JD Hinton – Trouble Time
Townes van Zandt, the great philosopher of country music, sang about kinds of troubles that, should they ever find you, would break your back and leave you with nothing. That isn’t exactly a cheerful subject, the kind that pop music producers would encourage their artists to sing about. And, because of its very nature, it isn’t something that those who have been through such events can articulate through lyrics.
Yet, there are exceptions. There are some songwriters who have the sangfroid to stare down the worst that may happen to themselves or a fellow human being and write down what they see in great detail. These are not people who laugh in the face of danger, but rather, like van Zandt, understand that just like a ship caught in a great storm, the only thing left is to marvel at the potential for horrible destruction.
JD Hinton’s “Trouble Time” is a great blues rock ode to the things that, should they catch up with you, will crash you into nothing. The lyrics are poetic. The blues groove is hypnotic. JD Hinton uses the power of repetition to hypnotise you. Like the artwork used for the single, the song will make you feel as if you’re slowly driving into a hurricane, being pulled ever closer and without the possibility of stopping yourself. Trouble finds you if it wants to.
Doug Walther – The Dullard
I, too, am one of the chumps who has taken up reading rockstar autobiographies. Maybe the musicians who tell their stories to the ghostwriters are just playing up to our expectations. Still, it is hard to find a bunch of less humourless, more arrogant human beings. Each one of their stories is used as another reminder of their glorious pursuit of making themselves famous.
Of course, that makes the unauthorized biographies highly more entertaining. While some of them are mean-spirited, they contain true stories and paint nearly every rock star as a potential source of inspiration for the future Spinal Tap movie. Rockstars go missing, end up addicted and living in caves, know nothing about the world they live in, and can’t handle the finances of a lemonade stand.
I’d like to think that, one day, rockstars writing about their lives could be as charming, funny, and capable of self-analysis as Doug Walther. “The Dullard” is a marvellously endearing folk-country song about the benefits of refusing to take life quite as seriously as everyone else does. Walther delivers a very good performance, albeit one that does not remove him from his comfort zone. Isn’t life all about trying, failing, laughing about and trying again?