Tom Brosseau (Loveless)
By Kyle Wagner
Wednesday. May 03, 12:03 AM
A journey to the past to help you understand the present.

After the successful release of What I Mean to Say is Goodbye, with its transcendent stark beauty and heaps of critical praise, Loveless has decided to re-release Tom Brosseau’s first album from 2001. Lovingly referred to as “The Blue Album” (though it originally had no title), this work serves as a historical document of sorts, chronicling the origin and evolution of a unique and genuine talent in the often over-saturated and bland world of contemporary American folk music. In addition to the original album tracks, this re-release includes three extra songs from the 2001 recording sessions with Gregory Page, an unreleased song from the What I Mean to Say is Goodbye sessions, and a live performance from the radio program Morning Becomes Eclectic.

Tom Brosseau is often referred to as an “old soul.” The term may be overused to the point of triteness, but it will never be employed more accurately than when referring to Brosseau’s wandering voice that follows its own logic and immediately transmutes the stale landscape around you into an imagined world of new (yet dusty) beauty. It’s easy to instinctually construct a mythology surrounding his past that places him outside of the traditional limits of time. You can see him jumping trains with Jack Kerouac in the ‘50s, being displaced from the Oklahoma Panhandle during the Dust Bowl of the ‘30s, or trading songs with the folk troubadours of the ‘60s without being burdened by the temporal incongruity of those mental images. Every crooned phrase sounds genuine. You’re never saddled with the thought that the “old” feel that permeates his work is premeditated or gimmicky, and that is difficult to pull off. It only works if you’re not actually trying to “pull off” anything.

The structure of the songs on “The Blue Album” is much more standard than the songs of What I Mean to Say is Goodbye, but you can feel Brosseau beginning to deconstruct that framework and move toward a unique intrinsic logic. Yet even within that structure, he still creates stark lyrics and delivers them with such deft phrasing that everything is allowed to work on more than one level. He’s nuanced and subtle in observation, writing songs that are deceptively simple without being simplistic. Give a listen to “The Young and the Free,” “Broken Hearted Love,” or “Rose” and you will hear what I mean. One of the marks of a great songwriter is if he/she can create a simple song, lyrically, and deliver it in such a way that it transcends that simplicity. A good songwriter knows the space the lyrics are going to occupy and possesses an internalized understanding of how to tap into and manipulate the instincts of the listener with the right phrases/words delivered at just the right time and in just the right way. Brosseau is keenly aware of how his winding voice works, and he manages to wring every last drop of beauty from each word that he sings.

With all of that said, the three additional tracks from the 2001 sessions are a bit rough and leaving them off the original release was probably a good decision. “Used to Own a Rowing Boat” from the What I Mean to Say is Goodbye sessions, however, is confident and progressive. But it’s “The Young and the Free” from Brosseau’s performance on Morning Becomes Eclectic that outshines everything else on the album. The recording is so upfront that you can hear every nuance in his voice, and every nuance is perfect. It even trumps the studio version from this same album and proves that all of the vocal subtlety that he brings to the recording sessions translates to something even greater live. If you’re into singer-songwriters at all and you have yet to check out Tom Brosseau, you owe it to yourself to get your hands on What I Mean to Say is Goodbye. If you already own that album and are yearning for something to hold you over until the release of his next album, this reissue could be exactly what you need.
www.tombrosseau.com
www.lovelessrecords.com

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Kyle Wagner

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