Jon Dee Graham has been making music since he was a teenager in Texas in the 1970s, but he’s best known as guitarist for Austin’s proto-country-punk band the True Believers in the mid-80s. Hooray for the Moon, his third recording under his own name, by all rights should change that, because he deserves to be known and appreciated in his own right.
Moon finds Graham exploring some of the same territory as he did on 1997’s Escape from Monster Island and especially 1999’s Summerland, but with even more assurance and maturity as a songwriter.
As with his previous outings, Graham on this CD combines blistering blues-based rockers with quieter ballads. His usual themes include the darker side of human relationships (“The Restraining Order Song”), and of human nature (Tom Waits’ “Way Down in the Hole” and “Laredo”), as well as home and family (“Something Moves,” “Home,” and “I Go Too”) and the people and places of the Texas-Mexico borderland (“Tamale House #1,” “The Huisache Tree”).
Guitar-slinger Graham played George to the John and Paul of the brothers Alejandro and Javier Escovedo in the True Believers, with just a song or two on each album. He revisits two of them on Moon, both mid-tempo rockers: the opening track “One Moment” and the penultimate, “Home.” The Stones-like, stop-start riff of “One Moment” and the song’s first line, “In the name of 53 saints/I will go searching” are effective introductions.
“Home,” too, uses strong images of the landscape, both internal and external. “Last night I almost dreamed it/but it dreamed me instead/Woke up swearing I could smell the river/lying in my bed.” Throughout Moon Graham is crossing rivers, climbing hills, facing thunder and lightning, and going down the endless ribbon of the highway. “The stones may bruise your feet/on the road of your retreat/to the wide and waiting arms of the valley,” he sings in the the tale of the prodigal’s longing for home, the acoustic “Huisache Tree.”
In addition to Graham’s nuanced guitar and lap-steel playing, the album is graced with the Dobro (and other guitar) playing of his longtime bandmate Mike Hardwick, Mike Andes on bass and the consummately professional drumming of Jim Keltner. Graham uses his gruff voice like another instrument, whispering and wailing in turn. Tejano star Little Joe adds backing vocals to a slow-rocking rendition of the ranchera perennial, “Volver,” with Graham singing lead in his drawling tex-mex Spanish.
Graham rocks out with the best of them, but I think he is at his best on the quieter numbers, particularly the pensive “Tamale House #1,” a poetic memory of a youthful foray across the border. “Post office gray and cantaloupe orange/the colors of the morning that were left … we headed south, across the bridge/ and the sun was on our left, and the rest of our lives were right in front of us.”
Hooray for the Moon is Jon Dee Graham’s strongest effort yet, a moving and eloquent collection of songs from a sincere and talented craftsman.
(New West, 2002)
