Chuck Prophet – Dreaming Waylon’s Dreams

If you wanted to pick country music’s Best Album of All-Time, you could do a lot worse than to put Waylon Jennings’ Dreaming My Dreams on the short list. It’s hardly surprising, then, that someone would come along to pay tribute to that masterpiece. What is surprising is that the “someone” has turned out to be Chuck Prophet.

For a good while now, Prophet has been perfecting an entirely-a-creation-of-the studio approach that has often been just beautiful: samples and groove-centric arrangements combined with lyrics that are big on wordplay and short on narrative, sometimes earnest, sometimes winking, and sometimes who knows which. Even when you don’t know what Prophet’s songs are about in any rational sense — maybe even when he couldn’t tell you exactly what they’re about — his musical sense makes perfect sense.

On Dreaming Waylon’s Dreams, Prophet covers, in order, each song on the original LP, from “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” to “Bob Wills Is Still The King”, and not a note of it sounds anything remotely like Waylon Jennings. Which doesn’t always work. After a snarling version of “High Time (You Quit Your Low Down Ways)”, Prophet sneers, “Somebody is gonna drop on the kitchen floor like a wet sack of shit. Ow-ooo!” — but the effect is neither menacing nor amusing. And Prophet inexplicably turns “The Door Is Always Open” into a sound-effects-filled spoken-word piece that mainly comes off pretentious. Hank and Waylon did not do it that way.

But those are the only real exceptions. On “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way”, for instance, Prophet ends things with an agitated electric guitar solo that counts as his finest guitar rock moment since his Homemade Blood album in 1997. His version of “Bob Wills Is Still The King”, meanwhile, sounds like the royalty it really serves is Sir Doug Sahm.

Always, Prophet bends Jennings’ work to his own will; he turns other people’s songs into Chuck Prophet songs. That’s the way Waylon did it, too.