Eric Brace & Peter Cooper, Master Sessions (Red Beet, 2010)
Peter Cooper, The Lloyd Green Album (Red Beet, 2010)
Eric Brace & Last Train Home, Six Songs EP (Red Beet, 2009)
Various artists, East Nashville, Vol. 3 (Red Beet, 2009)
There is so much beautiful music on the first two of these CDs that it’s hard to know where to start.
The names on the albums belong to Eric Brace and Peter Cooper. (In 2008 they collaborated on an album called You Don’t Have To Like Them Both that was a sterling example of the kind of country/folk music that’s currently being made in what I think of as “alternative Nashville.”) But the real marquee names here belong to dobro legend Mike Auldridge and even bigger pedal steel legend Lloyd Green. Brace and Cooper both grew up in Washington, D.C., and although they didn’t know each other they both spent a lot of time listening to Auldridge, whose band the Seldom Scene was a weekly regular at the Birchmere nightclub. Auldridge’s musical hero was Lloyd Green, and although they once collaborated on a song Audridge wrote called “Lloyd’s of Nashville,” they’d never done an album together. Until now.
For the disc Master Sessions, Brace and Cooper gathered a bunch of players and turned them loose with a bunch of songs plus Auldridge and Green in a Nashville studio, and the predictable result was magic. This is the kind of country music I thought they’d quit making 30 years ago.
It starts with a song that’s hard to beat, Herb Pedersen’s “Wait a Minute,” a gorgeous number made even more beautiful by the wonderful vocal harmonies (including none other than Kenny Chesney), and of course the effortlessly sublime playing of Auldridge and Green. You can just assume that applies to every one of the 11 tracks on the album. Some of the best playing by the two slide guitarists comes in “Circus,” written by Brace and Cooper. But there’s not a clunker on here. There are covers of songs by Tom T. Hall and John Hartford, and several written or co-written by Brace and Cooper. A couple of them, “Big Steve” and “Behind Your Back” pay tribute to some East Nashville characters and other musicians. “Missoula Tonight” is a beautiful love song set in the vicinity of a forest fire, and “It Won’t Be Me” (by Brace and Last Train Home bandmate Karl Straub) is a train song about a guy who doesn’t get the girl. Brace and Cooper do a nice duet on Jon Byrd’s “Silent Night,” about the joy a traveling musician finds in coming home. The whole thing ends on an up note, with everybody sounding like they’re having a great time on Hartford’s “I Wish We Had Our Time Again.”
If you want to hear for yourself, you can listen to four tracks — “Wait a Minute,” “Suffer A Fool,” “It Won’t Be Me and “I Wish We Had Our Time Again” on this Reverb Nation player.
The stars of course are Auldridge and Green, who make every song special with their classy licks. But much credit goes to the rest of the band, including drummer Pat McInerney and bassist Dave Roe who do much more than keep the rhythm solidly, Jen Gunderman on keys and accordion, and Richard Bennett on lead guitars.
***
The same players pretty much played on Peter Cooper’s The Lloyd Green Album, minus the bassist, because they went for a more stripped-down sound on this one. That approach really lets Green’s pedal steel come to the front.
Cooper sings with a very pleasant tenor, and the songs he pens lean more to the folk part of the spectrum than Brace’s country-rock. That holds true for the opener, “Dumb Luck,” as well as those on Master Sessions, including “Suffer A Fool and “Big Steve.” Gunderman’s accordion and piano get a little more time out front here, too, which is just fine with me.
This album is filled with choice covers, including “The Last Laugh,” which Cooper co-wrote with another East Nashville denizen, Todd Snider (it was on his 2009 album The Excitement Plan). There’s also the lovely and sad “Bells of Odilia,” by Chris Richards; Tom T. Hall’s heart-tugging ode to a veteran, “Mama, Bake A Pie”; a fairly obscure but heartwarming Kris Kristofferson song, “Here Comes That Rainbow Again”; and “Train to Birmingham,” which John Hiatt wrote but has never recorded. One of my favorites is “Tulsa Queen,” written way back in the ’70s by Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell; Crowell himself lends some harmony vocals to this one.
Kim Carnes sings harmony vocals on “Odilia” as well as the deeply melancholy “Elmer The Dancer,” which Cooper wrote about the demise of a bar in Milwaukee. Other Cooper originals include “Champion of the World,” a song that seems autobiographical and which has a railroad rhythm courtesy McInerney’s understated drumming; the likewise autobiographical “That Poor Guy,” with Richard Bennett on dobro that subtly blends with Green’s steel; and the honky-tonk song “What Dub Does,” another song about another East Nashville character, which he co-wrote with Baker Maultsby.
Cooper gets to show off his own acoustic fingerpicking skills on this album, but of course Green puts on a pedal steel clinic on every song. His playing lifts this out of the realm of contemporary folk music and drops it solidly into the alt-country category. It’s beautifully performed and beautifully recorded.
***
If the songs on the 2009 EP Six Songs by Eric Brace & Last Train Home are any indication of what’s to come, I can’t wait. With every release, Last Train Home keeps taking major strides in songwriting, performance and production. And on this EP, Brace turns over the songwriting to others, including the band’s lead guitarist Karl Straub, one of the most underrated songwriters and guitarists in the business. His “Soul Parking,” the second track, is a beautiful slab of soulful, twangy rock.
These originals rub shoulders with some unexpected covers, including “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” a hot-jazz-era standard that was also covered by Nina Simone in 1958; Johnny Mercer’s “Autumn Leaves” and the French cafe standard “Et Maintenant / What Now My Love.” The former swings suitably; the latter is played straight the first time through, then given an upbeat Tijuana Brass-like arrangement that just shouts Swingin’ Sixties! The band further crosses genres with its cover of Keith Farquhar’s “Big Fish.” Every member of the band gets a brief solo take on this one, including some wonderful baritone sax from Chris Watling and trumpet from Kevin Cordt, plus Dave Van Allen’s pedal steel. Then it’s finished on another high note, the aforementioned “Autumn Leaves” in a twangy, rocking arrangement and that Last Train Home special locomotive rhythm. Brace shows off a previously hidden skill, singing verses of “Autumn Leaves” and “What Now My Love” in French. Oh, and there’s lots of hot and jazzy guitar work from Scott McKnight and Karl Straub, along with Van Allen on pedal steel.
This one, and all of the recordings in this review, are available direct from Red Beet Records.
***
Brace’s Red Beet Records in ’09 put out the third in its series of East Nashville compilations, this one subtitled More Music From the Other Side. Too often, this type of compilation is a hit-or-miss affair, but this one is pretty much all good. It’s dedicated to Duane Jarvis, an East Nashville musician who passed away in 2009, and whose cut “I Miss You Already” is a pretty good representative of what this music is all about. As Brace says in the promotional materials, “You can define East Nashville the same way you could describe Duane’s music: rock ‘n’ roll with a country heart and deep soul.”
“Gospel Song” from Peter Cooper’s album with Lloyd Green is here, as is a great little folk song by Brace, “Tranquility Base,” a 2009 single about Neil Armstrong’s historic walk on the moon and the questions it raised in Brace’s mind.
There’s a lot of soulful, bluesy music on this album, including Keiran Kane’s “Way Down Below” with its arresting juxtaposition of banjo and baritone sax; Anne McCue’s rocking “Broken Promise Land” which is reminiscent of Los Lobos’ East L.A. soul; Amelia White’s “Tiny Drops of Rain” with its George Harrison-inspired dual slide guitar lines; and Tim Carroll’s “No Easy Way” with its harmonica and spiky electric guitar; and the deep R & B of Elizabeth Cook’s “On the Wire” with its heavy bass and trebly wah-wah licks. There’s also plenty of twang from songs such as Kevin Gordon’s “Black Dog” (not the Led Zep song), a rocking look at urban life’s longings and what-ifs; Chuck Mead’s honky-tonk “I Wish it Was Friday”; Audrey Auld’s jangly folk-rock “Love You Like the Earth”; and Jarvis’s song, which he sings in his deep, craggy drawl over a plodding 4/4 rhythm and Tex-Mex touches from guitar and mariachi strings.
The generous 19 tracks are bookended by two songs by Phil Lee, the New Orleans-like “Neon Tombstone” and the slow, mournful ballad “Taterbug Rag.”
East Nashville Vol. 3 is an excellent introduction to some of the undeservedly lesser-known artists from “the other side” of Music City. All fans of Americana music in all its various forms should check it out, and follow up on some of these musicians.
- Gary Whitehouse
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