Texas singer-songwriter Eric Taylor has been influential on a whole crop of younger folks of the same ilk, including Nancy Griffith, Lyle Lovett and Steve Earle. Lovett, for instance, included one of Taylor’s songs on his 1998 double-CD tribute to Texas songwriters, Step Inside This House. Taylor, in turn, draws on veteran Texas troubadors, including Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark.
Scuffletown is Taylor’s third CD since re-emerging in 1995 after a 20-year break from the music business. It’s a meditative, powerful record that showcases the singular art of a major talent. Filled with blues, ballads and touches of gospel and soul, it’s the kind of record that at first impresses with the spare cleanness of its music, only to sink its poetic hooks deep into your consciousness with repeated listenings.
Most of the 11 tracks were written by Taylor, with the exception of two by Van Zandt and one from Blind Willie McTell. It’s the first time Taylor has covered others’ songs on record, and his words about it so impressed me I decided to pass them on.
“A few years ago, Dave Van Ronk told me the only trouble he had with … singer-songwriters was that they didn’t perform anyone else’s songs, and that they seemed unwilling to credit influence. It shocked me that he was so right. To paraphrase Henri Matisse, ‘To avoid the influence of others is a matter of cowardice and lack of personality.’ “
While all of the songs on Scuffletown are given plenty of room to breathe, two in particular are quite lengthy. The seven-minute opener, “Happy Endings,” is a ballad of a Dust Bowl family held together by adversity and then scattered to the winds by an unexpected stroke of good luck. The 11-minute pairing of McTell’s version of the old sweetheart-murder ballad “Delia” with Taylor’s own “Bad News” is a real stroke of genius. The long, slow, sweet backporch approach to “Delia,” accompanied by Taylor’s light fingerpicked guitar and a quavering Beatlesque organ, gives way to the uptempo “Bad News,” with its chorus that sounds like it could be out of Leonard Cohen’s songbook: “Looks like bad news from heaven, baby/Bitches backed with twos/Someone rolled a seven/Saint Peter got the blues.”
Both of the Van Zandt covers, “Where I Lead Me” and the final track, “Nothin,'” are hard-hitting bluesy songs typical of Townes’ best, full of cryptic lyrics and dark turns of phrase.
Taylor’s “White Bone,” the tale of an albino African-American, and “Game is Gone,” a revenge fantasy that Taylor swears is about a record company executive (not an ex-wife), are worthy of their proximity to Van Zandt’s songs.
The emotional centerpiece of Scuffletown is the one-two punch of “Your God,” a bitter tirade inspired by the brutal dragging murder of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, a few years ago, and “Bread and Wine,” a view of the Last Supper through the eyes of a pensive and questioning Jesus.
All is not dark and ruminative, however. “All the Way to Heaven” is a languidly humorous tale of a night at a Charlie Rich gig. “Blue Piano” is a beautifully sad love song. And “Chicken Pie” is a bawdy blues that Taylor claims once got him kicked out of a Catholic coffeehouse gig, with a chorus of “Chicken pie, chicken pie/It’s every old rooster’s alibi/Ask him where he’s been all day/Eatin’ chicken pie is what he’ll say.”
The accompaniment, by Taylor and a handful of musicians and backing singers, is tastefully and generally understated throughout. In addition to Taylor’s occasional distorted wails on the electric guitar, of particular note is the piano and organ playing by Mike Sumler, and James Gilmer’s percussion, both of which always perfectly highlight the songs.
There’s nothing flashy here, just a singer with his songs. With his rock-solid baritone somewhere between John Prine and Johnny Cash, Taylor sounds as though he’s seen it all and then some. If you’re lucky, he’ll sing you some songs about it.
(Eminent, 2001)
