Album Notes

There is a type of singer-songwriter who specializes in odes to the dark urban underbelly of America.

It has its roots in the cross-fertilization between the beats and the folkies dating back to the 1950s, when poets hung with hoboes in trainyards and college dropouts hitchhiked lonesome two-lanes to the coffehouses of Greenwich Village.

"Cocaine" by Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan's cover of Blind Lemon Jefferson's "See That My Grave I Kept Clean" established the prototype.

Tim Hardin, Lou Reed and Tom Waits kept the thread going as the sixties became the seventies.

A Massachusetts performer named Frank Morey has been handed the torch and is handling it well.

He ranks among the greats in the lineage by virtue of his voice.

The best of this type of singer-songwriter has always had a smoke-frayed, booze-worn quality that has sounded perfectly natural.

Many a second-stringer has suffered from the fatal flaw of contriving, rather than actually having, such a voice.

Not so Mr. Morey.

He has clearly spent much time curing that rusty throat of his in things that may comfort the psyche but rub the tissues like sandpaper.

The instrumentation of this album is unique and provides a slight nod to nostalgia.

There are lonesome little 1930s corner-café flourishes of muted trumpet and clarinet.

Accordion compliments the acoustic guitar in appropriate places.

Morey's lyrics cover a lot of the same ground as those of his predecessors, but with a more notable peppering of religious imagery.

In "Uncle Lefty's Lament," he "know[s] the Good Lord is watching over [him]." The song is anchored by a recurring chorus line: "I look forward to lay my heavy head down in heaven." Four of the songs have such imagery in the titles: "Catholic School Girls," "Jesus Says," "Devil Train," and "You Got Heaven (By A Balloon String)." It would be interesting to see this matter pursued in an interview.

Morey's press kit indicates that things are happening for him in the Northeast.

He has the chops and the seasoned insights to keep the momentum going.

In the meantime, we have this record to befriend us when we lift that last glass of Old Granddad at 3 AM on Sunday morning.

(from Barney Quick indie-music.com)