Graham Parker – Your Country

Always the outsider, the inscrutable observer who keeps his distance behind those sunglasses, Graham Parker stakes out familiar territory on an album promoted as a new direction. Your Country, he calls it. Not My Country or Graham Parker’s Country, but America’s country music, the music of a nation where the British native has long lived but would never claim as his own. Remaining on the outside looking in comes more naturally to Parker than leaping onto the bandwagon, even when he’s making what looks like a career move (if alt-country, whatever that is, can be said to constitute a career).

Your Country works best when it sounds most like a Graham Parker album, and only occasionally stumbles when it begins to seem more like a genre exercise or a period piece (as on the shoop-doo-bop “Tornado Alley” and the rockabilly revival of “Crawlin’ From The Wreckage”). This isn’t Parker’s Nashville Skyline or Almost Blue; it’s more like a selection of material with his characteristic bark and bite, backed by a stripped-down rhythm section with progressive country credentials (drummer Don Heffington and bassist Tom Freund). With apologies to John Hiatt (a kindred spirit whose career has some parallels with Parker’s), I don’t think Rascal Flatts is gonna ever record these songs.

As the artist who established the mid-’70s prototype that Elvis Costello would soon adopt (from the nerdy glasses to the acid wordplay to the Nick Lowe production), Parker isn’t about to exchange his musical identity to play cowboy dress-up. Songs such as “Cruel Lips” (with harmony from Lucinda Williams) and the veddy British “Nation Of Shopkeepers” show that he remains more at home with the resentments and recriminations that have long fueled his artistry than at home on the range.

Parsons’ musical persona has evolved and matured over the decades, with melodic tenderness tempering the twang of many of the album’s highlights. The opening “Anything For A Laugh”, in which the troubadour acknowledges that the joke’s on him, has the bittersweet resonance of his “Temporary Beauty”, while the paean to marital bliss of “The Rest Is History” could serve as a sequel to “Life Gets Better”. Among the other standouts, “Almost Thanksgiving Day” sounds the least country (perhaps in homage to early influence Van Morrison and his “Almost Independence Day”), while “Things I’ve Never Said” is pure honky-tonk jukebox. By comparison, the cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Sugaree” never quite connects.

Whether or not Parker ever releases another album promoted as alt-country, he fits just fine on the Bloodshot label, where veteran renegades such as Jon Langford and Alejandro Escovedo have found a home. In the press material previewing the release, Parker acknowledges he’s late to the party, confesses he’s never heard the music of Gram Parsons, and mistakenly credits Charlie Rich’s “Behind Closed Doors” to Charley Pride (ironically, the same sort of mistake as confusing Graham Parker with Gram Parsons). Yet he isn’t auditioning for the Opry, and you can still hear traces of his Howlin’ Wind blowing through this cool country breeze.