Jordan Chassan’s first album in twelve years presents the familiar problem of the labor of love that will be hard for anyone else to love as much as the laborer.
There’s nothing wrong with the ten songs here: Chassan can write a nice tune, and his crackly tenor is amiably weathered. It’s a sign of his stature as a Nashville songwriter and sideman that his most prominent guest is Gillian Welch, who lends sprightly harmonies to the organ-driven blues of “Wound Up Way Too Tight”.
But Nashville is full of people who can write a nice tune. The problem for Chassan or any of his peers is differentiation. On that score, East Of Bristol, West Of Knoxville doesn’t really connect. Chassan’s melodies and lyrics, his ideas, are too slight and familiar — folky blues here, honky-tonk there — to register as anything other than pleasant.
Chassan’s press kit mentions the odd fact that he is the great-nephew of Joe Gould, the Greenwich Village eccentric made famous in Joseph Mitchell’s essay “Joe Gould’s Secret”. Gould spent decades claiming to be working on a monumental book called An Oral History Of Our Time. His secret was that, a few scraps aside, there was no book. Gould died broke and bitter in a mental hospital. Chassan’s aims are considerably more modest than his great-uncle’s, maybe to a fault. But it’s possible that Chassan learned from family history to be satisfied with small pleasures.