Paul Thorn is a professional boxer turned country singer. On Ain’t Love Strange, his sophomore effort, he has crafted a set that’s as strong as just about anything by his more experienced Texas singer-songwriter compatriots. He and a small but muscular backing band churn out 14 tracks in 50 minutes, and every one of them writhes on lyrical and musical hooks.
Thorn co-wrote all of the songs on Ain’t Love Strange, most with Billy Maddux, who also plays keyboards and engineered the recording, or with guitarist Pat McDonald. Most of them are vignettes of the low lives of a collection of misfits and sad sacks who don’t seem to have a clue about love, women, or life in general. Some are funny, some are sad, some are both, and all are catchy and well crafted.
The musical settings range from horn-drenched Memphis soul and Beatlesque pop to keyboard-driven Bourbon Street blues and barrelhouse boogie. The most memorable is the ballad “Where Was I,” which is as near to a perfect country song as you’ll hear this or any other year. The guy in the song remembers what he was doing when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and when John Lennon died, but wants to know “Where was I when you stopped loving me? When did I become history?”
Another standout track, “Burn Down the Trailer Park,” features a redneck bent on revenge for his two-timing wife’s behavior. “She hired the neighbor’s son to cut our grass/she gave him cold iced tea and a piece of cake,” he moans with a straight face. The guy in “Mood Ring” buys one of those ’80s artifacts to help him devine his girlfriend’s feelings: “If it turns black, I should turn back/if it turns red, she liked what I said…” he chants in the chorus.
The loser in “A Lot of Good Reasons” can only think about all the stuff his wife got in the divorce settlement: “I got a lot of good reasons to come back around/I want my big screen TV with home theater sound.” In “Fabio and Liberace,” a piano-playing drag queen on his way to Vegas picks up a hitch-hiking male model. “His pink El Dorado was lookin’ good/with a chrome candelabra welded to the hood.” It’s the kind of attention to detail found in every song on the album that elevates Thorn’s songs above the usual tear-in-my-beer honkytonk hokum. It’s all delivered in a confident Texas tenor twang.
Thorn even did all of the artwork for the CD booklet, illustrating each song with underground comic-style drawings. About the only thing this guy can’t seem to do is write and sing a bad song.
(Ark 21, 2000)
