“Please listen,” Peter Cooper writes at the end of the liner notes to this fine album, his fourth solo release. That might be a pitiful, needy whine if he were begging you to listen to his own songs. But he’s pleading for you to listen to his versions of these 12 songs by Eric Taylor, one of the finest singer-songwriters of his or any generation. Texan Eric Taylor is yet another criminally under-known and under-appreciated writer, on the level of Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark. A poet and novelist who packs his emotionally wrenching narratives into devastating songs of a few minutes’ length each.
Peter Cooper is no slouch at scratching out a song himself. And he knows American music. He’s a journalist covering country and folk music previously in Washington, D.C., and now in Nashville; an editor at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum; and a teacher of the history of country music at Vanderbilt. He has toured and shared stages and recording studios with the best of his generation and those on either side of it, from Mac Wiseman and Emmylou Harris and Tom T. Hall to Jason Ringenberg and Todd Snider. So when he thinks Eric Taylor’s songs are among the best ever written and it’s worth doing an album full of them, yes, you ought to listen.
Taylor’s songs are populated by people you might refer to as working class. They’re having a hard time making ends meet, both financially and emotionally. Material success is a mirage, and so too are relationships. A good example is the song “Carnival Jim and Jean,” which Red Beet chose for the first video from this project.
Cooper’s voice is a pleasant tenor, with bits of expressiveness and a slight dryness, as opposed to Taylor’s dusty, sometimes barren-sounding baritone. It makes for an effective contrast between the tone of the songs and the tone of the voice and, to me, makes the songs a little less troubling to listen to.
As you know if you listened to “Carnival Jim and Jean,” Taylor’s style is more that of a short-story writer or narrative poet than your average singer-songwriter. He doesn’t spell everything out, but makes the listener work at teasing out the story. They’re most all like that. Sometimes you don’t get what they’re about until the last verse, sometimes not until many hours later when you’re awake in the middle of the night and wondering why. The song “Deadwood” is a good example. On the surface it’s a fairly straightforward tale of a barroom in that frontier town failing to react to the news of the death of Crazy Horse. (Fans of Taylor’s ex-wife Nanci Griffith might recognize this one.) But if you wait until the last verse and you’re listening closely, there’s an Indian boy sweeping the floor, and suddenly the song about white men’s privilege hits home even harder.
The title song is well chosen, too. There are layers upon layers in this one that on the surface is about a man waiting at the depot for the return of his woman, who you know isn’t going to return. And he knows it too.
The arrangements on this record add immensely to the songs’ appeal, particularly the guitar playing of Thomm Jutz, the lovely violin and viola of Andrea Zonn, and touches of Dobro, mandolin and banjo from Justin Moses. Depot Light is a beautiful production all around, and deserves to be on lots of year-end best-of lists. Congratulations yet again to Peter Cooper, Eric Brace and the folks at Red Beet for another top-notch contemporary folk release.
Red Beet, 2015
