Kevin Welch Searches for Hallowed Ground

We roots music fans are a curious lot. We’re often torn between wanting our artists to be heard by everyone and wanting to keep them all to ourselves. In a perfect world, the ultimate goal, of course, is for the music to find success without compromising its integrity.

Kevin Welch is an artist who’s managed to do just that – he ought to be a household name, though his refusal to compromise may have kept him from becoming one. In his early songwriting career, however, art and commerce joined to create quite the resume. Like John Hiatt around the same time, Welch’s songs attracted a lot of attention in Nashville. Mainstream country radio listeners of a certain vintage may remember the mid-1980s hits “Velvet Chains” (Gary Morris), “Desperately” (Don Williams), “Let It Be You” (Ricky Skaggs), and “’Til I’m Too Old to Die Young” (Moe Bandy). All of these and many others were written or co-penned by Welch while he was grinding it out in the Nashville songwriting mill. Eventually, with a good word put in from Steve Earle, contracts were signed (Warner Bros.), albums and singles released. One – “’Til I See You Again” – hit the country top 40 (number 39, to be exact), videos were filmed, and the game was played. 

After his second album, 1992’s classic Western Beat, failed to meet the expectations of the Nashville machine (and after Warner Bros. had decided they’d spent more on him than they’d ever earn back), Welch was let out of his contract. He then teamed up with fellow ’80s songwriter Kieran Kane, Tammy Rogers, guitarist Mike Henderson, and drummer Harry Stinson to form Dead Reckoning Records. (Rogers and Henderson would later form the SteelDrivers and hire a young singer named Chris Stapleton who, coming full circle, would later kick off his solo From A Room, Volume 2 album with Welch’s “Millionaire”).

After three critically-acclaimed studio albums on the label, Welch then toured and recorded three albums with Kane and Fats Kaplin as Kane Welch Kaplin. In 2010 he was back solo, releasing the Texas-based A Patch of Blue Sky. It was a wondrous return to form; simple and direct acoustic-centered arrangements that exposed the aching beauty of his well-worn voice.

Eight years, a new marriage and baby, and a first grandson later, comes Dust Devil – beginning-to-end Welch’s best since 1995’s Life Down Here on Earth.

Produced by Welch and recorded in Nashville with a group that includes Dead Reckoners Stinson on drums and Kaplin on accordion, fiddle, and mandolin, along with studio aces Glenn Worf on bass, Matt Rollings on keys, and Kenny Vaughan on guitar, as well as Welch’s son Dustin on banjo and resonator guitar, Dust Devil continues the high standard Welch has set for himself over his 30-year recording career. 

Kicking off in similar fashion to A Patch of Blue Sky’s ambitious opener, “Come a Rain,” Dust Devil’s “Blue Lonesome” imagines how biblical characters would have coped with that universal feeling of the blues. Next, the soulful “Just Because It Was A Dream” shows Welch’s gift for composing and delivering a world-class soul ballad, sounding like a long-lost Spooner Oldham/Dan Penn classic.

Similar to his previous Blue Sky, Welch chooses to lay back on Dust Devil and let the music breathe, allowing his lyrics to take center stage. Those lyrics are delivered by a voice that’s weathered as a well-worn saddle, yet still smooth as top-shelf whiskey. 

The beautifully noir “High Heeled Shoes” sashays out of the speakers as sensuously as the song’s female subject.  Elsewhere, Welch proves he’s still a master phrase-turner on “Dandelion Girl” (“I never start drinkin’ ‘til the sun goes down / when the sun goes down, I go to town / and I hammer myself into the cold, hard ground”). “True Morning” is boosted by the mighty fine whistling of Cory Younts, evoking sepia-toned visions of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, and what could be more country than an heartfelt and melancholy ode to a tractor (“Sweet Allis Chalmers”)?

“Brother John,” driven by Stinson’s military cadence snare, was inspired by a former Marine commander who visited one of Welch’s songwriting workshops after returning home from his fifth tour of duty. Opening up to Welch after initially closing himself off from the rest of the group, he was inspired to start writing again and eventually would send Welch and Dustin every 20th song he attempted. Knowing the backstory, however, is not required to be moved by the tune. It follows a long tradition stretching back to the majestic “Some Kind of Paradise” (off his 1990 debut) where Welch’s empathic songwriting can detail a subject’s lifetime in about four minutes. 

Welch seems to channel the ghosts of Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, and William Shakespeare (then adds a pinch of Ray Wylie Hubbard) for “A Flower.” Told from a young woman’s perspective, it’s a modern folk ballad detailing her struggles and, ultimately, another chance discovered through the eyes of her newborn. 

Dust Devil closes with the divine title track, another in a long line of Welch’s philosophical ruminations set to song (i.e., “Life Down Here on Earth,” “Beneath My Wheels,” “Answer Me That,” etc.). Here, a relatively harmless weather phenomenon is used primarily as a metaphor for the decisions the narrator makes as he restlessly whirls his way through life and eventually stares mortality in the eye. “All I ever wanted was to settle on some hallowed ground,” Welch sings in the chorus. “I’m just an old dust devil waiting on the wind to die down.”