RJ Chesney’s Angels Falling-Through the Eyes of Heartbreak

If these songs were paintings, they would be Andrew Wyeth’s starkly beautiful American landscape work. The songs-and there is not a wasted track here-are landscapes of the soul.

There is a certain kinship in style and songwriting approach to the late Leonard Cohen. But, the ghosts of Townes Van Zandt and Mickey Newbury haunt these songs as well. The songs are purposefully slow and spacious. In fact, the songs themselves emerge from a sense of resolve found in silence and space. The approach supports the lyrics with an earthy, soulful quality that raises the songs beyond the ordinary musing of so many singer-songwriters.  If the Americana music scene is filled with songwriters, crowded sound-alikes striving for a moment in the spotlight; then RJ Chesney-like the back-cover photo of him with his back turned as he holds his guitar-stands apart from the crowd. It’s not simply a melancholy loneliness that saturates these songs; rather there is a sense of resolution and acceptance.

Throughout, the carefully created music inhabits a similar, intimate sonic space with Dylan’s 2016, Fallen Angels. The guitars-electric and acoustic-play off each other as they weave into the mood created by Chesney’s vocal and his insightful lyrics. Beneath it all, an organ gives the songs a distant gospel feel-like a player for a long-ago church service.

The opening song, “When the Light Comes Shining Through”, is an existential response to Leonard Cohen’s “There’s a Crack in Everything.”  A narrative of the loneliness felt when a lover is gone.  With a gentle up tempo, the lyrics sing of longing:

I have crawled around this floor, over and over

and my knees have worn the wood to black.

But when the light comes shining though the cracks

that’s when I’ll know your are coming back

The song, “Whose Hands are These,” is a meditation on innocence through the passage of time. It is about the impermanence of life and its loss of innocence and its rediscovery:

The seasons change the world spins forward through two dozen years

The heavens stay the same but everything has changed down here

One by one my dreams have vanished down the lost highway

And I’m just getting through when night crawls away.

But, he leaves us with a dream of regeneration and hope as he tells a haiku of a story of an old man and a child:

As the baby sleeps an old man sings a lullaby

the old man looks familiar, but I can’t tell you why

The floor trembles, the room starts to shake as a train passes through

The poor baby wakes and his tears appear like morning dew

The old man’s hand reaches down to comfort the child

the baby gently laughs and the old man smiles.

It’s stories like these that merge melody, lyrics and a haunting production to create an album that is unique among recent Americana releases.

“Red Ribbon Ties” is a touching portrait of the mother-son relationship. Marty Rifkin’s pedal steel seems to weep as the song moves through the stages of aging. “Prison Guard” takes country music’s affinity for songs about prison to a new dimension:

Loving you was easy

Losing you was hard

Now I’m doing time on death row

and you’re the prison guard.

The final two songs solidify and unify the albums theme with gospel undertones and a message for the environment on “Angels Falling From the Sky,” which then flows into the sacred country classic, “Uncloudy Day.”  The final song, “Man of Straw” is a heartbreaking homage to a moment when grief finds its resolve in a Wizard of Oz metaphor:

If I were some kind of wizard man

I would pick you up, kiss your lips

and breathe life into your lungs again.

The musicianship on this production-and much credit goes to bassist and producer, Jason Hiller- is completely in sync with the artist’s vision as each player brings their best to each track. On guitar acoustic and electric is, John O’Kennedy, who also composed and conducted an exquisite string arrangement for “Man of Straw.” Chris Joyner’s keyboard work hits just the right notes and brings an under tow of haunting magic that is as subtle as it is beautiful.

Angels Falling presents an artist who has fully grown into the craft of songwriting as a poet, a singer, a thinker, and a recording artist. With a gentle country feel, much of the album is a tip-of-the-hat to the legendary Hank Williams. If Townes, Guy and Hank were with us today, I’d imagine they would invite RJ Chesney into a guitar pull. If so, it is in this company where RJ Chesney belongs.