When rock critics use the term singer-songwriter, it’s usually in a vague, utilitarian manner. Sometimes it’s purely prejudicial, a blithe dismissal preceded by the word whiney or maybe navel-gazing. Years ago, I engaged David Cantwell in a good-natured back and forth about whether the term could be considered a genre. I argued that it could. David argued that I was crazy. Be that as it may, and whether or not you agree that there might be a set of formal and aesthetic qualities, of self-fashioning and relating to audience, fairly unique to many post-Dylan singers and songwriters, the term needn’t be an empty label.

Neither country, blues, rock nor folk (to mention another widely abused term), Eric Taylor is a case in point. He has just released his third album since his extraordinary (and apparently out-of-print) self- titled comeback in 1995. It’s called The Great Divide; in my opinion, it’s not only one of the best albums of the year—it’s one of the best singer-songwriter albums since Freewheelin’.

Taylor grew up in Atlanta, where he first played in soul bands, and then made his way to Houston, where he heard and befriended bluesmen like Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins, and where he fell in with the ’70s Texas songwriting scene. He married Nanci Griffith and influenced (or wrote) some of her best work for MCA during the ’80s. As a guitarist, he’s a master of recombinant fingerstyle blues; as a singer, he uses his scorched baritone to dig in and around the edges of lines for sly insights and menacing irony.

Like John Prine, he gives voice to uncommon characters and necessary stories. Though he’s often compared to Townes Van Zandt, the Mickey Newbury of “San Francisco Mabel Joy” and “Why You Been Gone So Long” is a better point of reference. I generally don’t like to resort to literary comparison when discussing music, but when Nanci Griffith says “I consider him the Faulkner of songwriting,” she may be guilty of overstatement but she’s not completely wrong. Taylor’s mode, as with the best of his contemporaries—Bill Morrissey, Greg Brown, Kate Wolf—is narrative, intricately cumulative, detailed and discursive, imagistic but not obscure. His songs capture personal and social history through the evocation of places haunted with lives, and lives haunted with places.

The Great Divide is a dark but never gratuitously bleak album. There’s a feeling of opening-up-ness or catharsis in experiencing all the details of these stories, their black humor and hard facts. It’s also about as far from self-involved as a George Bellows painting. “Well, I got a horse named Corsicana,” he starts out—and there’s already a character emerging. The name of the horse counts. Like most of these songs, the title track is a blues but not a blues. It’s a story, but the beginning, middle and end are implied. “I got scars up and down my legs, I got a crooked smile, ’cause I got another women who drives me wild.” The character is the story, or is it the other way around? “I got a sailboat down in the Yucatan, I got a coffee tree, and I got a woman who says she’s ashamed of me.” The narrator couldn’t be more unreliable or more honest about that fact. People, with their inseparable flaws and virtues, embody so many mysteries, and those mysteries only deepen in plain view of mortality and time: a gambler with a violent streak putting “salt in the whiskey” and “sugar on the dice,” an obese man finally killed by his mother’s unconditional love, a dying man staring at his wedding shoes which will be his funeral shoes, a couple named Bonnie and Avery Wilder comforting each other in a declining dancehall. “Time’s been good,” Taylor sings with a deep catch in his lungs, “All except when Panama left them childless / Time’s been pretty good.”

I’ve included one exemplary song from each of his last four albums–all essential. Gracias for the indulgence, David!

P.S. For all St. Louis area readers, Taylor will be making a rare appearance at The Focal Point in downtown Maplewood, Missouri on August 17th.

“Dean Moriarty” from Eric Taylor (Watermelon, 1995)

“Louis Armstrong’s Broken Heart” from Resurrect (Koch, 1998)

“All the Way to Heaven” from Scuffletown (Eminent, 2001)

“The Great Divide” from The Great Divide (Blue Ruby, 2006)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 at 5:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.