs to my collection.

...a little bit Lee Hazelwood. I bought this album blind, on a recommendation (probably because I've been on an alt.country buying binge lately), but it's rarely been out of my CD player since. Tom Russell is as much a storyteller as a country musician. It's like the soundtrack of a great 60s western movie that never was.

It ain't just cowboy music here. It's a wide ranging excursion from heartfelt love songs to timeless ballads. Great covers of Dylan and others, such as Peter LaFarge's Ballad of Ira Hayes. Russell is in full voice and Andrew Hardin's guitar playing is superb.

If you want to learn about Texas music just buy this disc. Tom's love of life and artist's eye infect every song.

The opening number "Tonight We Ride" is hard to beat. He sang it on David Letterman's show (Paul Shaffer played the accordian!). Letterman described it as a "song that will make you want to saddle up a horse, ride up to Connecticut and rob a liquor store." Me, I just went out and bought some good Reposado Gold. Letterman's got a point, though- the songs on this disc will move you one way or the other.

My other favorites are Bucking Horse Moon, and All This Way for a Short Ride. Tom Russell is true American artist like Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger, and this is one of his best.

Someone once said that if you bought every miles davis album, and the albums by everyone who ever played on one, you'd have an ultimate jazz collection. Tom Russell is like that. If you bought every album that had a Tom Russell song on it, or the albums of everyone who ever played with Tom on one of his, you would have a collection that would include the top of the rock/country/folk/folk-rock charts for twenty or more years.

Now Tom does the favor (again) to others' music, using a bunch of artists who are equally unsung legends. There are a number of people out there who are becoming consummate collectors and interpreters of the American Music Idiom; Ry Cooder, Dave Alvin, Ian Tyson, and Tom Russell. On this Album, Tom and his stellar backers take some familar and some rare songs and do 'em up right in the Western way.

worth the purchase.

"Tonight we Ride" is the kind of riveting ballad that should go down in the annals of Western music with "El Paso", which just received its definitive cover on this CD.

And Russell doesn't let up all the way through the CD. Accompaniment is sparse, mostly guitar with an occasional fiddle.

"Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts" covers Dylan one better with Eliza Gilkyson and Joe Ely along for the ride to tell the story from the point of view of the various characters.

"The Ballad of Edward Abbey" is probably my favorite. Russell memorializes the kind of man who preserves what Westerners love most, the land, the animals the freedom to be what they want to be:

Ed walked across the desert at least a thousand times
He spoke with javalinas
And if he saw a billboard he chopped that b@st@rd down
If a man can't p#ss in his own front yard, he's living too close to town...

And that's the spirit of this CD that musically preserves the spirit of the West. I can't say this is the best Tom Russell CD--I like "Man From nowhere" very much too.

This was the first Tom Russell CD I ever purchased...originally, I bought it for the Edward Abbey song...in the end, I loved listening to it all...over and over!

The last time that I reviewed a CD by the singer/songwriter Tom Russell was his album, about the Irish disapora- "The Man From God Knows Where". Hey, wait a minute- how can you go from the Irish diaspora to searching for the Old American West like that? Well, that answer is easy- not all the Irish stayed in the Eastern cities after heading out of the old country over the past 150 years or so. Some, like members of other ethnic groups, headed west when things dried up or got too "hot" in the East.

That is the common design for Russell's drive to find the key to the old West, and to sing of it, to sing of it like Walt Whitman did in his poetry that sang of America. Although the unabashed promise that Whitman sang has turned somewhat rancid and wearisome in the last hundred years or so that is where the meat of Russell's work lies.

In this album the motif shifts a shade in that Russell takes a deep, deep look at the stormy (to be kind ) relationships between whites and Native Americans in the struggle over the land, and, in the final analysis over cultural respect (or rather lack of it). That is always brought home to me in "The Ballad of Ira Hayes". Ira Hayes was one the planters of the American flag at Iwo Jima in the Pacific War in World War II. For a minute he was a hero then went just as quickly back to being...."just another drunken Indian". In that same vein here, "Tonight We Ride" and "All This Way For A Short Ride" stick out.

Real Music, Real People, Real Places and Things. If your favorite novels of the old west, Texas, and the Rio Grand could sing, play, and write music, this is what they would sound like. That is this album. Tragic, from the gut, funny, it's all here in one neat little package of emotion, easy guitar, lonely bass, the smell of dirt and sage, and laced with a squirt of telecaster. You will think you have heard all of these songs before...maybe in a dream or a nightmare, maybe in a story your father told you, maybe in some of your experiences that you can't quite touch...you can touch it here.