SOUL SURMISE

STARLESS - EARTHBOUND

This has been my biggest pleasant surprise of the year. I cannot even remember how I came across it. I am now absorbed in it. 

In the late 80s and early 90s I was Glasgow-centric in my music loves. I mean Deacon Blue. Aztec Camera, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, The Big Dish, The Bathers, Bloomsday, Friends Again, Hipsway, The Pearlfishers, Lies Damned Lies and Big Sur. It was a astonishing time and a lot of it seemed to fall away in the mid 90s.

Paul McGeechan fell away. He was in both Friends Again and Love and Money but got more involved in engineering and production. 

Finding Starless and discovering McGeechan had new music out had me scuttling off to listen. When I did it was even better than I could have imagined. Not the singer in Friends Again or Love and Money, McGeechan has used The Bathers’ Chris Thompson, The Big Dish’s Steven Lindsay and Hipsway’s Grahame Skinner as well as Julie Fowlis, The Delgados’ Emma Pollock and Jerry Burns. 

I was particularly delighted with Burns. Her Columbia debut in 1992 suggested she’d be huge but like Canadian Mary Margaret O’Hara she seemed to disappear. I now find there was album or two I missed.

I guess a good comparison to this Starless project would be Peter Gabriel’s Ovo where he was the sonic shaper but used the likes of Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan (who sang on the first Starless record) and other for vocalists.. 

After all that I should finally get to the record. It is ambitious in its breath and depth. The singers aforementioned and their co-written songs get laid over with McGeechan’s piano and the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra add a dramatic warmth. Then McGeechan adds the sound of the sea lapping shores of Scottish Islands and a dollop of Scottish Gaelic with Julie Fowlis and Karliene giving ethereal celtic vocals to the song and a sense of land and sea and sky to the theme.. 

It is no surprise that over all it sits snugly beside The Bathers and late Love and Money. I particularly love Chris Thomson and Steven Lindsay’s contributions, the former coming on as a Glaswegian Nick Cave on Calvary and the latter’s new version of Breakdown originally on his second solo album Kite. 

Earthbound is a very gorgeous piece of work. It is the second album in a trilogy. I am excited to discover the first one and cannot wait for the third. I also have my Bathers’, Big Dish, Love and Money and Jerry Burns records back out and have discovered one or two records that even the eagle eyed me have missed. 

The sweetest surprise that has prised open a treasure trove!

RAY LaMONTAGNE - MONOVISION

After a few albums where he has experimented with his sound, using producers such as Dan Auerbach from The Black Keys and Jim James from My Morning Jacket, Ray LaMontagne has gone back to basics and not only produced Monovision but played everything on it. I have enjoyed those last three records but this one might be his best of all.

As well as going back to basics LaMontagne goes back to the early 70s for his influence. Strong Enough is all Creedence Clearwater, Summer Clouds could be Joni Mitchell and Misty Morning Rain is Van Morrison circa Tupelo Honey. Right across the album are echoes of Neil Young, that lonesome harmonica and rustic strum of the Comes A Time record.

In it all, LaMontagne remains somehow himself, the real songwriting McCoy in a world of big voices who wish they had LaMontagne songwriting chops. 

Everything here is pastoral in the sense of land and sky but also pastoral in how we might get ourselves through Coronavirus Times. We’ll make It Through says all that we have been feeling:

 

I know you’re scared ‘cause you can’t see the light

You toss and turn through the night

Holding me, and I’m holding you

And together, we’ll get through

We always do

 

This is a song and this is an album to help us through these strange 2020 days. It’ll be on my playlist for a long time.

STOCKI'S FAVOURITE 10 RECORDS OF THE FIRST HALF OF 2020

As June comes to an end here are my favourite albums of the first half of 2020. The quality of records released has been excellent, especially coming out of our own wee country.

 

1. BOB DYLAN - ROUGH AND ROWDY WAYS

I haven't reviewed this one yet. Not sure I can do it justice. It is a long time since he was so lyrically engaging, socially acute and cultural aware.)

 

2. SAMMY BRUE - TEENAGE MAYHEM

From a 79 year old at number 1 to a 19 year old at number 2. Brue with the help of co-writer and producer Iain Archer has come cup with an album that respects the past and energises the present with an eclectic mix of styles. 

 

3. JASON ISBELL - REUNIONS

Between Dylan and Brue in age lies Jason Isbell, maybe the best songwriter of his generation.

 

4. THE AIRBORNE TOXIC EVENT - HOLLYWOOD PARK

Main man Mikel Jollett's Memoir of the same name might see this accompanying record getting lost in the rightful critical acclaim of the book but this is Californian indie guitar rock at its best with perhaps the most poetic writer in that genre. 

 

5. DEACON BLUE - CITY OF LOVE

Deacon Blue get better and better. An album about Glasgow and the stories of love within it. Could be your city or mine. Crafted songs that I cannot what to see come alive live!

 

6. RAY LAMONTAGNE - MONOVISION

This might be Lamontagne's very best record. My review is coming but there are echoes of Morrison, Mitchell, Fogerty and Young. Rustic and true. Woodstock 69 revisited, not the Festival, the town.

 

7. DENISON WITMER - AMERICAN FOURSQUARE

An utterly utterly beautiful record of the gentlest mediations on small life America. 

 

8. MALOJIAN - HUMM 

Stevie Scullion teams up with Jason Lytle from Grandaddy, a perfect match for the song writing craft and instrumental layering. Sumptuous!

 

9. ARBORIST - A NORTHERN VIEW

Can a good thing come out of ballymena. Also-flippin-lutely. This is an imaginative look at Northern Ireland's place in the Brexit fragmentation. Stunning collages of sound with a Heaney-like sense of land and sky.

 

10. ANTHONY TONER - GHOST SONGS VOL 1/ THE PRESLEYS - EMBRACE

Two more Northern Irish albums. I needed to squeeze them both in. Anthony's covers record is wonder4ful in its breadth of choice and stripped back arrangements. 

The Presleys is a side project of Brian Houston's. Heavy on the blues with a spiritual underbelly and seems more set in urban America than East Belfast. Another successful musical adventure from Brian.

 

 

 

 

 

DION - BLUES WITH FRIENDS

Dion needs to forgive me. Apart from his duet with Paul Simon that I heard as an extra track on Simon’s Stranger to Stranger record, I hadn’t paid him any attention since his albums in Contemporary Christian Music back in the 80s and even then I can’t remember those.

He is 81 in a month’s time and at last he has my attention. I am no blues expert. I leave that to my friend Gary Burnett over at his Down At The Crossroads website. Yet, surely Blues With Friends has to be one of the most stellar blues albums of the year. 

It is the most solid piece of work end to end but to pull out a few highlights. Joe Bonamassa’s guitar playing in the opening Blues Comin’ On and Van Morrison’s vocal on I Got Nuthin’ that also features Joe Louis Walker. Elsewhere there’s Sonny Landreth, Jeff Beck and Samantha Fish.

The closing Hymn to Him is literally a hymn. It is that Christian faith that Dion has exuded for decades and got him nicknamed the “Catholic Blues Singer”. Adding the Catholic Rock Bishop Bruce Springsteen was a perfect duet, though it is Bruce’s other half Patti Scialfa whose voice gives the song an ethereal spirituality. This is a song for the dark moments, maybe pandemics or national injustice or unrest:

 

Take his hand through the sunlight

Lift your head high above

Let your blood flow forever

With the warmth of his love

 

Come to Him through the darkness

Come to Him through the rain

Walk with Him from misfortune

Walk with Him from the pain

 

As Dion said recently in an interview with the Guardian - “To be honest with you, if you had to retitle the psalms, the songs King David wrote in the Bible, you’d call them the blues. It’s like the naked cry of the human heart longing to be in union with God. Those guys are crying out in pain. They feel isolated, they feel separated, they just don’t feel good. And they got the blues. Everybody in the Bible got the blues, probably including God, from the travails of overseeing us. God is love, he’s not loving, he is love.”

Of course Blues With Friends dropped as the streets of America was on fire with racist tensions. Dion has dealt with these race issues too with a new duet with Paul Simon, Song For Sam Cooke (Here In America).

This is a more tender acoustic sounding song in the midst of all the robust guitar playing but the message is perhaps the hardest hitting of all. Taking us back as far as 1962 Dion admits that he was blindly unaware of the racism his good friend was suffering. The song is a good avenue to ask that why nearly 60 years later there is still such racism:

 

Down the block I saw the people stop and stare

You did your best to make a Yankee boy aware

I never thought about the color of your skin

I never worried 'bout the hotel I was in

 

Here in America

Here in America (In America)

But the places I could stay

They all made you walk away

 

Here in America.

 

81 years old and right on the pulse musically, spiritually and socially. Dion, sir, you are deserving of my respect!

SAMMY BRUE - CRASH TEST KID

What is this?! 

It sounds so retro but so refreshingly new. It’s brash and loud and quietly beautiful. It’s got a celebratory freedom and a melancholic yearning. 

Through it all Sammy Brue has this natural flare for melody. Every song finds immediate traction. To these melodies the 19 year old wonder boy has a smarter turn of poetic phrase than most. 

The lead off singles give a clue to the breadth of sound that we are dealing with. Teenage Mayhem soars like some hybrid of The Straycats and Nirvana and then Crash Test Kid is so tender with its minimal piano atmospherics. If Jason Isbell fronted The Flaming Lips? Nah, I am trying but I cannot pigeon hole him!

Though these songs in particular might be the voice of a younger generation, it is vital for the older generation to listen. Brue has a “What Would Woody Guthrie Do?” motto and for one so young he has a social critique and personal introspection way beyond his years.

I could give you highlight after highlight. I love Die Before You Live, the exuberant almost cosmic love song Megawatt - don’t you trade your innocence for lies” - the fascinating lyric of Pendulum Thieves and the beautiful closing ballad Paint It Blue that reminded me of a lyric Joni Mitchell might write and could be my favourite song of the year so far. 

It will not be lost on reviewers that Crash Test Kid is co-written and produced by Iain Archer who also played his part in that other wonder kid Jake Bugg’s early career. Don’t miss Archer’s guitar playing on the record. Astonishing in a plethora of styles. There is no doubt that Bugg’s debut could sit snug beside this record. 

Both Bugg and Brue have a respect for the old sounds but, where a Nottingham housing estate perhaps hemmed in Bugg’s vision, Brue has the wide open space of a Utah desert and you can hear these songs bouncing off the red rock formations. At times literally bouncing!

DEACON BLUE - THE LOCK INN SESSION - EP

Now here is a treat. The Lock Inn Session -EP. Four Deacon Blue songs all stripped back.

I have been fascinated by Deacon Blue songs, naked of band arrangements, since I saw a TV interview back in 1988. It was the first TV interview I ever remember seeing with Ricky Ross and Lorraine McIntosh and sitting at a piano Ricky showed the interviewer how Ragman sounded before the band added their contributions. I had just heard the piano version of Raintown as a b-side on the re-released Dignity.

 

Of course since then we had such versions of Circus Lights, Wages Day, Bethlehem’s Gate and Ricky’s recent Short Stories Vol 1.  

 

The Lock Inn Session bring us four more such incarnations and should not be taken for granted. Both Ricky Ross and Lorraine McIntosh have been through Covid 19, Ricky first then Lorraine. They were isolated from each other for weeks.

 

In the time since they have more than made up for it. This is a couple whose thirty years of marriage befits us all. Lorraine McIntosh has never been a backing vocalist in Deacon Blue. She’ is an extra instrument and when it comes to her soul mate Ross, she knows the exact amount of harmony needed. There’s never too much. Always just enough. 

 

This is a beautiful and unique project. One of those Coronavirus blessings against the run of play. They do four songs. All of which make their Lock Inn points. Dignity, one of my very favourite songs of all time, has a whole new take on “a place in the winter for dignity.” The refuge we need within our enforced refuge. Indeed.

 

Weight of The World off the recent City of Love albumbecomes even more cathartic in its stripped back strength to deal with the weight of these days. 

 

The sweetest surprise for me is (What’s So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding. I’ve loved this Nick Lowe chorus as a mantra for thirty five years and more. However, this version brings it back to the bone, the words took on fresh poignancy. 

 

What's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding?

What's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding?

And as I walk on through troubled times

My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes

So where are the strong and who are the trusted?

And where is the harmony, sweet harmony?

 

What's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding?

What's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding

 

I am hearing it, clearer than I ever had.

City Of Love?! Well, this is a Gospel song. About Glasgow and the love within its streets that can translate to Belfast or any other city. Yet, there is something lingering longer in this city of love. This is about a gloriously filled future hope. It is an eternal love. In Biblical terms one thing remains - love. 

Again here it post March 2020…

 

Lost the will for keeping on

Just as the winter is dragging

What can I do with all of this?

Where can I put what I'm carrying?

 

Goodness, that is close to all our experiences. 

 

If you've got the will you've got to keep on going

No matter what the world is saying

No one can stop you, not until

You reach the end and lay down your burden

 

Oh my but those are words for this marathon of resilience. If we take time to reflect on these Coronavirus Days we will find city upon city filled with love. Either it is the NHS front line, the hospital cleaners, the Foodbanks, the imaginative volunteers bringing food to the isolated and vulnerable. Or even the spouse looking after spouse in isolation…

 

All that remains is the city of love

All that remains is the city of love

 

The city of love

All that remains is the city of love

 

The Lock Inn Session -EP is a sonic treat for these times BUT never think that Deacon Blue just recorded 4 songs as some ear candy treat. They are too reflective for that. They have more intentionality with their art. These are four songs for the times. Coronavirus Times and Ricky Ross and Lorraine McIntosh know all about that.

JASON ISBELL AND THE 400 UNIT - REUNIONS

I don’t believe that the Cornovarius was God given but I do believe that God can use it for the good of earth and we humans upon it. Likewise, I do not believe that Jason Isbell’s alcoholism was God given but my has Isbell’s recovery from it set him above most every other songwriter of his generation.

Oh I would be into that Isbell sound whatever. I love that borderline between rock and country, particularly when it is inhabited by a purist songwriter. That is the homeland of Isbell and his 400 Unit. He stands with the Springsteens, Pettys and Mellencamps as much as he is up to neck in Nashville.

What though raises Isbell above the bar is his introspection. He asks the daily questions that my searching of soul needs. His songs are more consistently a soundtrack to my spiritual journey than most other artists. 

Even U2! Where I would go to U2 for theology, I would go to Isbell for the personal. I’d almost call it discipleship. I believe that the courageous challenge of getting and staying sober are the reason for such a posture and therefore the songs.

Reunions can be described perfectly in so many poetic lines from the record. I’ll begin with a couplet from River: - 

 

“But now I'm tired and a little bit confused

Regarding what I meant to do and what I did”

 

Reunions are songs about what a human being should be doing. It is about how to be a good person, husband, father and in the working out of vocation. Isbell spends a lot of time with the ghosts of his past, in regret, learning and forgiveness.

He then brings that critique to bear on how now to live. The opening lines are telling and a wonderful mantra:

 

What've I done to help?

What've I done to help?

Somebody save me

What've I done to help?

What've I done to help?

And not myself?

 

There it is. A searching of the past. I need to be fixed and an ambition to help others and not just himself. I am with him not only in singing along but in the excavating of soul and determination to contribute.

My current favourite song Be Afraid applies all of this to Isbell’s vocation. He is asking for more from his peers in the music industry suggesting that they are soft and compromising and not using their currency to help others and change the world. 

 

And if your words add up to nothing

Then you're making a choice

To sing a cover when we need a battle cry

 

Isbell believes that there has really been a better time for a battle cry and suggests that we should commit to change no matter the cost. I find that his chorus speaks as much to a Presbyterian minister in Northern Ireland as it does a singer in Nashville:

 

Be afraid, be very afraid

Do it anyway

 

Elsewhere I will turn to Letting You Go when my daughter goes off to University and It Gets Easy (but it never gets easier) will be a helpful companion as life throws losses of any sort my way.

If the content of Reunions resonates in my soul more than most other rock albums have in recent years, so too the sound. Southeastern was my album of the year back in 2013 and though I’ve loved Something More Than Free and The Nashville Sound, Reunions is even more immediate and accessible. 

The opening What Have I Done To Help come across all Michael Kiwanuka with its fluid funky bass line and Mark Knopfler’s guitar sound influences a couple or three others. Everything is ear grabbing. 

Isbell's lyrics are trademark. He's almost better than anyone else mentioned in this review for his vivid images, short stories, wonderful rhymes, fascinating rhythms and memorable lines. 

If we give it time and Reunions will grab our soul too and give them a good spring clean and maybe make us all better human beings. Now that is a record!

DENISON WITMER - AMERICAN FOURSQUARE

Gorgeous in the best definition of that word. Delicious in the best definition… If music was ice cream then this would be my flavour.

When my Granny Stockman, “Annie Meta Luke from Ahoghill” as she called herself, told me not to go looking for women who wore make up and big false eye lashes, she certainly hung her rural conservative north Antrim values out there. I laughed at her old traditional ways but to be fair she could also have been describing Janice, who I finally did marry. She’d have been pretty pleased.

She could also have been describing Denison Witmer’s music. 

I have written before how just three piano chords into his short live set at Calvin College’s Festival Of Faith and Music in 2003 I was in love with this sparse sound. Everything Denison does is so spacious, so utterly pure and unadorned. 

Denison’s art doesn’t need make up or those false eyelashes. It is as beautiful as it can get without any need to decorate. When percussion breaks in on San Francisco it almost seems to apologise. All you need is that voice, the melodies and Witmer’s simple but profound words. The rest is the frailest of a framework for the songs to hang, with near perfect skin.

American Foursquare is a record that my Granny might have related to. After a couple of decades in the big city of Philadelphia, Denison and his wife and two children relocated to his small hometown of Lancaster PA. After ten albums a couple of eps and a live record Denison stepped back from the industry’s push and pull and constant travelling to settle close to family and gave up the wood of his acoustic guitar to make things out of wood as a carpenter.

These songs record that experience. This is a record about home life. There are love songs to his wife. Birds Of Virginia is a wonderful love song. Rock music is okay with love songs. Songs about the children not so much. Witmer’s genius even allows him to transcend all the sentimental quick sand of that most dangerous endeavour. Confident Sensitive Child and Robin succeed where so many have failed abysmally!

Don’t think that songs about washing dishes and doing the laundry are too domesticated for the big questions. Witmer’s unassuming genius is that he can in the deftest of poetry drop a big heavy death charge in the middle of a motionless lake that ripples out forever. 

Take these lines from River of Music: -

 

We live in a difficult time 

How do you want to live your life? 

Where are you going to spend your love? 

Isn’t that alone enough? 

 

Or in Save Me From Myself, which could be the mission statement of everything Denison Witmer has ever written: -

 

In the modern age 

My addictions have me caged 

And the social posturing 

I feel cynical and vain 

 

Set the needle down on American Foursquare if you want the gentlest of meditative sounds and something deep to meditate on. It is utterly beautiful in the best definition of that word.

LUCINDA WILLIAMS - GOOD SOULS BETTER ANGELS

Lucinda Williams has made one angry, dark, dirty, vengeful, riffed up mother of all records.

It is a long way from the Lucinda Williams that I came across in a second hand record shop in Cork in the summer of 1994. Oh Sweet Old World rocked in places but it was a gentle sweeter rock. Emmylou Harris would cover the title track of that very record and Mary Chapin Carpenter had had a hit with Passionate Kisses from her previous eponymous record.

Good Souls Better Angels is more Rolling Stones than Chapin Carpenter. It might be Williams’ Exile On Main Street but actually it is heavier than that.

The heaviness of the guitar riffing is not here for its own sake. The sound evokes the menace and the gloom of the subject matter. This is a collection of songs looking around at the 2020 world that it dropped into and declaring this is a very skewed vision of how things should be. Williams' unique Texan drawl is made for such raging prophesying!

For Williams America has lost its soul and she is not behind the door pointing the finger at the reason for it. Man Without A Soul is a vicious ode to the President. 

Williams comes across as a heroic figure in the darkness all around. She is militantly defiant, standing against the tide. No one is going to rule or or steal her values and she is not getting on the Big Black Train to the abyss. On another song, she is keen to Pray the Devil Back to Hell; a personal favourite in line and attitude, as you can imagine! 

Not everything is gloom though. In fact hope and light are constant in the evil dark despair. When The Ways Get Dark is an anthem of fortitude for Coronavirus Times even though Williams had no idea such times were coming so soon after the record’s release. The cover track is another prayer about the communal carrying of one another through these days of shadows and doubt. I might play it in church!

I am not going to dupe you. The subject matter and the disturbing sound scapes do not make Good Souls Better Angels an easy listen or make you fall in love with it quickly. This record takes time and its weightiness deserves that time. The investment of time will reap a harvest. 

What we end up with is Lucinda Williams’ most urgent album in quite some time. Perhaps the throwing off of those who would bully and manipulate her has given her the freedom to tell us who Lucinda Williams is today. From there she throws spiritual insight of how the world she lives in is today. Ultimately therefore we can learn vital clues to who we are in such times. Now that is exactly what I want any of my favourite artists to be doing. 

STEVE FORBERT'S DIGNITY _ Reviews of his book BIG CITY CAT and album EARY MORNING RAIN

My memory is of a blow into a harmonica and the thumping sound of a cowboy boot hitting the stage. Steve Forbert launched into Going Down To Laurel and another Old Grey Whistle Test moment was indelibly mark in my brain, like Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell before him and After the Fire a year or two later. I’ve loved that voice ever since.

A couple of weeks ago, Anthony Toner put a Forbert album cover on his Facebook page and it found instant traction in my musical soul. I bought Forbert’s memoir Big City Cat: My Life In Folk-Rock and started listening to Forbert records, most of which I owned, but that I had sadly neglected.

Forbert’s autobiography explained the cooling of my ardour for his later work. It seems it was self inflicted. My last loved Forbert album was 1982’s eponymous record. It would be his last for 6 years during which he made decisions in management and record company that took him out of the trajectory to become the next Bob Dylan and ultimately made him a constantly gigging songwriting troubadour, who could stop at the Gas station for a coffee while travelling to the next gig!

Big City Cat is an excellent read, easy reading and informative both about the inside working of the music scene across four decades as well as Forbert’s own subjective journey through it. 

Not becoming a superstar gave Forbert the space to live a slightly different life where he can write about his twin boys and daughter, his wives and every day life. 

Around that we get to negotiate more management deals than your common or garden rock star and the find ourselves inside studios and venues across the world. I would always like more detail on specific songs but there a lot of songs that I was sent back to discover as a result. 

I found Forbert’s candour endearing and refreshing. Big City Cat is like the story of the boy next door who took off from Meridian, Mississippi to make the big time in Greenwich Village, New York and who ended up a quality songwriter in Nashville Tennessee, still the boy next door! It was thoroughly enjoyable.

What are the chances that now that Anthony has me reading Forbert, I find out in my research that he has a new album out THIS week! To be honest such seeming coincidences happen a lot!

My favourite song on that eponymous album from 1982, that I kind of lost Forbert after. Well, it was a cover of Jackie DeShannon’s When You Walk In the Room… and guess what… Forbert’s new record is a covers record. His first, though on live albums through the years, Forbert has regularly thrown in One After 909, Honky Tonk Woman, Send In The Clowns and even Harry Belafonte’s Jamaican Farewell.

On Early Morning Rain, Forbert again goes for the obvious and the little bit more obscure. The first single off the album was Good Time Charlie Has The Blues by the almost forgotten Danny O’Keefe and here it sits beside Elton John’s Your Song, Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne and Gordon Lightfoot’s title track. 

Where Forbert’s Kinks’ cover Supersonic Rocket Ship doesn’t grab my immediate attention The Grateful Dead’s Box Of Rain, Richard Thompson’s Withered and Died and Bob Dylan’s Dignity are utter successes.

The Dylan is particularly brilliant. Again, Forbert doesn’t pick the obvious. Dignity is an out take from 1989’s Oh Mercy, released in various forms years later. When Forbert’s boots whacked the OGWT stage back in 1978 he was one of a long list being introduced as the new Bob Dylan. 40 year later and here he is doing Dylan better than Dylan… or at least better than Daniel Lanois captured that particular Dylan song.

It’s Forbert’s voice. It is like no other and it has some kind of tonal shade that takes words and melodies and gives them an earthy gravitas. He does it right across this record but best of all on Dignity which has more drive and therefore more punch that Lanois's production on the original.. 

A close look at the lyrics might even suggest that it is a list of all the threads of a life that best describes Forbert’s and that he elaborates on in Big City Cat. 

In Big City Cat I have come to respect the dignity of Steve Forbert . His life, vulnerable ability to look at his mistakes, his decision to be a troubadour rather than a superstar and the catalogue of work that emitted from such. Dignity is one of the songs on his current Early Morning Rain that has me enthusiastically seeking out the albums I missed from 1982 until now.