Eric Taylor – Hollywood Pocketknife

If you’ve heard Lyle Lovett and Steve Earle, you’ve heard Eric Taylor — or at least the influences Taylor imparted to these and other young performers during the salad days of Houston’s fertile folk community in the early/mid-1970s. Though he never became the marquee draw that Earle and Lovett and Nanci Griffith did, Taylor’s influence on them and other performers who played regularly in the Bayou City was seminal.

Taylor’s sixth album, Hollywood Pocketknife, continues a string of finely etched portraits of lives writ small: grifters, rootless spirits, burnt-out lovers, ships that have long since passed in the night. Think Tom Russell meets Leonard Cohen in a Galveston waterfront bar.

His wintry voice and blues-inflected guitar make lines such as, “I’m a three-for-a-dollar carny sonofabitch/But you won’t do no better without me” and “Ain’t no gamble if you think you’re goin’ to lose” ring with unsentimental pathos. But Taylor can also speak volumes of longing when he sings, “Thought maybe I’d try just one more time/Since I bought these postcards, three for a dime.” Likewise, “The Peppercorn Tree” is a study of two lives in heartbreaking miniature.

Save for an astringent cover of mentor Townes Van Zandt’s “The Highway Kind”, a lovers-quarrel tune by Susan Lindfors, and a disposable cover of the patriotic chestnut “Rally ‘Round The Flag”, the songs on here are all Taylor’s. He imbues them with a signature touch and sound that remains indelible long after the last notes have sounded.