Titled for a town in West Texas and a line from a co-write session with Steve Anderson for Alone In Valentine, his second studio album, the Lancashire-based Americana singer-songwriter joined forces with drummer Cal Campbell and bassist Cornelius Webb, respectively the sons of Glen and Jimmy, to record at Campbell’s Nashville home with contributions also coming from Ben Jarrad on guitar, pedal steel player Neil Jones, pianist Dan Ingenthron and Matt Combs on strings with Ben Jones and Toria Woolf on backing.
Drawing on influences that range from Tom Petty to Colter Wall, it gets into its stride with the opening chugger ‘Hand Me Down Heart’, a call for a full commitment relationship (“I don’t need half an emotion/Can’t afford to just go through the motions/If you still ain’t over him/We might sink before we can swim/Don’t bring me a heart that’s all used up”), the album anchored by a succession of swings and roundabouts love songs and continuing with the cut your losses and move on ‘Checkmate’ (“When you put it to the test/Oh there is no second best/Just only one path left to walk away/You were tired of playing a losing game/It’s 4D chess and now we’ve called checkmate”). Of a similar mind, the relatively brief encounter shuffle of ‘Strangers To Lovers’ is summed up in the title (“It happened in a minute and you almost passed me by/I was holding /The door when you threw me a smile/Life’s twists and turns left us where we began… It took about a year to know it wasn’t right/We went from strangers to lovers and back to strangers again”).
The fingerpicked melancholic title track with its Guy Clarke undertones spins the story of a lonely woman driving through southern Colorado in a beat up Silverado, ‘Desperado’ playing on the radio, following the death of her husband to take him home and scatter his ashes on the banks of the Ro Grande. The album artwork and the single’s video were actually shot in the town.
Stepping off the relationships path, Woolf on harmonies, ‘Coal Town’ is a lament for a dying industry and the communities that died with it (“Turned out the lights as they were punching out the clocks…A skill was a job, you had for your whole life/Kind of like a husband and a wife/But when data’s the new oil and code is the new craft/No wonder things that were built to stay, were never meant to last…Is it too far gone to turn this place around/’Cause I ain’t leaving this old coal town”).
It’s back to burned bridges for the slow waltzing ‘Brown Paper Bag’ which, stripped to just guitar and pedal steel, speaks of the way alcohol can tear things apart (“You told me to choose between the drinking and you…took for granted everything I ever had/”I promise I’ll give up”, the only words I never said/Traded your love for liquor and a brown paper bag”), that mismatch between what you want and what you get spilling over into the slow strummed broken honky tonk of ‘Man You Need’ (“I might be the man you wanted/But I’m not the man you need/How I wished to make you happy, put a smile upon your face…But in the long run it was for the best, that I let you slip away”).
The ruminative ‘Another Sad Song’ is exactly what it says on the tin, but comes with a positive perspective about how “words don’t mean a thing/If you don’t speak them from the heart” and not screwing things up again (“take your time/But please be mine/’Cause I don’t want to sing another sad song/Don’t want to feel another heartbreak/I don’t want to spend another night alone/Just staring at the ceiling wide awake/All I want and all I need/Is you and your love”).
The strummed, easy rolling and vocally soaring ‘Backseat Driver’ takes love out on the road down “eighty miles worth of telephone poles” following a dirt track with no clear destination but still “making memories made to last” because “my best adventures/They all start with you”. If happy ever afters are few and far between on the album, at least there’s one here (“The mountain air went to our heads/And we got married in the spring”).
Time passing but savouring the moments is the carpe diem theme of the penultimate ‘Silhouettes and Sunsets’ as he sings that “another year is fading from our lives/Time’s passing, it makes life beautiful…With memories, cast like shadows in the skies…Life will bring you sad and happy tears/Don’t shed one, for the sake of loneliness, loneliness/No save them, for moments just like this”.
It comes to a halt in ‘Paris Texas’, a first person narrative about endings and beginnings that may or may not echo the Wim Wenders film, as, just leaving a note behind, the narrator calls time on their life “in this Godforsaken town” but clings to the hope that a new life lies ahead (“I’ll write you from Paris Texas/And I’ll wait for you there/If our love is strong enough/You just might call my bluff/I’ll show my hand/And hope that you’ll take it/You’ll come running to my door/And we won’t worry anymore”).
A valentine to 70s Americana troubadours, there’s no flash here, just unvarnished emotions and music sung and played from the heart. Give it some company.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.joemartinmusic.com
‘Another Sad Song’ – live:
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