Guy Clark is credited with mentoring a stream of great singer-songwriting Texans – Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, Lyle Lovett – who have illuminated the art of musical storytelling over recent decades. Indeed, many of them came together to record last year's excellent This One's for Him: A Tribute to Guy Clark.
This album, Clark’s first new music in four years, finds the 71-year-old alt.country champ paying tribute to his own muse: Susanna, his wife of 40 years who died last year. The title track’s affectionate take on her memory strikes the right balance between heartfelt and mawkish. The picture in question is a Polaroid from the 1970s, which on the album cover a slightly out-of-focus Clark presents to the camera. Susanna is clearly furious, arms folded – “Fire in your eyes . . . curse on your lips”.
“That was always my favorite picture of Susanna, probably 30 years old,” he says on his website. “Me and Townes Van Zandt are in that house, just drunk on our asses, jerks. And she’d had enough, she walked out that front door.”
But she never left. And that “moment in time you can’t have back” crystalises into a profound salute that tells you everything about their relationship. “The camera loves you and so do I,” he sings in that signature drawl, grown more weary by the weight of his loss.
For Clark's generation of songwriters, the grim reaper is increasingly a key topic as the years pile up. But there's nothing natural about the lives ended in two of the standout tracks. Heroes highlights the phenomenon of suicide by former US soldiers who fought in Iraq, while El Coyote focuses on the true story of a border smuggler who left 18 people to die in a locked truck in sweltering heat. Clark is a little lighter when he swings sweetly on Cornmeal Waltz and Waltzing Fool, and offers caution on Hell Bent on a Heartache.
His voice may be a little more seasoned; otherwise Clark's style hasn't changed down the years: warm and low-key, engaging and engrossing, his pithy stories flickering in the fire of his gentle melodies. guyclark.com
Download: Hell Bent on a Heartache, My Favourite Picture of You, El Coyote
