Despite several other shows in the area on this night, it didn’t have an effect on attendance as Caleb Caudle & The Sweet Critters drew a full house, fascinating the audience at Live at Ted’s with a 21-song salute drawn from not only the just released “Sweet Critters” album but taking several detours into Caudle’s six-albums-and-change catalogue. “Call it our sixth record,” Caudle advised. “I did a couple before that but they weren’t good enough to count.”
There’s no question he’ll be counting this latest as it is loaded with hooks, packed with melodies and overstuffed with clever lyrics that have sustained the band as they continued an ambitious schedule since August promoting the album. They crushed it from the tempestuous opening notes of ‘Great High Mountain’ to the high-revved finale, ‘Monte Carlo,’ 90 minutes later. Caudle’s affable manner made the gig seem like a house concert to a crowd that was eager to embrace his music. The new songs felt as if they were already well beyond beta-testing, fully timeless and established as staples of his shows.
Everything it took to put together an album and tour seemed like it had culminated on Ted’s stage where, earlier this year, he played a show that was barely remembered. The pace of the schedule may have drawn some energy, but Caudle showed no signs of wear. He’d just take a deep breath in between songs, down a couple swallows from a glass of water and relate an anecdote about the next tune to come.
‘Great High Mountain’ was written by Keith Whitley, the only song Caudle didn’t have a hand in. He sung the last verse acapella like a soloist in a church choir singing of redemption and then segued directly into the title song from his 2016 album, the sublime ‘Carolina Ghost,’ supported by lilting dobro from Carter Giegerich. The temperature was raised on ‘I Don’t Fit In,’ introduced as “my song for all the weirdos out there,” before dipping into the “Crushed Coins” album for the radiant ‘Stack of Tomorrows,’ a long-distance love song where Caudle’s character is writing postcards using words the recipient already knows. Caudle picked one from his “Forsythia” album next, telling the story of the home where he grew up and how people left vegetables on the front porch of the house on ‘Red Bank Road.’
It was then time for Caudle to break out some songs from “Sweet Critters”, starting with ‘Kentucky When You Called’ because that’s where he was when his wife called asking when he’d be home. After a reverb-drenched, foreboding interlude, he changed direction to unleash ‘The Devil’s Voice’, a song about addiction that hit painfully close to home (the devil’s voice sounds a whole lot like mine). “If you know someone like that,” Caudle advised, “lend them a hand.” In the intro to the uptempo ‘The Garage’, he observed that was a place much like Ted’s, a small venue in Winston-Salem where he first went as a fan, then for open mic nights. “They let me open for a bunch of cool people, and I was really terrible. But they allowed me to be bad and get better which was so important. Unfortunately, it’s not there any more, but there are a ton of small venues that are the cornerstones of their communities like this one.”
It must not be a coincidence that ‘Crazy Wayne’ is one of the highlights of his sets. It’s about the need “to get a good mechanic to go over your shit,” something he continues to do. Caudle explained that everybody accuses him of just writing sad songs all the time, though he calls them “realistic.” At the merch table, you can buy a t-shirt that reads “Cloudy with a chance of sad songs, because that is the weather forecast.” But he wanted to write one where everything worked out and launched into ‘Hollywood Ending’.
Every musician needs a good tuning the guitar story, and Caudle’s ‘Whirligigs’ is about his uncle Shorty, the hardest working man he knows. “I saw him out in the yard the other day without a shirt, wearing just his shorts with a chainsaw in his hand. It’s 8 a.m. and this dude is out there chopping up trees to build houses for every bird in the neighbourhood. He’s switched to whirligigs now. He works on the honour system. You can come get anything you want; just leave a few bucks in one of the birdhouses.” ‘Six Feet from the Flowers’ followed, a wistful tale that sounds as if it came from the Carter family songbook and led to ‘Better Hurry Up’, because, well, time is running out on your life (and the first set).
Caudle is relaxed and self-aware in a country kind of way, like someone you could meet at the local diner who can either pat you on the back while listening to your troubles or pull your leg as if it was attached to a roasted turkey. “Welcome back to the best night of your lives,” Caudle announced tongue firmly in cheek and asked the audience to think about turning the phone off and going out in the woods, stand in the creek and let the water roll past, thinking all the good thoughts. It’s his favourite pastime, ‘Feeling Free’ enough to always be the one with the grass-stained knees. Those pleasant images are left behind as the band kicks into the rocker, ‘Texas Tea’, where he sings about a misspent birthday taking a late checkout at the Lonestar Motel in Amarillo, then as Adaline Delgado’s snare drum popped over the outro, the band broke into ‘Shattered Glass’ finding out you’re not able to handle the heaviness that comes with being a victim.
This is a musician as deeply in tune with himself and his surroundings as are the Sweet Critters backing him. They are understandably proud of the new record, recorded in Florence, Alabama with John Paul White and Ben Tanner. Sweet Critters is the name of the band, the album and its gorgeous title track, written while on tour, comparing a couple to a pair of sweet critters trying to cross the Interstate. “Over time they became one Like second day soup.” Upright bass player Karl Zerfas joined Caudle for some plaintive harmonies on the wistful ‘NYC in the Rain’ then it was a return to new music with ‘The Brim’. “It’s a song I wrote for my wife,” Caudle revealed, “but it’s one you write when you’re in the thick of it, not at the beginning.”
Winding down to the last few songs, he introduced ‘River of Fire’ with a scary tale familiar to anyone who has been to his shows recently. “I wrote this one about the time I got robbed at gunpoint. It took a long time to write this song because you have to forgive somebody to write it and believe it or not it’s pretty hard to forgive somebody after that. I didn’t die so that was the cool part but it was pretty weird, never had somebody say they were going to kill me before. I got robbed. It wasn’t anything personal. The guy was pretty bad off, which you pretty much have to be if you’re willing to do that. Every time I tried to write it, I was blocked like I was really hating the guy. Truth was, it was just the wrong time wrong place kind of deal. So, I’ve gotta practice radical empathy … Hope no one here gets robbed at gunpoint.” After a joke about John Prine preferring eating hot dogs to writing songs, the band kicked it up several notches with ‘Knee Deep Blues’, “a song about doing something and wishing you didn’t.”
Caudle has an innate sense of the right time to play a particular song, and he decided to leave the audience with ‘Monte Carlo,’ a song Elizabeth Cook sung with him on the record. “My grandfather had a 1970, which was the first year Chevy made them. I know that because he told me every time I got in the car. His was glitter green, had a dark green leather roof and a little Batman hanging from the rearview. He was a cool dude and that was a cool car.” Well, that was a cool rockin’ country song and a cool satisfying night of southern cultured country rock.
