Laura Benitez— Sounds Like Country & Western

While the rest of Nashville clothes itself in pleather and a Hollywood- and hard rock-style of music, the rest of the world has taken Nashville to heart. Not the Nashville you see and hear on all of those gawdawful TV tribute and award shows presented by people who look upon country as a way to get away from the country. Rather, the people who have country in their hearts, who love everything open spaces and base-rooted, if that makes sense. Who like swimming in the creek rather than the swimming pool.

I grew up at a time and in a town which embraced the country way of life. Back in the fifties (yes, I am ancient), Hank Williams and Hank Snow and Patsy Cline and later Willie Nelson and Tom T. Hall and even Roger Miller dominated that world. Those musicians reflected a blue collar world full of everything from crying in your beer to trying to keep the family fed and gas in the car, if people in that world even had a car. They were a hard working lot, the town full of loggers and millworkers and surrounded by farmers struggling to survive from year to year.

The town at that time consisted pretty much of churches, gas stations and taverns, it seems, and every kid lucky enough to live in or close to town knew which taverns to avoid, some having a but of a rough clientele. During the summer, the doors would be open, though, and a few of us would hang out on the street outside listening to the music— jukeboxes during the day and if you were old enough and lucky enough, live bands at night. I can still recall a few of us being chased away by bartenders or friends of the family who knew taverns were truly dens of iniquity (my, how times have changed, eh?).

That’s what I think of when I hear Laura Benitez. Tavern music. Jukebox music. Dancing music. Pedal steel preferred. She and her band, The Heartache, would have packed them in at The Frontier Room or out at Pine Grove, noted for the fights which would break out every weekend, spilling out onto Highway 20 and sometimes stopping traffic both ways. It was a two-fisted world around those establishments and Benitez and crew would have written the soundtrack for it.

The real difference between this band and others is that they have chosen the music of the fifties and sixties to emulate. Not country but Country & Western. Loretta Lynn. Patsy Cline. Lynn Anderson. That kind of music. Benitez and the Heartache would have fit right in.

I raved about her last album, Heartless Woman, partially because it brought back memories of what I call West Coast country— music just slightly different than that of Nashville back in the day. I will be raving about With All Its Thorns too. It is straight out of my growing up period. A large part of my introduction to music as life. This could well be a jukebox to my youth.

I smell cigarette smoke and stale beer every time I hear this. It was a strange but wondrous world. And this album captures it beautifully.

Release date is January 26th, 2018. It will be worth the wait.

http://laurabenitezandtheheartache.com/index.html