Mando Saenz is that guy: that seductively, entirely incidentally, totally wrong guy. He’s the dreamer, the brooder and, ultimately, the heartbreaker, but at least, for all the good it’ll do you, he’s right up front about it. “Wrong Guy” spells it out in the opening track, just as clearly as “Go Away From My Window” did for your mother’s generation. And he knows our side of it, too. Track two, “A Pocket Of Red”, co-written with Kim Richey, is, in the end, mostly a “bucket of blue.”
But Saenz is a lover and a poet, and he can’t help himself. The crowd-pleasing “Pittsburgh” (you can just picture a club full of fans singing along) is at once an inscrutable and immutable image of a steel city rose, subsisting on a diet of fire, sandstone and swallowed pride. “Seven Dollars” turns on spinning fans, crimson showers and stained-glass eyes. “Last Goodbye” finds him “hangin’ out with the girl down the street, who couldn’t find her soul if it bounced off her own feet.”
We’re not used to such metaphors rising above a country pop melody, but Texan Saenz doesn’t record country pop by the numbers either. His arrangements soar with a constellation of such musicians as Kenny Vaughan, Chris Carmichael and David Grissom, and a guest harmony by Richey. Produced by R.S. Field, these tracks sparkle with subtle surprises in instrumentation and dynamics. If all country pop was this engrossing, we wouldn’t need to program so many buttons on the radio.
