Rick Shea & Brantley Kearns – Trouble and Me
This pair will be familiar to many as backup men for an impressively wide variety of performers. Rick Shea, a country rocker from the Los Angeles area, is a good enough guitarist to back Dave Alvin on-tour — and do it well, even if some in the audience always find adding any guitar to Alvin’s screamingly superfluous. But then, Shea has backed Doc Watson, too. Kearns is a veteran fiddler from North Carolina fiddle contest country who’s been flexible enough to support Hazel Dickens, Dwight Yoakam…and Dr. Dre.
Trouble And Me is an often pleasing attempt to fuse their two styles, veering between fast-pickin’ country and more laid-back tones. On old-timey numbers (“Loafer’s Glory”, “Cane On The Brazos”), Kearns’ fiddle and rougher vocals dominate, with pleasingly gritty effect. Shea’s vocal on the title track, a Harlan Howard song, is on target, and a surprising version of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Black Snake Moan” fairly rocks.
Onstage, Alvin recently described Rick Shea’s voice as “so good I don’t let him sing.” What that really means is that it’s a near-pristine voice used in a polished, more conventionally pretty, commercial folk vein — one reason (though not the only one) that some of his cuts approach new age music, or at least Nickel Creek-era post-Newgrass styles. To be a fan of the disc as a whole will demand having a taste for both grit and polish — an unusual combo. As are Shea and Kearns.