Danny Flowers – Tools For The Soul

Maybe the most perfect prayer is uttered on a National steel guitar. If Tools For The Soul is the hymnal, then Tulsa roots poet/guitarist Danny Flowers has created a compelling sanctuary for one’s faith. Be it the quiet meditation of “World Enough And Time”, the wrung-out notes of “Born To Believe”, or the brimstone-bubbling “Ungodly” that’s all soul witness and full-immersion fire and salvation, Flowers’ faith has many moods.

In a tepid world of worship music, contemporary Christian and watered-down pop in the name of the Lord, the man who wrote Eric Clapton’s shuffling “Tulsa Time” and Emmylou Harris’ exquisite “Before Believing” offers raw articles of faith: quivering slide guitar runs, a slight dry husk of a voice that crackles and bristles with fervor, then gets guttural and surges with gospel growl ‘n’ grit.

Flowers’ humility succeeds from musicality, from the undulating piano rolls on “Reason To Try”, to the hovering Native American flute that drifts into the heavenly “Prayer Song” (which tangles Harris’ ethereal exhalations with Flowers’ mortal tenor), to the bass-grounded reggae of “What Would The Father Say”.

Keeping it real, Flowers mines his own life on “At An Open Door”, offering his flaws traded and transformed to grace. Tools For The Soul is an eclectic brew, Sunday morning music of a more organic, authentic aesthetic.