Customer Reviews

Songs & Stories

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have all Guy Clark's CDs/LPs and so know his music pretty well. I also rate him as one of the most consistently great American songwriters over the last 40 odd years time period.This set billed as an overall career retrospective with some long time collabarators should thus have been somewhat the icing on the cake, in reprising many old favourites in a live setting.

That it does cover a lot of Guy's best know songs is a fact - what I found myself not liking afer a few plays is the mix of this being an ensemble set and the sharing of songs and performances with guys who quite frankly are not of Guy's calibre and that on top of that Guy himself seems to treat it all as a laidback event. The man's use of space and pauses is a key part of many of his songs and like JJ Cale and early Little Feat he knows how to use silence and understatement to great effect in performing. However the style also needs emotional invovement and to my ears anyway that is what is missing here. Overall Guy just seems a tad jaded and bored at times which in making a career lookback live performance, is exactly not what you want.

A personal disappoinment - sadly compared with say Eliza Gilkyson's recent similar style live recording ("Your town tonight"), I do not think this one hits the target.

Guy Clark's music is mesmerizing. It ought to be tasted with whiskey-dewy evenings. Always cheers up. He's master in studio, he's commander on stage. Great voice, great songs, great banter.

OVER THE YEARS I HAVE BEEN A FAN OF GUY BUYING ALL HIS ALBUMS , BUT I WAS VERY DISSAPOINTED FOR THE FIRST TIME

So often it's the case that an artist's later works are not the best points of introduction, but that's not the case with Clark. Songs and Stories is as good a place as any to get to know the man who has inspired Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, Joe Ely, and numerous others. It isn't so much that he gets better with age, it's that he doesn't get any worse, remaining the same consummate writer and performer he was all the way back in 1975 when he released Old No.1 in 2009 with Some Days the Song Writes You to today. Few have been that consistent in their careers and few have been as brave. None are Guy Clark.

The material itself is nearly all aces, whether the perfectly realized beauty of Townes Van Zandt's "If I Needed You", or "Out in the Parking Lot", a west Texas story co-written by Clark and Darrell Scott, or the light-hearted "Maybe I Can Paint Over That", which he penned with longtime pals Shawn Camp and Verlon Thompson. Elsewhere, "The Cape" and "Homegrown Tomatoes" remind us that sometimes the simpler subjects are the best fodder for songs, be it the ability of childhood hopes to imbue adults with courage on the former or the pleasures of a different kind of flesh on the latter.

At the very top of my list of preferences come songwriter/singers and Guy Clark is close to the pinnacle among the genre. Guy is another artist I have seen doing a live show. Guy is beginning to sound a lot older on this album,probably as a result of the illness he recently suffered, nonetheless he is a brilliant writer.

This is a must for all Guy Clark fans, The atmosphere is relaxed and intimate and gives a feeling of 'being there". The gentle acoustic music and Guy's voice totally envelop the listener. He allows his band to perform at times but there is sufficient Guy Clark material to make this live album a must for your collection