When I first encountered Tim Easton's music, six or seven years ago, he was drawing lots of comparisons to artists like Beck. That could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your point of view. Frankly, Beck turns me off, but Tim Easton had a solid groove behind a song called "Downtown Lights" that had me coming back to the Borders listening station again and again until I finally broke down and bought the damn CD. True, I never much listened to it, but I liked that one song enough (and the CD was cheap enough) that when Easton released his 2003 album Break Your Mama's Heart, I picked it up the day it came out.
And it was then that I think I first heard Tim Easton. Not just because I actually played his CD (and kept playing it, and kept playing it), but because Easton actually let me hear his songs, by stripping away a lot of the textural gimmickry of the past and laying his songwriting bare. No one in their right minds could have compared that record to Beck - I was thinking more along the lines of a younger John Prine myself - the Midwestern self-deprecation, the sly dog sense of humor, and a genuine appreciation of love and meteorology and stuff. It had to have been a courageous step, especially when the record industry seems to be clueless when it comes to guitar-strumming male folkie-type singers ("Adam Fair" just doesn't have that same mystique to it, does it?) And well, is there any other musical form more common than just-a-guy-and-his-guitar? The urge to gimmickry is totally understandable; the will to drop it is completely admirable. The ability to stay interesting (or grow more so) without it is extremely rare. Though it certainly didn't land the guy on the charts, Break Your Mama's Heart is likely one of the best singer-songwriter records we're gonna hear this decade.
Easton's fourth full-length album Ammunition finds him stripping his sound down even further, and further elaborating upon his gritty, stubble-faced, travelin' troubadour with a heart o' gold persona. The songs are mostly broken-up love songs - to people, places, and controlled substances - but, as the title of the record might suggest, these songs are informed by the nightly news even when they're not necessarily about it. They are informed by distance and travel as well, by seeing what's going on at home through the eyes of people who live in other places and speak other languages. In his liner notes, he credits the metaphor of "Black Dog" to a girl he met in Prague. The lovely, almost regretful "Oh People" reads like a reluctant break-up letter to a whole population. When he sings oh people, I'm not coming along with you, there's a wistful sigh in his voice - but there's also steady resolve.
He duets with Lucinda Williams on "Back to the Pain" and channels his forebears - Cash, Dylan, Kristofferson, and above all, Prine - on upbeat numbers like "Not Today", a winking declaration of experience-won wisdom, and the hilarious "Dear Old Song and Dance", an unusually joyful, affectionately wrought catalog of psychotropism that ends abruptly when the author wakes up - sober - in friggin' Amsterdam, of all places. In "Next To You", he turns the view of a ceiling fan from a hotel bed into the height of romance: I can hear every song better when I'm next to you."C-Dub" is a funny, but not entirely convincing late 40s vintage blues jam (with a moral about messin' with the married womens), while the closing "Sitting on Top of the World" alludes to an old Doc Watson tune, and boasts some swampy-hot slide-guitar work. Between his clean, percussive finger-picking and his hellbound acoustic slide licks, Tim Easton really can do some fine things with his gee-tar, and he knows how to stomp out the time with his boots too.
But Easton oversteps when he strives to overt political comment, most notably on the annoyingly sincere "J.P.M.F.Y.F." ("Jesus Protect Me From Your Followers"). On "News Blackout", he attempts a hard southern blues bellow as he delivers lyrics straight off the pages of Salon.com's War Room blog. Even as I sorta agree with what he's saying, it comes off smug and cliche and, well yes, a little extremist. I mean, maybe there are followers of Jesus that "walk shoulder to shoulder with greed and violence" but they're mostly elected officials, and only the perverse Rev. Phelps's crew would "laugh in the face of pain and suffering". These aren't necessarily bad songs, but they could use the poetry (not to mention intellectual honesty) of his straight love songs.
Despite its flaws, Ammunition is lovely and lovable - an intimate and often moving collection of songs that sound great just before the sun goes down on a hotter-than-July day. Plug this one into your CD-ROM drive, and any common work-station becomes a brick sidewalk outside an empty coffee shop on the main street of an old downtown. An open guitar case at your feet, and a busker singing songs whose passports have been stamped a thousand times for no one in particular. Throw the man some love.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Ammunition" by Tim Easton
New West Records
Released 5/16/06
Produced by Mark Howard and Tim Easton w/Gary Louris and Ed Ackerson
45 min.
SONGS: Black Dog - Oh People - Next to You - Not Today - Back to the Pain - I Wish You Well - Before the Revolution - News Blackout - Dear Old Song and Dance - J.P.M.F.Y.F. - C-Dub - I Don't Want to Come Home - Sitting On Top of the World
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DUDE! FREE MUSIC ALERT!
Tim Easton has posted live performances from his recent tour with Lucinda Williams on his website at www.timeaston.com. Good stuff, Maynard.
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