Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
The concept of confessional poetry isn’t a new one, especially in The United States where it flourished under auspicious talent, weighty hearts and minds that saw the acknowledgment of their craft being greeted as an affirmation of genuine skill and endeavour. As Mike Zito readily admits; his new album with The Wheel, the brutally honest and gorgeous Gone To Texas, is an album in which he pays homage to the Lone Star State, the state that he says saved his life. It might not be in the same vein as poetic luminaries such as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath or Allen Ginsberg but the sentiment is there, this is a musician shaking his soul loose and willingly, ungrudgingly revealing all.
Mike Zito & The Wheel, the irreplaceable Jimmy Carpenter on saxophone and percussion, Rob Lee on drums, Scott Sutherland on bass, Lewis Stephens on piano and Susan Cowsill with additional vocals, take the demons that the main man has written about, lyrics that chill the blood and affirm hope in the human spirit to endure and come through the other side and turn them into songs of self admittance, of tracks with substance and a personal past.
Texas may be the spiritual home of old runaways, of criminals and fugitives, of men who were running from the problems they had seen and mostly caused but there is nothing to be ashamed of in Gone To Texas, no need to find a hiding place in which to take in the superb sound that has the faintest reminisce of the great Joe Walsh running through its seamless layers. Tracks such as the beautiful Rainbow Bridge, I Never Knew A Hurricane, the excellent Don’t Think You’re Pretty, the pounding eternity of Death Row and the disclosing august feel of Voices in Dallas and Wings of Freedom all make sure that Mike Zito and his collection of top notch musicians in The Wheel delivers songs with incredible artistry and a frankness that should never ignored.
If confession is good for the soul then for the Blues, it is a vital source of indelible music and a lifeblood of experience.
Ian D. Hall