Kieran Kane & Kevin Welch with Fats Kaplin – You Can’t Save Everybody
This album opens with the kind of prickly, slow-motion banjo that was a Dock Boggs specialty. Then comes Kieran Kane’s tenor vocal, sounding just as weary and ancient, declaring, “You can’t save everybody; everybody don’t want to be saved.” This is the kind of downbeat observation that no one wants to hear because it’s so true. But Kane presses on, repeating the refrain over Kevin Welch’s lyrical guitar, Kane’s own shaker and Fats Kaplin’s implacable banjo — never accusing anyone, never whining, but never softening the blow.
That sets the mood for the whole disc, which is the sound of three men sitting in a room amidst a floor covered in wooden instruments, delivering good news and bad with a patience that never pulls punches and never gets pushy, trusting the songs to do the work. All the songs but one (“Dark Eyed Gal” by Ron Davies, a Nashville singer-songwriter who died last year) are originals, but they all sound borrowed from the pre-bluegrass era when string bands still played slowly enough to sit down and savor the stories.
Kane and Welch have often collaborated since they co-founded Dead Reckoning Records in 1995, even though this is the first time they’ve been co-billed on a studio session. Those many nights of playing together — often with multi-instrumental whiz Kaplin — have honed a rare rapport. The key is the rhythm, for the simple parts played by the three musicians lock together in a way that gives the tunes a potent pulse. And it’s that momentum which makes inescapable the uncomfortable message of songs about the devil in New Jersey, loneliness in the mountains, smoke from the pistol, the waiting cemetery plot, and souls that refuse to be saved.