Kevn Kinney – Broken Hearts And Auto Parts

Travel back through time, if you will, to an early ’90s November night in Athens, Georgia. Half a dozen songwriters gathered around a living room, trading songs way into the wee hours of the morning. Among them, two characters with strikingly similar stories to tell.

Alejandro Escovedo rose to the fore in the mid-’80s fronting hard-driving Texas roots-rockers the True Believers; meanwhile, Kevn Kinney was coming into his own in Georgia, fronting hard-driving roots-rockers Drivin’ N’ Cryin’. In the ’90s, both Escovedo and Kinney turned toward songwriter-oriented pursuits, though neither could abandon the desire to rock out (Kinney kept DNC alive; Escovedo moonlighted with Buick MacKane). Each made new inroads with solo albums, though both had a tough task in trying to capture the spontaneous nature and personal charm that made their live shows so special.

Whereas Escovedo employed a finely crafted approach to create his career-best record last year with A Man Under The Influence, Kinney has gone about things quite differently on Broken Hearts And Auto Parts, but with equally auspicious results. It’s a loose record, yet not necessarily spare; the instrumentation augments the songs, but never so much that they feel “arranged.” Improvisation is part of the dynamic, but not to the point where it ever overrides the material.

And it’s really the material that makes this the high point of Kinney’s solo career. He’s never been sharper from start to finish as a songwriter, both lyrically and musically. “Comin’ Down The Way” is an effortlessly rolling folk song that rivals DNC’s “Catch The Wind” in immediate catchiness. “Time” is a brilliant small-scale construction, a promise that “Everything will be OK in time” set to the steady clickety-clack of a metronome. “Why Does It Feel So Hard To Say” is beautifully Byrdsy jangle-rock, overflowing with melody in both the shimmering guitars and Kinney’s twangy vocals. “No Blues” defies its title musically — it’s a dead-on acoustic blues number — but, like most true blues tunes, it’s bent on exorcising those demons.

Everything leads up to a seven-minute finale, “A Good Country Mile”, which just might be the best song Kinney has written (that’s no small feat for a writer whose catalog includes the barroom anthem “Straight To Hell”, the folk-rock signature “MacDougal Blues”, and about a half-dozen other tunes only slightly below that standard). Subtly but surely building steam on the strength of Johnny Irion’s dobro runs and Sarah Lee Guthrie’s gentle harmonies, Kinney paints a picture of his own personal Eden, a place that’s “Just outside of heaven.”

Providing a perfect frame and theme for the album is the title track, excerpted again at the end with an additional storytelling snippet delivered much as Kinney would render it in live performance. And if, as with Escovedo, a record may never match the magic of actually being there, this is the closest Kinney has come to bottling that intangible spirit.