Paul Burch & The WPA Ballclub – Wire To Wire
It does no good complaining about the inequities of Music Row, the vagaries of country radio, nor how much exceptional music gets drowned in all that mediocrity. No, it’s simply too late to change how things are, only an ongoing compulsion to hope for better. But you still have to wonder at a world in which the increasingly extraordinary work of Nashville’s Paul Burch continues to appear on a French label.
Happily, his delightful first outing, Pan American Flash, has at last settled into an American home with Chicago’s Checkered Past. There, Burch (heretofore known principally for his role behind the drums in Lambchop) unveiled his singular skill for evoking the sound, songwriting, and flavors of country’s classic ’50s. And Flash remains a stellar debut.
Wire To Wire, however, takes so many steps forward it’s hard to know where to begin without stumbling. Start with the songwriting, which from the jaunty “I Am Here” to the on-the-lam “Percy Lynn’s Run” to the singing-cowboy update “Long Tall Glass Of Water” (with echoes of the classic “Cool Water”, and Ranger Doug of Riders In The Sky along for the ride), this is as fine a collection of songs as you’ll find this season.
With those songs, Burch seems to have settled into a delivery and rhythm that comes naturally, as if he and his friends are sitting on a shady back porch, feet on the rail, hands cool on a longneck. He sings easy on these songs, no longer struggling (as he did occasionally on his debut) to find the right way to display his voice. He doesn’t have a lot of range, but he sings with character and warmth, the same qualities (if not tones) that made Ernest Tubb a legend.
The production team (Hank Tilbury, Burch and Paul Niehaus, with assistance from George Bradfute) has done a first-rate job of capturing the sound of this mythic warm summer night.
For all the yearning we young folks — who mostly didn’t, after all, have to live through the ’50s — have for the classic country era, it’s easy to get caught up in the costume and illusion of recreation. It’s much harder to manage what Burch does so effortlessly here: To catch the flavor of that time, both in sound and song structure, without sounding stuck in the impulse to revive that imagined past.