ALBUM REVIEW: Joe Ely Offers a Thrilling Ride on ‘Driven to Drive’

“I’m a rovin’ soul,” Joe Ely confesses on the haunted opening to “Drivin’ Man,” the number that opens and sets the thematic tone for his sparkling new album, Driven to Drive.

Since bursting out of Texas in the ‘70s like a Lone Star Springsteen, his rocking dynamism colored by country accents, Ely has been fascinated by the road. The artist who once titled an album Lord of the Highway has spent a lot of time there, following his own muse in the grand tradition of stubbornly iconoclastic Texas tunesmiths.

Joe Ely (photo by Barbara FG)

Driven to Drive collects 12 numbers — 10 originals — with all but one recorded at home over the course of several decades, and they revolve, more or less, around travel and motion. With Ely joined by just one or two accompanists, the tracks have the unadorned intimacy of demos but also the bracing immediacy of live performance.

“For Your Love” echoes the lean, mean rocking energy of the full-band version that appeared on 1988’s Dig All Night, although this one features just Ely’s guitar and Joel Guzman’s accordion. (Ditto for “Drivin’ Man,” which also appeared on Dig All Night.) “Didn’t We Robbie” is a roadhouse romp that adds Bill Guinn’s piano and organ, while “Ride a Motorcycle” roars on just electric guitars and synthesizers — another example of how Ely makes some of these ultra-spare arrangements sound like full-band assaults.

“Odds of the Blues” rides an irresistible blues groove with Bruce Springsteen on guest vocals and Jeff Plankenhorn augmenting Ely’s guitar with some lead lines. On Butch Hancock’s “Watching Them Semis Roll,” Plankenhorn contributes some stinging slide guitar as Ely conjures a jaunty Woody Guthrie vibe, while the solo “San Antone Brawl” is a slice of country blues.

“Slave to the Western Wind” introduces a Spanish flavor, with Guzman’s accordion and Richard Bowden’s fiddle heightening the song’s wistfulness, and Guzman’s lonesome squeezebox underscores the late-night feel of “Gulf Coast Blues.”  “Nashville Is a Catfish,” meanwhile, sounds like a cousin of Flatlanders mate Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s “Dallas,” which Ely recorded on 1981’s Musta Notta Gotta Lotta.

Reinforcing the bristling energy at the heart of this set, Ely goes out rocking with Donald Elwood Dykes’ “Jackhammer Rock” and his own title song. “I’ll give ’em a run for their lives,” he boasts on the latter, a warning to all challengers. It sounds as if he’s still up to the task, and given how good Driven to Drive is, it makes you wonder what other treasures Ely has in his vaults.

Joe Ely’s Driven to Drive is out Aug. 2 on Rack ’Em Records/Thirty Tigers.