The Wandering Eyes – Songs Of Forbidden Love

Once the backbone of many an album and career, a lightning rod for thunderbolts from countless pulpits and as essential to roadhouse ambiance as beer lights and peanut shells on the floor, the cheatin’ song is just one more thing the Nashville mainstream don’t do like they used to. Dripping with salacious sex, helpless longing, guilt and aching regret, these highly compressed, Opry-atic soaps served as perfect vehicles for some of the genre’s finest singers to pull out all of the melodramatic stops while shaking their fists at Cruel Fate. But whether today’s singers are all faithfully monogamous or just too damned dishonest to ‘fess up, cheatin’ ain’t the talk of Nashtown no more.

So raise a glass, all you sleazy back door men, small-town Romeos and bouffanted femmes fatale — to the Wandering Eyes, an aggregation of Austin all-stars who have done their level best to fuel laundromat gossip and jump-start the whispering down at the diner with Songs Of Forbidden Love. A concept album dedicated to the cheatin’ song’s tawdry glory days, the disc seamlessly delivers a dozen painful, triangular weepers, forbidden-lovingly sung by Dale Watson, Kelly Willis, Rosie Flores, Ted Roddy, Chris O’Connell and Jason Roberts (either solo or in varying combinations).

Ten of the tunes are either country classics or lost, buried treasures. The remaining two are an in-the-tradition original by Watson (“Unspoken Kind”) a sterling countrypolitan take on Billy Paul’s classic “Me And Mrs. Jones” (gender-bent to “Mr.” for Willis’ rendition). Production by Asleep At The Wheel’s Dave Sanger Forbidden Love is creamy, classic and shamelessly gorgeous, with just-right pickin’ by all hands. There’s not a runt in the litter, either: Songs Of Forbidden Love could shame most honky-tonk jukeboxes all by its lonesome, all the while reminding us that it takes two to love, but at least three to cheat. So park yer consciences and go for it, ya slimy, back-stabbin’ weasels.