Unsung Heroes

Unsung
Slaid Cleaves
(Rounder)

A recent trip to see my people in Maine coincided with the release of the new Slaid Cleaves disc, "Unsung." Naturally, I performed my civic duty by picking up the album, supporting a fellow Mainer (relocated to Austin) and putting a little cashola in the coffers of an independent record store, Bull Moose Music.

We were blessed with lots of leisure time on this vacation, which translated into plenty of time for listening to Ol' Slaid. Oh yeah, I call him Ol' Slaid, too. Most people assume us Mainahs all know each other, so I assume Slaid and I would be buddies if we hadn't left the Pine Tree State to make a living. Anyway, the repeated plays of "Unsung," a collection of songs written by Cleaves' favorite writers, many of whom are his friends and most of whom are unheralded, led my father to say that more singer-songwriters should record albums of other writers' material while they are still working up their own songs.

One of Dad's favorites, folkie Tom Rush, recorded plenty of songs by young, talented songwriters in the '60s. Perhaps you've heard of a few of them: James Taylor, Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell. Maybe artists shy away from all-covers albums while they polish their own material because they fear that fans and critics will see them as stall tactics or stopgap measures.

But if all covers albums were as uniformly excellent as "Unsung," I'd be all for more of them.

Give Cleaves credit. Though highly regarded by Americana fans in the know, he's hardly a household name. Nonetheless, he's trying to share his slice of the spotlight with other deserving writers. He's also a great judge of material. One thing that sets Cleaves' collection apart from some others is his comfort with the material. If you weren't familiar with the original versions of the songs (I'm not), you'd be inclined to think that Cleaves had written them. He sings them like they were his creations, like he has inhabited the minds of the characters within. That's likely because some of the characters resemble those he writes about. He certainly can empathize with them. He admits as much in the liner notes, saying that in Karen Poston's tale of loss and longing, "Flowered Dresses," that he kept choking up on the line about "hugging my knees, holding my breath." Those lines, which paint a vivid picture of a child's father leaving home, are, "And I was sitting in the hallway on the night he left / huggin' my knees, holding my breath / I never knew why be he was damn sure gone / thought it was maybe my fault." Hear it in context, and sung in Cleaves' soft tenor, and you'll be lucky if you don't get a lump in your throat, too.

Poston will be somewhat familiar to fans of Cleaves' work. She co-wrote a tune on his last disc, 2004's "Wishbones." And, according to Cleaves, the most requested songs at his shows is "Lydia," her solo write from his 2000 disc, "Broke Down." Other contributors to "Unsung" might not be as familiar, but Cleaves is hoping to change that. Michael O'Connor, who contributes "Devil's Lullaby" and "Getaway Car," is the guitarist in Cleaves' touring band. Many of the others, among them Peter Keane ("Another Kind of Blue"), Steve Brooks ("Everette"), Graham Weber ("Oh Roberta"), Adam Carroll ("Racecar Joe"), Chris Montgomery ("Call it Sleep"), Melvern Taylor ("Working Stiff") and JJ Baron ("Song for June") are friends made on the singer-songwriter circuit.

Friends or not, though, the main reason this collection works so well is that the songs' inhabitants are much like the ones living in Cleaves' compositions. Some are disillusioned. Others are down on their luck. Others still are victims of heartbreaking circumstance. There are louts and lovable losers. Some wish they could get out; others wish that another had stayed. Most are sprinkled with Texas trail dust.

Many are well-defined. In the case of "Millionaire" by David Olney, probably the best-known contributor to "Unsung," the narrator isn't likeable. He's a ruthless cutthroat, cheating his way from a guy with a buck in his pocket to robber baron and not caring who gets hurt along the way. More disturbingly, he makes us wrestle with our thoughts of greed: "How many of you wanna see me dead? / How many of you wanna have my head? / How many of you just live your life / Wishing you were me, boys, wishing you were me?"

One of the most vivid portraits, and unenviable characters, is sketched in Ana Egge's "Fairest of Them All." Its Francis Baker is a "red-eyed woman" who want to be a star. She winds up a lost soul in a motel, where she "does her cocaine in the hall / no more hiding in the bathroom stall / She is the fairest of them all."

Cleaves makes sure to say something nice about each of the writers in the liner notes, too, but with writing this good it would have been nice to have the lyrics as well.

Aside from the all-covers format, "Unsung" is a departure for Cleaves in that he didn't make the album with Gurf Morlix, who produced his previous four discs in Austin. Instead, Cleaves went to Nashville and the disc was produced by David Henry and Rod Picott, a childhood friend of Cleaves' from South Berwick, Maine. It should also be noted that Picott, a frequent co-writer with Cleaves, is an underappreciated writer himself.

Despite the change in producers, there isn't much of a change to the approach. The instrumentation is primarily guitar, harmonica and occasional, light percussion, though there are scattered strings, horns, pedal steel and keys that really round out the arrangements.

Start to finish, "Unsung" is a winner. It pairs one of Americana's best performers with first-rate material. Hopefully Cleaves decides to go down this road again. It would be even better if the praises of these songs and singers (including Cleaves) were more widely sung by then.