Twelve tracks that run the full gamut of American music.
In case you are unaware of Rees Shad, whose biography can be summed up as “polymath”, this is his 17th album in a 30-year career which has included collaborations with roots performers including the songwriter’s songwriter Guy Clark. Fans of Dr John and Randy Newman’s more New Orleans-inspired efforts will have much to enjoy on this album, although Cat Stevens sounds like a major influence on the vocal timbre.
Self-produced, and released independently on his Shadville Records imprint, Shad offers a dozen stories, with two additional Back Porch versions of ‘Coda Blues’ and ‘Brighter Daze’ available on physical versions of the album. The former is a groovy tune inspired by Shad’s wife Pamela and, even in its full band arrangement, sounds like a back porch jam thanks to harmonica from R.B. Stone. The latter, featuring Eleanor Dubinsky and (in the Back Porch Version) her husband Dario Tiech too, brings in bossa nova and jazz guitar, pointing to a tremendously eclectic set of songs.
There were four pre-released singles: punchy album opener ‘Ain’t That the Way’, which includes a nod to “the bullies and the cheats and the rats”; ‘Isn’t it a Lovely Day’, which is a rather classic tune in the mould of Van Morrison or James Taylor, but with a dobro solo; ‘Magic Lantern Presentation’, which Shad sings in a Dr John-type burr and conjures up the Antebellum era with its tale of sharecroppers and lyrical nods to gingham dresses and “the progress of the race”; and the strongly melodic title track, which is sung confidently over a sparse acoustic arrangement and includes the line “resistant to the onslaught of the change”.
The atmospheric ‘Thumbing The Scales’ begins the second side of the album, with the ear caught by off-beat guitar stabs that conjure a vaguely grunge-y mood akin to Soundgarden or Pearl Jam. There’s some growling and tootling from Marcus Benoit’s sax on the raunchy ‘A Man Like Me’, which nods to James Brown and rhymes “promise/honest” and “full of fiction/kick that addiction”, while ‘Great Big World’ has a major-key chorus built for campfires.
‘The Right Thing’, which includes vocab like “contrition” and “self-deceit”, is a confessional tune, while the warm and empathetic ‘Your Last Straw’ could have been a Cat Stevens hit in 1971: “I’m absorbing every story”, “I can’t take your first steps till I walk beside you”. On closing track ‘Pistol Whip Hangover’, which shifts us out of the contemplative mood to end our journey back in a blues bar, Shad’s narrator gets “a call from a beneficial friend” who is the creation of the song’s co-writer Fred Koller, who owns Rhino Books in Nashville.
There’s a reason Shad is still recording after all these years, and he sounds like a pure songfaber who is fully aware of every aspect of American music. Given that he grew up in New York City, that’s no surprise, and he is a credit to the city that spawned him.
