24-carat Texas folk/country songwriting is alive and well in Matt Harlan’s head and hands.
Raven Hotel was recorded at Ace Recording in Austin, Tex., as was Harlan’s debut Tips And Ccompliments (2009), On this go round, studio owner Rich Brotherton (Robert Earl Keen) and Harlan share the production credit. A few additions were captured in nearby Buda, at Bukka Allen’s Screen Door Studio. Boerne-bred, Houston-based artist Harlan’s third solo release is a twelve-song collection. He is supported here by Brotherton (acoustic/electric guitars, banjo, lap steel, dobro, bass, synth, vocals) and Allen (accordion, organ, piano), plus young Maddy Brotherton (violin), as well as time-served, local session suspects Floyd Domino (keyboards), Glenn Fukunaga (upright/electric bass), Jon Greene (drums, percussion), John Mills (tenor saxophone) and Mickey Raphael (harmonica), plus there are copious backing vocals from Harlan’s wife Rachel Jones.
Harlan was named Singer-Songwriter of the Year in the 2013 Texas Music Awards. Around a decade ago I (first) stumbled across him as a contestant in the University Songwriter Contest, which the Kerrville Folk Festival hosts annually. We met again in 2009 when Harlan placed in the Songwriter Contest during the annual Wildflower! Arts & Music Festival. In 2011, he scored the Telluride Troubadour title. That’s just a few of the songwriting accolades that have rightfully come his way. Still a relative youngster, his compositions consistently bear the hallmarks of a dyed-in-the-wool songwriting veteran, and that ain’t no Texas tall tale.
Maddy Brotherton’s fits-like-a-glove 20-second fiddle intro launches the waltz-paced opener “Old Spanish Moss.” A study of life’s ups and downs, you should always make time to “dance ‘neath the trees with that Old Spanish Moss.” Cranking the tempo up a couple of notches, “Half Developed Song” focuses on those occasions when “you wake up wrong” and “all your pieces they don’t seem to get along.”
Harlan is a master wordsmith, who selects with care and creates phrases that have this listener take many a sharp intake of breath. A prime example: “drive the day out of the night.” Sage advice “Drop it down a gear / the roads are slick this time of year” is proffered at the outset of cautionary road song “Second Gear”. Having added a harmony vocal on earlier songs, with Allen caressing the ivories, Rachel is the sole vocalist on the uptempo “Riding with the Wind”.
Allusion to the present (“I try every day to make one less mistake”) and the past (“he had lived and died so long before I walked across this land”) is woven into the fabric of “We Never Met (Time Machine)”. Launched by a gritty electric guitar, “Rock & Roll” is the full-tilt band song in this set, as Harlan waxes lyrical about American “hawks and doves”, politics, and foreign policy. “The Raven Hotel” lyric is a masked, yet subtle, analysis of the trade that Harlan plies. Built around the refrain “I’m in my own world now,” among numerous interludes, there’s a chance hotel lobby meeting with an old (musician?) friend, a half-way empty bottle (at 11:15pm), while, centre-stage, a guitar is sat “on the bed like some old preacher at confession.”
At a tad over six minutes, “Old Allen Road”, the album’s longest song, recalls the murder two decades ago of two Mexican immigrant farm-workers (“seems like a movie somehow”).
It’s a stretch to envisage Harlan decked out in tuxedo and bow tie crooning into a 1950’s microphone, yet the saxophone introduction to the jazz-inflected “Burgundy & Blue” certainly suggests that possibility. Therein, the narrator promises “One day I’ll buy you dresses / made of burgundy and blue.”
Aided by Raphael’s wistful harmonica, Matt and Rachel share the vocal on “Slow Moving Train”. The penultimate and bittersweet “The Optimist” is narrated by the dobro-playing road warrior Katherine Mary Lee, who reflects upon her muse (“sometimes I tune into empty pages”) and life (“the rain just means everyone’s allowed to cry”).
Our visit to the Raven Hotel closes with “Rearview Display”, a short, pragmatic and sweet eulogy to the tarmac strip that stretches endlessly to the horizon, penned by Harlan, Kerrville Festival veteran George Ensle and Oklahoma bred writer Buffalo Rogers.
By a clear mile, Raven Hotel is the finest song collection I’ve stumbled across this year — in many a year, for that matter. An ageless 21st Century creation in the mould of those classic 1970’s Texas folk/country songwriter recordings — you know the ones I mean.
http://www.mattharlan.com/ and http://www.berkalinrecords.com/artists/#/matt-harlan/
Photo Credits: Matt Harlan smiles (Credit: Sasha Haagensen); L. to R. Matt Harlan, Rachel Jones & MC Hansen, 2012 Kerrville Folk Festival (Credit: Folk Villager)
Brought to you from the desk of the Folk Villager.
