On the new album, one telling track takes a giant attitudinal step further: “Let’s Just Call It Love” is a grown-up country ballad that’s explicitly about getting past the dodges boys use to avoid the “L” word. Hobart recognizes it as a watershed (and, incidentally, almost R&B-style) song for him.
If there’s any twisty “joke song” at all on Your Favorite Fool, it’s probably the Jones-influenced fast number “Another Bad Habit Of Mine” — but the joke’s on the listener’s expectation that this “habit” will be something predictably dark and debilitating. It turns out instead to be loving a particular woman. The song actually posits giving up “walking the line” of being too cool to love as rebellion, which in alt-country is probably downright daring.
The Jones influence is most obviously apparent on a cover of “Golden Ring”, one of the master’s classic duets with Tammy Wynette. Fellow Bloodshot singer Kelly Hogan joins Hobart on the track.
Throughout the disc, there is a clear breakout beyond rudimentary honky-tonk themes to a considerably more sophisticated range. “I would like to think that it means I’m getting better as a songwriter,” Hobart says. “I’m not relying so much on clever wordplay — though I hope there’s still some in there! There are different sorts of ideas here.”
Your Favorite Fool is easily the band’s best yet in dynamics, too. There’s a previously unheard interplay between the guitars, the pedal steel and the singing which goes beyond driving the song and more toward making the song. “That has to do with us realizing that it’s ultimately the story of the song that we’re trying to get across,” Hobart says. “These are story songs, and you only get half the picture if you’re only going to rock out.”
The new album was recorded at the Los Angeles studio of Dwight Yoakam’s guitar ace, Pete Anderson — but that’s easily misinterpreted, beginning with the fact that the producer was Sally Browder, not Anderson (though he’s credited as executive producer). Hobart suggests that the biggest change from the two previous albums was that the producer could be less intrusive, because the band circa 2002 was more practiced and ready to go.
Shortly before Your Favorite Fool was released, Hobart moved to Buffalo, New York, where his wife Paula has entered graduate school — a reminder that the man is not perpetually struck down with heartbreak and misery in his own life. He’s touring this fall with the Misery Boys, who remain based in Kansas City, though he’s been working some in Buffalo with a local band called the Steam Donkeys. After the tour, Hobart expects to return to Buffalo and write songs for the next Misery Boy outing over the winter — in time to learn the meaning of “Lake Effect snow.”
The educated, upper-middle-class Southern woman who turned herself into a character called Minnie Pearl, who also invented a background mythology for that invented self around a place called Grinder’s Switch, likely never did believe she was that working creation. But in a very real way, Rex Hobart has come to see himself as his.
“That’s true, in the sense that I came to realize that I’d been trying in some ways to deny the background that I’d come from, if not the person I’d been,” he admits. “And as this got to feel more natural, I thought that maybe the things I’d thought of all through the rock years as being most important with music, of trying to achieve a big moment of some ‘real breakthrough and originality’ — maybe that was the facade.”
ND contributing editor Barry Mazor has been learning about writing about music since 1974. In public.
