We’ve reviewed three Pawn Shop Saints albums here on Music Riot and they’ve all been great pieces of work, particularly 2020’s ‘Ride My Galaxy’. When we asked for contributions for this year’s tenth anniversary of the High Fives feature, Jeb Barry was one of the first to submit a contribution covering, in true High Fives tradition, a wide range of his special 2022 moments and experiences. Over to Jeb:
So here are my five favorite things of the past year or so…
Home recording:
I’m lucky enough to have my own small recording studio where my band, The Pawn Shop Saints, record, mix and master all of our releases. It’s small, but it works for our style of music…laid back acoustic Americana. It’s been an important part of the creative process to simply walk up a flight of stairs and work on music….and it doesn’t cost us a penny. This is important since I fund everything myself and we are 100% indie…we do it all on our own. It may be a little low tech for some, but we are trying to create our own sound our own way. Sometimes it works..other times..well, not so much..but it sure is fun.
The European Americana Scene:
I live in the Berkshires in the state of Massachusetts…not a huge original music scene, but that’s ok since, from the start, we’ve focused on promoting ourselves across the Atlantic instead of at home. Europe seems to have a more focused and concentrated Americana scene, and our last three albums have all charted there, thanks to great support from our promoter, djs, critics, writers, bloggers, etc…It’s still pretty cool to see all the airplay and reviews that we get with every release, which makes all the work worthwhile.
Except for my publisher and a handful of others in Nashville, we are pretty much unknown…even in our own town. It’s simply too hard to compete with groups with money behind them and staff to do the hard work of promotion, publicity, booking, distribution, and everything else that goes with doing original music. We play live only a couple of times a year locally since we are not in the local music loop and are picky where we play. My dream is to someday get to play some shows in Europe, even if it’s a solo show.
The Return of Live Music:
Solid Sound, Wilco’s three day festival that occurs at the Mass Moca Museum complex, finally returned this past spring. Since it is held five miles from me, I have gone to every one of them in the past ten years. To be honest, I was a little uncomfortable being in such large crowds with Covid still a factor, but since it was outside it made it a little easier to be in a crowd of 8,000. This festival, along with the Freshgrass Roots festival held every September (I have played six of them) are three days of bands, food, art, and performances. It’s great to see old favorites again and new groups for the first time. It’s a great scene…not too big like some festivals.
Unfortunately some of the music clubs I used to go to pre-Covid have closed or drastically cut their schedules.
The Ongoing vinyl resurgence
Yeah, I’ve been collecting vinyl records for about 12 years. The resurgence in interest is great, but it has had some negative impacts on my hobby. For one, I can’t simply go to the local thrifts or estate sales and find tons of records like I used to do. There is so much more competition, but that’s ok…I just have to try a little harder. The resurgence has also impacted my bands releases, as I planned to press our last two releases on vinyl, just for the hell of it, but due to everyone pressing their releases, the cost and wait time was too much for us, so we’re sticking to CDs and digital.
Calton Guitar Cases:
Eight years ago I finally splurged on an upper level acoustic guitar; a Martin HD-28 with the 1935 sunburst color scheme. Since then, I have always been nervous to fly with that guitar, given how airlines can mistreat musical instruments. So I finally splurged on my dream guitar case (yes, there is such a thing LOL) …a Calton case, handmade in Austin, Texas. This gives me a little more peace of mind when I fly the next time and can take my main guitar, instead of my second guitar (A Martin 000-15). Hopefully this will be next summer when I try to get back overseas. Oh yeah, I got a blue one since it’s easier to find at the airport…or if someone walks off with it.
There’s one thing you can say about a Bob Seger album; you know what you’re going to get. What you get is Bob’s gravelly, lived-in voice, a couple of out-and-out rockers, probably a couple of ballads, a couple of mid-tempo anthems, a cover or two (carefully chosen to sound like they could have been written by Bob himself) and maybe something a little bit funky as well. You would expect nostalgic and maybe wistful lyrics about growing up in the Midwest in the sixties, or life on the road and fairly standard rock arrangements spritzed up by a bit of sax and maybe some tasteful Bill Payne piano. So you would expect what is probably his final studio album to be a bit more of the same, and you would be perfectly happy at that.
Well, “Ride Out” looks like a Bob Seger album and from the opening track, John Hiatt’s “Detroit Made”, it sounds like a Bob Seger album. He’s always been keen on a good rocker to start the proceedings; “Get out of Denver”, “Rock and Roll never Forgets” and “Hollywood Nights” are all opening tracks on “Seven”, Night Moves” and “Stranger in Town” respectively and his romp through Hiatt’s song is right in the comfort zone. “Hey Gipsy” is a straight Chicago blues with guitar and bass playing in unison; it’s a bit of fun but it’s a bit of a departure because, despite the blues influences, you don’t often hear a straight blues on a Bob Seger album.
The cover of Steve Earle’s “The Devil’s Right Hand” is where things start to move out of established Seger territory. It has an Americana/roots feel with some lovely 12-string guitar and Earle’s use of half-line repetitions lends the song a very traditional feel. Bob has had a reputation for solidarity with blue–collar workers in the past but has usually avoided overt political lyrics (certainly during his peak period), so “Ride Out” comes as a surprise with its stabs at the media, high finance and politicians, over a chugging beat punctuated by discordant four-piece horn fills. What comes next is a real surprise; it’s a cover of Australian country stars Shane Nicholson and Kasey Chambers’ “Adam and Eve”; the arrangement is pure dustbowl country with banjo, mandolin, harmonium and fiddle backing Bob and Laura Creamer’s vocal duet. It’s raw, earthy and powerful and the harmonies are superb.
If you’re not already surprised and confused, the next song was written by one of America’s most politicised songwriters; but it’s a Woody Guthrie love song taken from the Wilco/Billy Bragg “Mermaid Avenue” project which was featured on Bob’s 2013 tour. It’s a big production again with violin, Hammond and a horn section and, I know Seger diehards will probably hate this comparison, but it wouldn’t sound out of place on Springsteen’s “We Shall Overcome” album. “”It’s Your World” is another lyrical departure, tackling environmental and financial issues over a sparse piano and guitar-based arrangement; it’s powerful stuff. “All of the Roads” is classic, “Against the Wind”-style Seger, although the violin gives it a more roots feel, creating a nice counterpoint to the Hammond B3. The ballad, “You Take Me In”, a mid-tempo ballad with a fairly traditional Seger arrangement and very upfront vocal would sit perfectly on any Seger album between 1975 and 1995 and sets the scene nicely for a powerful song to close out the album.
And “Gates of Eden” is a powerful song; it’s a slow, almost funereal, revelation of a personal epiphany which builds up with strings, a full rock band and huge backing vocals to a climax before fading out on synth strings. It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard from Bob Seger and it finishes the album as perfectly as a full stop at the end of a sentence. If this is the last album of new Bob Seger material, then “Gates of Eden” is a perfect ending.
The three additional songs on the deluxe edition of the album are all Bob Seger originals. “Listen” and “Let the Rivers Run” are both personal songs, while “The Fireman’s Talkin’” addresses environmental issues again. While I understand the marketing reasons for “Deluxe” editions of albums, in this case it’s an act of vandalism; “Gates of Eden” is clearly intended as a closing song for the album (and perhaps a career) and it’s totally inappropriate to add any songs after that punctuation mark. There’s nothing wrong with the songs, but maybe an additional EP or a download would have worked better.
This is a long way from a comfortable album to keep the fans happy without rocking the boat; this is a set of songs that have the feel of an artist disregarding expectations by using traditional American musical idioms while addressing his concerns about the state of the human race in the twenty-first century before it’s too late. As much as I love Bob Seger’s work, I really wasn’t expecting that; this could be a perfect swansong.
Available on import now.
