Veteran Texas troubadour recovers his muse.
Billy Eli is a Texas songwriter with plenty of miles under his wheels, both literally and metaphorically. It’s been forty years of pounding the American highways, playing honky tonks and bars and following the music, and if those few words conjure up a particular image of Americana or country music in your mind, rest assured, that’s what you’ll find inside his latest release, ‘Lace’.
Guitars twang, pedal steel bleeds heartache, and an irresistible country groove underpins the songs. And what songs they are! Unvarnished, emotionally intelligent but without unnecessary window dressing, muscular without being aggressive, ‘Lace’ conjures up one of Eli’s influences, Steve Earle – especially if you’re a fan of Earle’s opening salvo of records, ‘Guitar Town’ and ‘Exit O’.
There is a consistency of sound and feel to the songs within, that says if you like one, you’ll probably like them all. An interesting back note is that Eli describes this album as coming from a period of “creative disinterest … (I) thought I’d written everything I had to write”. Arriving eleven years after his last offering, this is understandable, but turns out to be significantly inaccurate.
Opener ‘Trying Not to Drown’ kicks in with a twangy intro, and a groove with a fleetness of foot. ‘You’re the One’, then ‘Hey Maria’ come through like natural segues; and though ‘Here’s to You’ slows the pace and becomes a little more introspective, musically and lyrically, this is a record that overall has an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ feel.
If that sounds like faint praise , it’s really not. Eli writes of himself, “I’ve got a few lines in my face and a permanent trucker’s tan on my left arm”, and really, that’s as perfect a summation of what he brings to his art as any amount of other words could do. ‘Lace’ sounds natural, unforced and is an easygoing partner to the road or the back porch.
