Listening to the Spirits That Haunt Us

Buried deep in Slaid Cleaves’ new album, Ghost on the Car Radio, is “The Old Guard,” his canny and downright brilliant song that looks to the past and celebrates it and mourns it without wallowing in it. The tune kicks off with a riff from Hank Cochran and Harlan Howard’s “I Fall to Pieces,” moving into an up-tempo shuffle that would be comfortable snuggling up to any Ray Price or Willie Nelson tune. The singer walks into Dickey’s Place, a tavern where he often goes and “through swinging doors,” he “hears the voice of old George Jones.” He meets up with his own, and they punch those old “heartbreakin’ melodies of cryin’ steel” into the jukebox: “cheatin’ hearts, crazy arms, now it’s cryin’ time.” With the tongue-in-cheek knowingness of someone who’s seen the new fade into the tried and true, he watches the young people punch in the new fast songs, but then grow tired of the old slow songs; yet, he knows they’ll be back and one day be part of the old guard. The bridge delivers the real beauty of the song, though; it starts with a few bars of George Jones guitar riffs, slides into a few bars of a Willie Nelson-like solo, and then with a nod-and-a-wink cascades into a bright guitar stroll straight from an early ’60s beach music.

The rest of the songs on Cleaves’ new album confirms that he’s a songwriter’s songwriter, fast with a phrase, delivering the just-right lick, and, most of all, serving up a knowing story of heartache, desolation and desperation, disappointment, loss, and enduring hope and love. “Still Be Mine,” a fast-paced rocker fueled by David Boyle’s jazz piano, ponders the white heat of lust and love, the regrets of the loss that it sometimes carries, and the “can’t-live-with-you-can’t live without-you” fever of love sometimes held together by lies.

“If I Had a Heart” is a love song with a warning—don’t get involved with me, for I’ve a jaded heart that can’t be broken; the young lover reminds the singer of the man he used to me. The song opens with litany of lessons that build a wall against love: “The more I see the/less I understand/the harder I work/the poorer I get/the more I hear/the less it all seems real.” “Little Guys,” a paean to the way life used to be in small towns before the Walmarts moved in (“the little guys’ shops don’t stand a chance/ when the big guys start to play”), opens with one of the best lines on the album: “I was in the first grade/I was pumpin’ gasoline/I could build a carburetor/by the time I was twelve years old.” The album kicks off with “Already Gone,” a tune reminiscent of the Byrds that sums up in one line the desolate resignation and wistful yearning of the entire album: “I may not have gotten all that I’ve dreamed of/ pretty sure I’ve gotten all that I deserved.”

Ghost on the Car Radio reminds us of the spirits that haunt us, the shimmering presence of the way things used to be—whether in love or in music or in our communities—and Cleaves allows those ghosts to roam free, talking with them himself and opening doors to show us our own.