Slaid Cleaves has never met a down-and-outer he didn’t like or couldn’t work into a song. As much as, if not more than, his last full-length CD, 2000’s Broke Down, Cleaves’ new Wishbones sets up a desperate, occasionally despairing carnival: sinners and ghosts, a fallen-from-grace boxer and an aging jockey, a divorced farmer and an undocumented laborer, as well as different profiles of the singer-songwriter himself — too long on the road, burned out on late nights drinking at the Carousel.
Producer Gurf Morlix deepens and sharpens the economical groove he has recently brought to records by Ray Wylie Hubbard and Mary Gauthier. The sound is nearly classic: a lean, swinging rhythm section supports the chiming electric guitar accents of Morlix and Charles Arthur, Jeff Plankenhorn’s dobro, and Eleanor Whitmore’s fiddle. Nary a note is wasted. On “Drinkin’ Days” (co-written by Karen Poston), Morlix briefly challenges himself in a duel on pedal steel and guitar. On “Sinner’s Prayer”, Ian McLagan’s organ reveals the full brooding mystery underlying Cleaves’ self-interrogation.
The title track (co-written with Hubbard) features one of Cleaves’ instantly catchy chord changes, carried by fiddle and cello. That fetching melody and Cleaves’ voice, with its irrepressible innocence and charm, contrasts but can’t counter the grim facts of the lyric. “You’ve prayed to every god you’ve known/Just to wind up all alone,” Cleaves sings. “Your friends are gone, your mama’s dead/Nothin’ left but skin and wishbones.”
When the chorus comes around again — “Spin the bottle cap, throw a shot back/Everthing’s gonna be all right” — you don’t believe that glimpse of hope. And by the time the album closes on a note of community, celebrating music and friendship from Kerrville to Maine, you’ve already been convinced of Cleaves’ tragic sense of life. That vision may be hard to face, but songs so well-crafted and arranged make it hard to turn away.
