Eric Andersen – Blue River

As the ’60s ebbed into unease and uncertainty, Eric Andersen cast a deadly, unveiled glance on his own life — the drugs and the affairs, the dreams and the journeys — ultimately turning his own spiritual and emotional desolations into an unconscious accounting of the whole decade. “I knew a man with a lonely mind…all the beauty locked inside his soul, he never could believe,” he sang on “‘Round the Bend”, which closes Blue River. “Yes, I knew that man well, for that prisoner he was me.”

The sound of Blue River is subtle and incandescent — not what one might expect from an East Coast singer-songwriter heading to Nashville to cut a country-rock album. “When I went to Nashville to record Blue River and Stages,” Andersen once recalled, “the musicians were completely excited: ‘Here’s a guy who doesn’t want us to play Floyd Cramer licks!’ They were hot to do something new. That’s why these records don’t sound like country records.”

Many of the songs Andersen chose to record resonated with gospel music; his stately, lyrical piano playing on “Wind And Sand” and “Blue River” marked a crucial departure from his troubadour persona. Drawing on vibes, steel guitar, organ, harpsichord, and his own expansive bass playing, producer Norbert Putnam crafted a sound that was both sensual and spacious — at times reminiscent of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks — and always attentive to the languid melodies and sometimes frightening intimacy of Andersen’s lyrics.

Even Kenneth Buttrey’s drumming and Grady Martin’s gut-string guitar work seem finely tuned to the emotional, and not just structural, elements of the songs. Legacy’s remastering work greatly emphasizes those musical details. The full, enveloping analog warmth of these recordings, among the finest of Andersen’s career, has been deepened and clarified by this important, rewarding reissue.