Rod Picott’s a craftsman, working on songs in the same way as carpenter works with wood and a mason works with stone. When he talks about the songs in his notes on the album, he uses images of chisels and carving knives to illustrate the process of knocking a song into shape. If there’s a better songwriting chronicler of rust-belt blue-collar America than Rod Picott, I haven’t heard them; he’s totally authentic and he incorporates his own experiences into his work. By his own admission he’s finding it more difficult to create songs these days after ten albums but he’s now working with other songwriters to create classic songs; the magic is still most definitely there and ‘Starlight Tour’ is probably the most complete Rod Picott album I’ve heard.
The discipline required to complete the album in just five studio days with producer Neilson Hubbard is evident in the arrangement for all ten songs, whether it’s the full-band sound of the blue-collar anthem ‘Digging Ditches’ and moody nostalgic rock of ‘Wasteland’ or the two stripped-back songs that close the album, ‘Pelican Bay’ telling the story of Vietnam veteran and his happiness followed by tragedy and the intimations of mortality in the closing song ‘It’s Time to Let Go of Your Dreams’ with a close-mic vocal backed by acoustic guitar and a very understated muted trumpet solo.
There are references you come to expect on a Rod Picott album; boxing’s one of them. His take on the tragic life of Sonny Liston from 2022’s ‘Paper Hearts and Broken Arrows’ is a classic. Here he builds ‘A Puncher’s Chance’ around a boxing metaphor which he applies to a romantic pursuit; the last thing to go is a boxer’s strength, so there’s always a chance of landing a lucky punch if you’re willing to take enough punishment along the way.
Rod’s songs are firmly grounded in real life; his style is very much audio verité and two of the co-writes demonstrate this in different ways. ‘Homecoming Queen’, written with Amy Speace, tells a familiar story with a more personal twist, while the Nick Nace co-write is an exploration of tales of the Saskatoon Police dumping drunk indigenous people outside the city in winter to die of hypothermia. There’s a terrible economy and clarity in the line “His crime was being, drunk, brown and poor” set against the sparse arrangement of ‘Starlight Tour’ that stops you in your tracks.
If you’ve heard any of Rod’s previous work, you’ll recognise some of the themes here; his interest in boxing, looking through the rear-view at small-town America and his love of its inhabitants. The change in tone with ‘Starlight Tour’ and, to a certain extent, its predecessor ‘Paper Hearts and Broken Arrows’ is that they‘re looking forwards at a road that’s much shorter than the road already travelled. It’s a difficult realisation to come to terms with and it adds a maturity to the album that promotes it from great Rod Picott album to classic singer-songwriter album.
‘Starlight Tour’ is released in the UK on Friday October 20th on Welding Rod Records.
Here’s the lyric video from the album’s opening song, ‘Next Man in Line’:
