The production is spare, and effective in its use of elegant acoustic guitar figures against gentle chord progression. The Road To Torreon is a song cycle about poverty, love and death. His best numbers are as evocative as dreams that everyone has shared in to some degree, dreams of better times, of fewer farewells, of an easier way of living. Talley is a great believer in the power of the heart. You see, it doesn’t take a hardscrabble working-class background to appreciate his songs. – Joe Blum, High FidelityĪlthough a dazzlingly capable country tunesmith and performer, he has another, probably more important gift of universal proportions. this offhand, conversational style is Talley’s greatest charm he talks to you as if he knows you.
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His best songs conjure images of the American landscape (the corner store, the jukebox, the filling station), images he weaves together with his subjective experience, the way Bruce Springsteen does. And he sings about workers, and the odds against them, as well as about lovers, and places in this land most of us will never see. Talley really is a manifold original American – working class parents fresh off the farm himself a carpenter, welfare worker, horse wrangler, college student, construction laborer. His lucid, poetic lyrics depict universal characters whose stories offer insightful glimpses into Americana. His songs are attractive in their simplicity. Talley’s music reflects the same kind of soft-spoken determination as his conversation. In fact, it was the first time in twenty years that the great blues guitarist had worked as a sideman. King played his first Nashville recording session with Talley. President Carter even invited him to perform at one of the inaugural parties. Rosalyn Carter took copies of James Talley’s three albums to the White House. In Tryin’ Like The Devil, James Talley has ventured to explore new territory and given us a hard-hitting record about the present day which will stand up to repeated listenings and changing trends. In the vein of the Band’s second album, it is an affirmation. Every note sounds as if it was played - and what is more, felt - by a living human being.
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marketed as country, it has little to do with what came out of the Nashville machine. GOT NO BREAD, NO MILK, NO MONEY, BUT WE SURE GOT A LOT OF LOVE