Teddy Thompson
My Love of Country
Chalky Sounds
My love of country music started with my mom, a nurse from Racine, Wisconsin. The closest she ever got to a cow was a carton of milk, but she loved Johnny Cash and Dell Pierce and all the old countrypolitan tunes she heard on an old vacuum tube AM radio. And that’s the sound I hear on this classic sounding collection of failed love, crummy jobs, and too much beer and whiskey.
Thompson’s emotional content is spot on. I’m tracking “I don’t love you anymore” and its gut punching response “…trouble is, I don’t love any less.” As I wipe a tear from that tune off my eye I’m already in the middle of “Crying Time Again,” an old Buck Owens, Ray Charles, and Freddy Fender hit from my more careless and cavalier days. I’ve stepped out to grab another box of tissues, and now I hear another tear jerker, “I Fall To Pieces,” popularized by Patsy Cline. Will the emotional onslaught ever let up? I’m not sure I can make it all the way through this project, but I can see where it is heading.
Thompson puts a sparse ten tracks on this collection, fewer than normal, but with each packing an emotional punch you should not listen to alone. And if your close personal friend is Mr. Jack Daniels, or you keep a sixer of Coors in the garage fridge, well pardner, that’s OK, too. You have a CD of misery’s company, and putting this on repeat is your best way through the lonely night.
