Review Summary: Thoughtful, intimate and bluesy folk-country from New Orleans
Some music comes alive in more intimate settings. Grayson Capps is a fine songwriter, but his take on blues, country and folk seems to lose something in the recording studio. The songs survive, but his work and his style of performance are threaded with a kind of subtlety that’s frazzled by production.
Songbones was recorded one night after a show, on a porch with just a couple of microphones. Capps plays guitar and sings, Tom Marron plays violin and harmonica. This simple set up captures a close and textured sound, one that draws out all sorts of nuances from the songs themselves. Where his other albums keep you at arm’s length, here you’re brought in and given a beer.
Poetry dorks might notice the shifting pauses in the chorus of ‘I See You’ creating a lovely sense of enjambment, but everyone will notice the little twists of meaning they call to mind. Capps’ New Orleans’ accent drawls over the opening syllables of ‘Slidell’, and later in the song swings wryly around the line “hallucinations rise up from the road”. The violin is at turns mournful, playful, gothic and malevolent – here commenting like a narrator, there a supporting character. There’s a broad range of emotion, but the overall tone is probably best described as world-weary, lively and thoughtful. It won’t set the world ablaze, but it doesn’t want to - it just wants to bend your ear for an evening. Give it time.
