Saturday Songs - March 31

1. “The Long Road Ahead” – Shooter Jennings

The son of country legend Waylon Jennings comes into his own on his 5^th album, which marks a return to his country roots after his pseudo-experimental concept album Black Ribbons with his band Hierophant. A weird country/hard-rock excursion, Jennings himself has compared the album to the work of Nine Inch Nails—an odd influence for a country rocker. Certain tracks on Jennings’s new album Family Man bear witness to those influences in less obvious ways.

“The Long Road Ahead,” for example, features a curious bridge/break overlaid with a Tom Morello guitar solo—and not any meandering country at that, but a Rage Against The Machine-flavored diatribe against traditional forms…which jumps right back into the lilting, country chorus. Where Jennings will travel next with his gunnysack of influences is yet to be seen, but I can only promise that it will be interesting.

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2. “The Skin You’re Living In” – Grand Drive

Besides currently fronting the band Danny & the Champions of the World (a band name I like more and more for its saccharine appeal every time I see it), Australian-born English singer-songwriter Danny Wilson was once in the folk-rock band Grand Drive with his brother Julian. This wistful folk song sounds derived directly out of the American South; Danny, in more recent releases, has been even more forthcoming with his American influences on recent work. Several critics have pointed to the obvious Springsteen influences on Hearts & Bones, the latest album from Danny & the Champions of the Word.

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3. “Jesse With The Long Hair” – Robert Earl Keen

[Apologies for the bad video...you're best finding the studio version of the song somewhere.]


This is one of those story-songs that you either love or hate. If you don’t follow the narrative that Keen stretches across three and a half minutes, then you most likely won’t care for the tune. That said, Keen sprinkles his story of the love triangle between outlaw Jesse, Jesse’s girlfriend Luann, and the banker Mr. Brown. The smirk of the story rests in a simple understatement; Keen doesn’t tell us exactly what happens in the penultimate verse, but we still know what happened to Mr. Brown.

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4. “White Freightliner Blues” – Lyle Lovett

“White Freightliner Blues” is one of those Townes Van Zandt songs that doesn’t exactly sparkle with wit or glimmer with sadness. In fact, there’s nothing all that lyrically or melodically interesting about the tune. To top it off, there’s that one high, lonesome note in the chorus that Townes could never quite hit. (Not to say that anyone who sings on Lovett’s cover of the song can quite hit that note either.)

However, there’s still this inexplicable energy about the song; I’ve written previously about the fantasticLyle Lovett show I saw earlier this year. The last song I heard (before a less than totally enthusiastic and tired family dragged me out the door) was “White Freightliner Blues,” which bristles with a live energy not quite like anything Lovett played that night. Hell, most of the people in the audience didn’t know that song—or at least not quite like the way they knew “If I Had A Boat”—but they were still rocking out.

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5. “Long Love Letter” – Tony Lucca

Currently on a contestant on the The Voice, Tony Lucca has been bouncing around the singer-songwriter scene for years. Although in recent years he’s been toiling in near obscurity, he was once on the world’s stage as a member of Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club alongside pop luminaries Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and Christina Aguilera. His appearances on the The Voice are, sadly, about as close as he’s come to that level of exposure ever since.

Lucca, in what I will always applaud as a smart move in expanding a fan base, has put his 2010 album Rendezvous With The Angels on Noistrade for free! I’m going to go ahead and assume, as I did with the recent appearance of fun.’s Aim & Ignite, that this free album will be a very limited offer. So do yourself a favor and download the album below! (I offer “Long Love Letter” as one of several great songs on the album.)