If indeed god is in the details, Chuck Brodsky has a direct line to the powers that be. Brodsky is a storyteller in the vein of Tom House with a warmly wry delivery akin to John Prine. His arrangements, both acoustic and electric, are deceptively simple, stripped down and loose. Brodsky’s a low laying, loose-collared folkie with rockist irreverence and bluesy swagger: an American stranger in a familiar land. A man who’s seen it all and done it all, or close to it — from picking fields on the American West Coast to picking guitar on the streets of Sweden and Denmark — Brodsky renders character studies that are bittersweet, biting and insightful.
The title track tells of a small-town character, a beloved retarded man whose ways are seen as visionary. “Moe Berg: The Song” adds to Brodsky’s already impressive output of baseball songs, exploring the double life of the catcher/WWII spy. Other stories range from tender to cheeky.
The album-closing “Circle” is his sole cover; it is here, on Annie Gallup’s song, that he sweetly sounds most like Dylan, to whom Brodsky is most frequently compared. There’s also a tale of road rage (“Blow ‘Em Away”) and a funny, funky Jewish view of Christmas (“On Christmas I Got Nothing”). The core of the record, however, is “Our Gods”, when Brodsky asks with neither sentimentality nor shame, “But how often do we say ‘I love you?'”