Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
In celebration and commemoration, that is how the marking of time is meant to show how much we care about an event, or indeed the human spirit that may have created or been instrumental in its happening.
Surrounding herself with the appreciation and insight of the American sage of Woody Guthrie on what would have been his 110th birthday, Monica Taylor, The Cimarron Songbird brings her own stories of ‘dirt roads, home, fence posts and trains’ to the fore in the haunting and yet fulsome new album, Trains, Rivers & Trails.
In an album that utilises some incredible musical talent, including Jared Tyler, John Fulbright, Casey van Beek, and Travis Fite, Monica Taylor channels the ideals of the Dustbowl Troubadour and shows that the nation, despite everything it may have come to be associated with in recent years, its global expansionism, its projection of capitalist society, can at its very core still retain the beauty of its pioneering days, one that harks to adventure, to picket fences and travel, and not the dominance over indigenous people or the effects of believing everything has a price.
Trains, Rivers & Trails is empathy for a lost period of time, one that still has favour and grace, but is becoming rare to exhibit, even in the state of Oklahoma, the home to both Monica Taylor and Woody Guthrie, where the depression caught the attention of the world. It is in that rare quality of solidarity with the world at large, of being actually able to see the wood for the trees that makes the album, not only enjoyable, but one of social and natural balance.
A mixture of original songs and covers, a melting pot for the country in the 21st Century, this is the honesty of a woman’s observance, and as tracks such as The Sound Of A Train, the cover of Roger McGuinn’s The Ballad Of The Easy Rider, the sheer depth of depravity to be found at the hand of government in their ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people of Oklahoma in the early 1800s in the inspired Salty Tears, and the Civil War ballad, written by Taylor, The Occee Love Song, all combine to make what is a gifted and measured understanding of a book ended century of social perception, astute, and sensitive throughout.
Trains, Rivers & Trails is an America away from the lights of Broadway and the politics of Washington, for there is nothing finer to remind people of their true roots, bound to each other, and mindful of treading upon this great planet of ours with care.
Ian D. Hall