ALBUM REVIEW: Kinky Friedman Makes Elegiac Exit With ‘Poet of Motel 6’

Kinky Friedman’s posthumous album opens with the title song, “Poet of Motel 6,” a tribute to a fellow late legend of the Texas troubadour tradition, Billy Joe Shaver. “He’d stay up all night/ He would drink and he would fight/ Ah, but every song he’d write was the story of our lives,” Friedman sings in his conversational rasp, framed by producer David Mansfield’s tangy acoustic arrangement and Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s high harmonies.

Friedman nails Shaver perfectly, setting the tone for an album that’s a beautiful and poignant meditation on life, love, and loss, marked by tenderness and deep wisdom.

That should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention from the start. While Friedman, who died last year at 79, became notorious as a provocative satirist (“They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore”), he’s always been a songwriter of depth and seriousness. Just listen to early numbers such as “Sold American,” “Wild Man of Borneo,” “Nashville Casualty and Life,” and “Ride ‘em Jewboy” (really).

Poet of Motel 6 caps a creative renaissance that began with 2015’s The Loneliest Man in the World, when Kinky returned to music-making after years of writing mystery novels and then making a quixotic run for Texas governor.

Mansfield, who goes back with Friedman to Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, is a master of all things strings, and he plays most of the instruments, with occasional accents like Joel Guzman’s accordion, Mickey Raphael’s harmonica, and Steven Bernstein’s mariachi trumpet. The result is exquisitely understated accompaniment that enhances the emotional pull of the songs.

In “The Life and Death of a Rodeo Clown,” Friedman shows aching empathy for a figure who is never taken seriously but deserves to be – maybe he could identify? “Banjo, Sophie, and Me” touches on his love of dogs – he operated a rescue ranch – while underscoring the sense of mortality that hovers over the set: “Now Banjo is gone and Sophie is a-waitin’/ And I’m just a few steps behind them I know.”

“Whitney Walton Has Flown Away” offers the admission that Kinky was among the celebrities who became strangely enamored of a woman they never met, speaking to her only on the phone. But he’s philosophical about it: “What Whitney did was splendidly wrong/ But everyone’s looking for that starfish on the beach/ The one that’s always out of reach.”

In “Sometimes,” he reflects: Sometimes I can almost see the flowers in the rain/ The ones who died so long ago, but somehow still remain.” That theme, of leaving a meaningful legacy, also runs throughout the 10-song set. It’s there right at the start, in “Poet of Motel 6,” when he declares that Shaver’s “words and his music and his memory linger.”

So should Kinky’s.

Kinky Friedman’ s Poet of Motel 6 is out March 21 via Hardcharger Records/Blue Elan Records