Dan Stuart – Can o’ Worms

What is it that has drawn a couple of songwriters from the Southwestern U.S. to explore the nether reaches of Southwestern Europe recently?

First it was Joe Ely, who paints aural vignettes of Spanish folklore and incorporates flamenco guitar accents on his new Letter To Laredo, which might just as easily have been called Letter To La Mancha. Now, here comes Dan Stuart, once-and-future-king of the flophouse known as Green On Red, with an album that draws upon songs from his recent extended stay in Spain. (Released on a New Orleans label whose office is on Spain Street, no less.)

Fate or coincidence, it also seems to have inspired the two to create some of their best work in years. For Stuart, it’s a debut under his own name, though by the latter days of Green On Red (and to some extent even in the earlier days) he was the one calling the primary artistic shots. For a guy who wasn’t blessed with a great voice, he calls those shots awfully well. What he lacks in vocal chops he makes up for with emotion, and more importantly, he knows how to write a song, and how to make it sing.

Thus, we bounce from “La Pasionaria” and “In Madrid”, a couple of instant classics of quasi-ethnic Spanish folk noir, to “Expat. Blues”, a darkly smooth pop song intriguingly obscured by stilted stop-start jolts of noise and percussion. “Who Needs More” somewhat recalls the more straightforward American rock ‘n’ roll that made Green On Red famous; but it’s offset by such divergences as the wall-of-guitar “Waterfall”, accented by producer J.D. Foster’s Mexican mellotron.

“The Greatest”, an ode to “not Cassius Clay, but the great Ali,” is a fittingly snippeted postscript to a musically inventive and emotionally resonant album. As to whether we can expect a Dan Stuart solo tour in support of this fine effort — well, that’s a whole ‘nother Can O’ Worms.