Chris Richards – Jam The Breeze
Sometimes the recordings of a great songwriter are clumsy or otherwise imperfect. But sometimes that makes them all the more touching and beautiful. Chris Richards’ performance of these ten magnificent songs is not polished, but that is not to say it is not in its own way perfect.
The style is melancholy, trad country in stripped-down arrangements featuring mandolin and pedal steel. That’s pleasant, but what’s deep are the lyrics, which have the kind of firm grasp on the specific that marks the work of John Prine and Lucinda Williams and makes them real and important.
It’s hard to say what exactly distinguishes the lame from the quirky, and both from something that makes you feel like you just woke to aspects of the ordinary, something both idiosyncratic and profound. Or maybe it’s profound in part because of its very idiosyncrasy; what you come into contact with is yourself and your world, now made explicit or plucked from the stream of experience almost arbitrarily and moved into awareness. Anyway, whatever it is I’m trying to describe, both songs like “Someone Else’s Blues” and Richards’ performances of them have it.
Finally, Richards puts you in the contact with the real world of human experience from a slightly skewed perspective; he takes you into his subjectivity and makes you into its locus.