Rod Picott
Paper Hearts and Broken Arrows
Welding Rod Records
A Stunning Album of Devastating Honesty and Emotional Perception.
Those who follow Rod regularly on Facebook will know as well as anyone that he’s a great writer – in lyrical and literate forms – and has a world-wise eye for the minutiae of everyday life in its hard physical and emotional ways.
In this latest release, the observational lyricism is married to some of the most sensitive production and instrumentation that Mr Picott has been presented in – and it’s a joy.
“Lover” – most definitely not the Taylor Swift track, opens things up
“A few more miles in the motor I guess”
… I’m so tired of flying alone”
is a hymn for those of us middle-aged types fighting against the receding of emotional opportunity and the gaping maw of loneliness.
“Lover come find me” is the call – tears – and it’s only track one.
Gently strummed guitar and faraway pedal steel push the heartbreak in the vocal to the fore of this raw confessional.
“Revenuer” (for us non-American folks that’s a kind of aggressive tax inspector/trading standards hybrid). “Revenuer’s coming but he won’t catch me”
is not just an ages-old tale of being chased by the fuzz and that blurry line between right and wrong, but also a metaphorical departure in haste from the grim reaper.
Grumbling distorted guitar, pounding percussion and clanging barroom keys reinforce the sense of fear and determination at the song’s core. “
Mona Lisa” which follows is a Prine-esque finger-picked tale of waiting for the one – whoever that might be – and it finds Picott in fine melodic voice too with its central message of
“You’re not the Mona Lisa / I’m not your James Dean”
– a spiritual relation to the opener, this song hits home on a personal level with this listener.
“Dirty T-shirt” is a distant cousin in sentiment of Jonathan Richman’s “Everyday Clothes;” in that it celebrates the beauty in the imperfect and average around us – the tremulous, cracked fade-out on Rod’s vocal on the last line is the kind of sympathetic production that does these songs proud too – big kudos to Neilson Hubbard on that account.
“Frankie Lee” is a beautifully observed underdog character story and a co-write with Jennifer Tortorici that deserves – and will demand – pin-drop silence.
“Sonny Liston” uses the (insert adjective depending on your view of the man) icon as a motif and emblem for the shame of slavery – and by extension, America’s general mistreatment of all its “poor (and) huddled masses”.
Musically it’s got very much another John Prinesque feel and dynamic (Someone really ought to introduce Prine’s former guitarist, Jason Wilber to Rod. You heard it here first.)
“Through The Dark” follows – a Slaid Cleaves co-write and one which explores the notion and imperative – “Take my hand – I’ve got this – don’t let go…” –
but whether that is a defiant gesture or a desperate plea – well, you take your pick….
“Valentines Day” has a self-effacing back story about its recording, which I won’t spoil as it’ll surely come up on stage in the song’s introduction – but get the hankies ready; a broken vocal, a gentle melody
“Here I stand/no-one’s hand in my hand / on Valentine’s day” and the details which remind me of the bit in “Manon De Sources” where Ugolin sews Manon’s ribbon to is chest – the heartbreak of impossible intimacy.
If Rod plays this on his upcoming visit I kid you not, I’ll be in the audience with my mask pulled up and wearing shades….and I’ll be keeping those emotional crutches in place for “Washington County” too with its oh-so current observations, fashioned in partnership with Mark Erelli of the fact that
“once a month we reach the foodbank”.
There’s so much righteous anger in this song – for the right musical, yet wrong political reasons, it deserves to be an anthem sung far and wide.
That righteous anger takes a different form in “Lost in The South” where Rod recounts the experience of a New England craftsman who when he moves South is, quite frankly – treated like shit – and so develops a double-shoulder sized chip before the years of being culturally streetwise harden the narrator against the blows towards a “Yankee lost in the South”.
As I remarked at the start of this, Rod writes a lot about his father in his Facebook posts – and his relationship with him; those posts offer a detached and objective observational – yet highly emotional – account of the complexity of someone – in this song “Mark of Your Father”, that idea is take into wider contexts and explores the difficulty of father-son roles, through a sequence of set-pieces. It’s in some ways a development and exploration of Larkin’s famous lines from “This must be the verse”
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.”
The album closes with another Slaid Cleaves co-write – musically it allies Kris Drever style picking to the difficulty of finding a positive way through the world;
“You ask again and again
in the dark of the night
As you live and you die and you try to
make your own light”
In creating an album with so much honesty and emotional perception on a personal level, Rod Picott has tapped into the seam of the universal.
Musically, it’s been perfectly crafted – stand up and take a bow Neilson Hubbard – around the timbre of Rod’s vocals and it’s drawn some wonderful vocal performances that ally the medium and the message.
I love it when artistically, everything falls into place for an artist – and that’s true of Rod Picott’s “Paper Hearts and Broken Arrows”.
Review by Nick Barber
http://rodpicott.com/
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Full Release
US & Europe June 10th 2022
The Rocking Magpie 