David Olney has released a suite of brilliant lyrics on Philo — Deeper Well, Highwide And Lonesome, and Roses — enlisting the help of ace musicians such as Mike Hendersen, Don Heffington and Garth Hudson. Critics often celebrate Olney’s howling voice and the embattled blues of his arrangements, but the power of these records lies in the wisdom of their best songs: the allegorical mysteries of “Jerusalem Tomorrow” (covered memorably by Emmylou Harris on Cowgirl’s Prayer); “Brays”, a fable of the beast that carried a savior; the glowing “Women Across the River”; the bedeviling “Illegal Cargo”; and what remains his best composition, “If My Eyes Were Blind”.
In the end, a singer/songwriter holds one trump: songs. And behind all the electric, bluesy smoke, Real Lies feels like a bluff. Neither the quasi-apocalyptic “Border Town” nor the barrelhouse nightmare “Death, True Love, Lonesome Blues and Me” would scare a church mouse. Even their polar opposite, “I’ll Fall in Love Again”, is just blushing and sentimental, down to an ethereal background choir that makes the Anita Kerr singers sound like shitkickers. “Basketball” and “Baseball” are confusing: the first a rattle of playground trash talk, the latter potentially a fine drama of failed American heroes that dwindles as the voice of a sportscaster chatters hysterically over the refrain.
Other songs come closer to demonstrating why Olney has been so revered by artists such as Emmylou Harris and Townes Van Zandt, and still deserves wider recognition in country circles. “Robert Ford And Jesse James” has the album’s most convincing characters — with a touch of dark humor, the song even renews this archetype of American folk music: Ford, it seems, shoots James to get him to shut the hell up. “Thirty Coins Of Gold” revisits the plainspoken chills of “Jerusalem Tomorrow” and takes them further, creating an allegory on the tanglement of art and betrayal through the story of a beggar cursed for playing the role of Judas. “Sunset on Sunset Boulevard” is a montage of film noire shadows, lost souls emerging from the darkness and receding again. Fascinating, but not enough to redeem the strained emotions and erratic production that — uncharacteristically for Olney — burden this set.
