Little Big Deal LBD 005



I’ve long been a fan of Jon Pousette-Dart, going way back to the mid-1970s when the Jon Pousette-Dart Band enjoyed some notable commercial success as a soft-rock outfit. They’ve maintained a 40-year music career, releasing their most recent album, ANTI GRAVITY, in 2011. Band leader and main songwriter Pousette-Dart steps out to release this excellent solo album. Produced by the underrated Bil VornDick and recorded in Nashville, it’s not the expected ‘country’ album, but a delicate and spare, haunted and haunting work of bittersweet southern r&b, forlorn folk-ish soft-rock and ragged country-soul. The studio band comprising Reggie Young and Bruce Dees (electric guitars), Dan Dugmore (pedal steel), Clayton Ivey (keyboards), Glenn Worf or David Hungate (bass), Greg Morrow or Lynn Williams (drums), Pete Huttlinger (acoustic guitar, mandolin) and Pousette-Dart (acoustic and electric slide guitar) sounds like it just stepped out of Muscle Shoals. The production is especially effective with a more live sound that makes the drums, guitars (especially the pedal steel) and piano sound as if they are only a few feet away from the listener.

The songs, mainly co-penned by Pousette-Dart with such Music Row writers as Kostas, Angela Kaset, Gary Nicholson, Sally Barris and Fred Knobloch, are very personal in their genesis, yet universal in appeal, dealing with love lost and found, as well as the joys of life, itself. Pousette-Dart’s gift is his ability to bring the listener into his world. There’s at once an inherent familiarity and lived-in vibe with TALK—his most personal album to date.

Timeless is a good word for it. If you shuffle the tracks and close your eyes, you might find yourself somewhere else. At another time, in a different town, in a bar, listening to an unknown singer and his band, whose voices are at once, both fleeting and familiar. The songs fit under the wide genre of Americana in general, and pull from the traditions of contemporary folk, singer-songwriter, country, and r&b in particular. It’s all there in the restlessness of How Much, a co-write with Gary Nicholson that’s built on a solid groove enhanced by the gospel-styled call-and-response vocals of the underrated Jonell Mosser. In contrast, The Story Of My Life is a delicate, steel guitar driven ballad beauty, one of two songs that Pousette-Dart didn’t write. The other is Jesse Winchester’s I Want To Mean Something To You, a song I’ve loved for years. Jon nails it perfectly, his passionate voice working sublimely in tandem with the studio band with Reggie Young’s guitar worthy of special mention.

The band is set free for the country romp Come On Come On Come On, with Dugmore’s steel and Young’s guitar trading off licks as Pousette-Dart skims across with a free-wheeling lead vocal. The smoothly executed Amnesia will insidiously penetrate your sub-conscious with its hypnotic rhythm and chorus and again Reggie Young steps up for some faultless yet subdued electric guitar noodling. Then there’s the bruised-hearted Muscle Shoals vibe of Can We Just Talk; countrified, bluesy guitars offer the emotional pull, while Rhonda Vincent’s duet vocal provides a sultry soulful delivery. After more than four decades of music making, Jon Pousette-Dart’s work remains every bit as adventurous and inspired as ever. With this album he has found a new focus to his sound—a looseness that always stays sharp, never loses the root of his work and ultimately reveals new layers in his inimitable style.

www.pousette-dart.com

July 2015