With twangy country rock wrapping around Ronny Elliott’s leathery, end-of-the-world voice, Magneto is a Fellini-esque dreamscape inhabited by known outlaws and unknown misfits swirling through a stream-of-consciousness backstreet travelogue. Elliott talks to Jerry Lee Lewis about bad career moves and to Johnny Cash about rock ‘n’ roll. He threatens to drink Picasso and Hank Williams under the table, reads the Bible and cries with the dying Tampa Red, watches Degas paint “thirty masterpieces in five months time”, even eulogizes Hemingway’s sparring partner. His characters smoke joints and pray, accept deviance and defy hypocrisy, empathize with boxers and rockabilly singers, but scorn preachers and record companies. There is a piece of Ronny Elliott in all of them.
Play his four most recent albums back to back, and one hardly notices the breaks. Magneto is another album filled with shadowy characters and less-than-wholesome images conjured from a life lived hard. It ain’t smooth, it ain’t slick, and it damn sure ain’t pretty. But with self-deprecating sentiments such as, “He works for himself and calls the boss a jerk”, and, “I played three chords and sang in a key that wasn’t too demanding”, it is entirely lovable and satisfying.