Bob Neuwirth – Back To The Front

How good are these forgotten, spare, living room recordings? Set against any singer-songwriter record in the ten years since its first appearance in 1988, the songs still shine like beautiful roadside bits of glass or chrome. The graceful ease of the sound owes, in part, to the not-quite-south-of-the-border acoustic ensemble of longtime friends T Bone Burnett, Bernie Leadon, David Mansfield and Steven Soles.

The songs, though, make this record essential. “Annabelle Lee” is a waltz filled with languor and memory. The autobiographical associations of “Akron” begin with “I remember Akron, whiskey cold mornings, smoke from the factories stung a young man’s eyes,” and keep stinging for nearly seven minutes. With “Eye On The Road”, and its chorus of “Keep your eye on that road/Stay awake, hold on tight/We’re picking up speed but we’re losing the light,” Neuwirth seems to prefigure Jay Farrar’s “Windfall”; at the very least, he penned a magnetic anthem for a generation adrift.

And if he never wrote another song after “Venice Beach”, it wouldn’t matter. There’s great delicacy and honesty about human failings in such a song, an effortless lyrical intelligence: “We all lost that innocence/We all shared the blame/But who amongst us has not cried or felt the bite of shame?” The voice has just the right frailty about it. The focus of a life comes into view and a man draws up accounts. What he sees makes him smile and weep at once.

“I still don’t understand how we let it slip away,” he sings, left with little more than “broken promises on the beach” and “the empty feeling heading home.” Burnett called Neuwirth “the best pure songwriter of any of us”; hearing the heartbreaking wisdom of “Venice Beach”, you may well believe it.