Search - Kevin Welch :: Western Beat

Where the West Is Wilder

Holly Gleason | Somewhere in the Wind | 09/06/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"He might've been Jackson Browne, except that Kevin Welch was an Okie. And well, he was very enamored with the literary nature of songs told with a certain Steinbeckian sense of detail and gravitas. And if his romance leans a bit to Kerouac's Buddhist Valentines, there's a plain-spoken beauty to a line like "I've whiskeyed up my coffee cup/ And I'm tryin' really hard not to call you up..." that enflames one's imagination from the haunted "Something 'Bout You."

In Welch's hands, it is the small moments that catch your breath. With a voice that's part cracked Spanish leather, more much-worn body-grazing flannel, the man who is part rogue, part romantic, part stoic, part Dust Bowl refugee sounds like someone you could know... and someone who understands life on its own terms, whether it's the up and down and up fortunes of "Sam's Towns" or the evolution of joy in the face of the getting by "Happy Ever After (Comes One Day At A Time)."

With Mike Henderson, who rides that low 6th string like a hard charger -- making the twang tang -- and the never tilt-a-whirl or miss-a-beat of drummer Harry Stinson and the always elegant bassist Glen Whorf, Kevin Welch made plain sirt arrangements feel like populist jazz. With a prayer-like meditation on the passage of life on John Hiatt's elegant "Train To Birmingham" as a focal point and a swaggering romp through Joe Ely's "Me & Billy The Kid" coming on the heels of Welch's own surging "The Restless Kind," WESTERN BEAT illustrates the tenderness farflung men can embrace, even as they cling to the machismo revelry that makes the girls' knees buckle.

"I Look for You" with its seeking, "Early Summer Rain" with its promise of renewal and the rest show a songwriter/artist i full possesion of their voice, their sound, the songs... Like the O'Kanes, who were contemporaries and whose Kieran Kane would partner with Welch on Dead Reckoning Records and several collaborations, this was the moment that what Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett, Dwight Yoakam and kd lang had started had the potential to become something akin to the burnished acoustic axis of James Taylor/Browne/JD Souther.

Though it never took root, it left some fine music in its wake. This, like his self-titled debut, offer a tremendous witness to what is possible"