Dale Watson – Every Song I Write Is For You

Since 1990, Dale Watson has been laying down a series of harder-than-hard, more-country than-country originals that have made him an alternative country star, on the verge of recognition even by the elements in the country establishment his songs have so often decried.

His albums have been filled with songs widely admired as professional, but you wouldn’t have called many of them personal. He has concentrated on catchy but remote collections of new songs in the honky-tonk tradition: fast-paced trucker numbers, portraits of people he’s met in places he’s been, even a ballad-filled Christmas collection.

This time, defiance and road rhythm were not going to carry it. Last September, his fiancee, Terri Smith, was killed in a car crash. He went into a tailspin that nearly led to his death by pills and alcohol last December. Songs he wrote in the wake of these events are the stuff of this dramatically, touchingly different record.

Smith’s presence dominates both the disc’s cover and, as the title spells out, its fourteen revealing and involving originals. This time out, the sides of Haggard, Lefty, Red Simpson and Tom T. Hall he’s generally avoided — the quieter ballads of sentiment, of prices paid, of losses and suffering — are the touchstones.

All of Dale’s pretense of the cool, and of the defiant, is utterly dropped — an act of true personal bravery. Instead of wallowing in the suicidal, the songs evoke the entire range of emotions of this life-shattering experience. That makes Every Song I Write Is For You not a dark, introspective confessional, but an often sweet, sometimes even breezy collection of unmitigated love songs.

In “Our First Time And Our Last Time”, Watson captures the ongoing sexual longing for the lover who’s not there to respond. He also projects the loss and sorrow forward, seeing himself in an old widower in a bar, still missing his wife (“I See My Future”) and, finally, counting the parts of life they’ll never get to at all (“These Things We’ll Never Do”).

The light and breezy side enters as Watson, in effect, delivers the love songs there was no time to get to while Terri was around. There are Texas two-steppers (“Money Can’t Buy Her Love”) Merle-like jazzy love salutes (“You’re The Best”), honky-tonk after-hours ballads (“One More For Her”), and even a bit of Tex/Mex in “Hey Chico”, a duet with Alice Spencer. Throughout, the fluid tones are delivered with the aid of such accomplished Texas veterans as Floyd Domino on piano, Earle Poole Ball on strings, Ricky Davis on pedal steel, Matt Powell on jazz guitar, and John Blondell on trombone.

In 2001, maybe nothing could be more alternative, even defiant, than this — a truly adult look at living through the horrific, yet holding on and going on, smiling and crying and battered for the wear. It’s not the typical entree on Nashville’s relentlessly upbeat menu, or on that of some alt-country audiences who may consider anything but hard twang to be “losing an edge” or “getting gooey.”

But the record doesn’t care.

It goes about its comforting and discomforting business. It speaks to sadly common experiences. There’ll be times you’ll want to play this. It’s personal.