Frankie Lee’s Heavy, Hopeful Dreams of America

Frankie Lee’s biography paints a picture of a wild kid, an all-American boy from the Midwest who forewent a sports scholarship to make his way across a rambling map of country-rock’s cities of note: Nashville, Los Angeles and Austin, where he learned the craft of cabinetmaking from Townes Van Zandt’s son. Lee hit some bumps in the road along the way, including a methamphetamine addiction – a byproduct of narcolepsy – and a farming accident that smashed several fingers, prompting him to switch to piano from the guitar he’d inherited from his father, who died in a motorcycle accident when Lee was 12.

Maybe it’s the residue of that knockaround life, with its scattering of hard luck, that makes Lee’s new album, American Dreamer – recorded back home in Minneapolis – sound more burnished and mature than the debut that it is. Its pace is somber but its tone is warm: textured layers of gentle acoustic guitar, plaintive harmonica and achingly pretty fiddle weave around Lee’s distinctive reedy, raspy voice around songs of grit, gravity and subdued emotion. The closing title track, an understated, slow-building piano-and-strings anthem built around the rueful line “I was thinking that the world was gonna change” stands out like a lone little campfire in the darkness – knowing, but hoping at the same time.