Don't remember much about Bonnie, I was there for Leo, my friends were only there for Bonnie so knew nothing of him, and were pleasantly taken from the start, he was very friendly and chatty and humorous between songs, and his playing was of course amazing. Fond memories of Leo opening for Bonnie Raitt back in the mid 80s at a little mountain winery amphitheater around here on a beautiful starlit night, great fun. I was completely mesmerized, a young audiophile's delight, and followed him closely for many years after. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.Love him. (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)Ĭatch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. poet laureate Joy Harjo: “Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.” Those are wise words and for any artist a noble calling, but Taylor is so concerned about lighting the way for others that he’s stumbling over his own feet. Taylor includes in the liner notes a quote from U.S. This is art that strives and strains so hard for meaning and weight that it threatens to become meaningless and weightless: lite music for dark times.
“Up with the mountains, down with the system… that keeps us in chains,” he sings on opener “Way Back in the Way Back.” He sends John Prine into the great beyond with the cringeworthy farewell: “Handsome Johnny had to go, child.” There’s a clunker line in every song, and “Mighty Dollar” is nothing but. In this case, writing such big songs erases much of the nuance in Taylor’s lyrics, reducing those thorny questions to bumper-sticker declarations. Good intentions don’t guarantee good art.
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“But I know how to sing about it.” And yet, the verses sound clipped, the call-and-response on the chorus nowhere near as rousing as you expect from the man who wrote “Heart Like a Levee” and “Saturday’s Song.” The payoff never comes. “Feeling bad, feeling blue, can’t get out of my own head,” he sings on “Sanctuary,” a would-be anthem of perseverance. They’re already settled in his head and in his heart, and he wants you to know it.
The songs on Quietly Blowing It, however, are more explanatory than exploratory, treating pat pronouncements as pop profundities because he already knows where he stands in relation to these issues. His songs were so relatable for being so vividly private: a still, small voice amplified through vintage speakers. On previous albums, he fashioned songs into question marks, interrogating God and himself, all with the understanding that faith has more to do with struggle than resolution. Taylor writes about big issues-income inequality, political corruption, a society fraying at its edges-but these complex matters are undermined by the rote uplift in his songs, an optimism assumed but never really earned. This is a statement album, broad and populist to a fault.
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But that short song is a parenthetical aside on an album full of grandiose declarations about the world today. Together, they worked up some moments of exuberance and experimentation, like the rousing ending of “Way Back in the Way Back” and the Nebraska-style harmonica that haunts “Glory Strums (Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner).” On “Angels in the Headlights,” Taylor ties up a sun-bleached pedal steel, a drunken piano, and a nylon-string guitar with baling twine, creating something both strange and affecting. He then recruited an impressive roster of headline guests, including Taylor Goldsmith from Dawes and legendary country guitarist/producer Buddy Miller. Even the album cover looks like a mashup of Lateness of Dancers and Hallelujah Anyhow.Įxcept for two co-writes with Anaïs Mitchell and Gregory Alan Isakov, Taylor wrote most of the songs alone at his North Carolina home and recorded in his small office studio. The title track recalls “Devotion” from 2013’s Haw and so many other airy ballads he’s written in the past. Here it just sounds like a thing that happens in a Hiss Golden Messenger song. “Sanctuary,” for example, opens with a tentative acoustic strum before the rest of the band comes crashing in, but that trick worked better on previous albums, where it depicted an artist who’d come to a crossroads, agonized over his path, then set on his way with a new spring in his step. It’s not just the crickets: Listening to Hiss Golden Messenger’s ninth proper album in 13 years (not counting live releases, joint albums, and a box set), it’s hard to shake the sense that you’ve heard all of this before.
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