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Darrell Scott - Aloha from Nashville (1998)

A Nashville session ace who plays with such standout artists as Guy Clark, Sam Bush, and Tim O’Brien, Darrell Scott has recorded a fine debut album of original material. With a neotraditional songwriting sensibility and a voice somewhere between Ry Cooder’s and Lyle Lovett’s, Scott is a mind-blowing multi-instrumentalist, turning in tracks on acoustic and electric six- and 12-string flattop and archtop guitars, bass, pedal steel, mandolin, Dobro, banjo, Weissenborn, autoharp, drums, and harmonica. The title suggests something about his range of styles which includes old-time, country, rock, and swing. Tasty.

Acoustic Guitar, January 1998

Tracks:

01. Head South

02. Banjo Clark

03. You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive

04. It's A Great Day To Be Alive

05. I Wish

06. The Ballad Of Martha White

07. It's The Whiskey That Eases The Pain

08. Spelling Bee Romance

09. Life Is Cheap

10. Heartbreak Town

11. Title Of The Song

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Darrell Scott's debut album is an ambitious fusion of various American roots musics, intercut with touches of jazz. Scott's songwriting isn't always fully formed, yet his music is rich and welcoming, featuring layers of guitars, banjos, dobros, trumpets, accordions and sighing steel guitars. Occasionally, it loses itself in the mist, but Aloha from Nashville is a fascinating and often compelling listen.

Thom Owens

It's always fun to go through one's CD collection and cobble together a tape anthology of favorite tracks. Then along comes Darrell Scott's first recording, Aloha from Nashville, to spoil the fun. All the cuts on it are so good, how can I choose a favorite?!

It may seem that Scott came out of nowhere to make this recording, but his fellow musicians have been aware of him for years. He's been a bandmember of groups led by Texas songwriting ace Guy Clark and by former Newgrass Revival frontmen Sam Bush and John Cowan. Aloha from Nashville shows that Darrell Scott has the songs and the spirit to stand front and left himself.

Do you like songs drawn from American musical idioms? Try the rollicking western swing opener Head South (complete with "Ah-Hah!" a la Bob Wills) or the bluesy interplay between Scott's dobro and Sam Bush's mandolin on It's the Whiskey That Eases the Pain. Are you drawn to compositions that take a no-holds-barred look at some hard luck stories? Try his stark Appalachian saga You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive or the plaintive portrayal of a struggling single mother, Life Is Cheap. Maybe you like contemporary takes on traditional icons. Give a listen to Banjo Clark, a fleshing out of the life story of Old Joe Clark (and a song already covered by Sam Bush on his excellent Glamour And Grits CD), or the outrageously "jazz noir" approach to The Ballad of Martha White. Perhaps you just want to be able to laugh out loud. You'll get your chance with the sly quips of Spelling Bee Romance and the recording's closer, a parody of boot-scootin' sell-outin' Top 40 contemporary country called The Title of the Song.

What did I leave out? Did I mention the gorgeous sadness of Heartbreak Town, a portrayal of a certain songwriter's frustrations in Nashville, or the anti-blues jauntiness of It's a Great Day to Be Alive, or Sam Bush's Cream-y "Crossroads" quotes on the offbeat I Wish? I hope you don't take my word that Darrell Scott's debut recording conjures up favorable comparisons to Lyle Lovett, John Prine, or Gillian Welch. Aloha from Nashville is a dazzling inaugural performance filled with pleasant musical surprises from start to finish. Check it out yourselves, and join me in waiting for his next recording.

Written for The Folk & Acoustic Music Exchange by Henry Koretzky

In the Hawaiian language, "aloha" means both "hello" and "goodbye" which is the key to Darrell Scott's debut album title, recorded at EMI Studios in Hasnville. It's a "hello" in th the fact that this is the Kentucky-born singer/songwriter's first album and in that he recently (1992) moved to Nashville toohustle session work while trying to land a recording contract. And it's a "goodbye"--hopefully--to the scuffling life of new musical kid in wn, and to the country stereotyping that is a constant danger for anyone known to be recording in Nashville. The truth is, Scott has contributed his country licks in the last couple of years to albums by Suzy Bogguss, Martina McBride, and Pam Tillis. But he has also done lead electric work for Boston's Catie Curtis and is presently a member of Texan Guy Clark's band (in which capacity he cowrote a song on Clark's brilliant new Keepers album [Sugar Hill SHCD 1055]) as well as having written, played, sung, and produced his own Aloha from Nashville. Hello and goodbye, indeed!

Aloha from Nashville is an understated tour de force, from Scott's smoothly expressive vocals to his musical talents (he plays acoustic, electric, arch top, pedal steel, and Weissenborn slide guitars, dobro, autoharp, mandolin, banjo, harmonica, bass, and drums), to the sheer inventiveness of his songwriting--including a bluesy song to Martha White and her self-rising flour ("I'm southern born and corn bred") and "Spelling Bee Romance" (in which J-A-N-E says "I watch WWF and I love CMT, I go to AA meetings and I've learned to like M-E").

And yet, in this musical space Scott occupies, somewhere between Lyle Lovett and Jesse Winchester, such bright wordplay and light fun is, many times, a fragile facade tacked up to hide the darker colors of betrayal and sorrow that inhabit the heart of his best songs, such as "I Wish," which begins with the singer wishing he were a diver with Jacques Cousteau ("I'd get a picture, in our rubber suits, so everyone would know") and closes with a wish of being a diamond on the back of his lover's "skinny little hand" so he could keep an eye on her and maybe understand how "you leave us all weeping, just to prove you can." This grim and darker side of life tears completely through to the surface in songs like "Life Is Cheap," in which an abused woman, having finally found the courage to leave her drunken lover, ekes out an emotionally dead life as a prostitute in Cleveland--"She don't take no more abuse, watches the headlights on the ceiling as she puts her mama legs to use ... life is cheap, but lady, it's not free"; or "Heartbreak Town," where "square people in a world that's round, watch you dance without a sound."

And if such intense, sophisticated lyrics don't put Scott in a category by himself, his inventive song stylings and arranging and superior musicianship (any one of these, really) most certainly do. Scott's problem, for the popular market that insists on neat musical categories to tuck artists into, is that--like David Grisman, or the late Walter Hyatt--he has already, with his debut album, said an emphatic "aloha" to the formula stuff (even including a spoof of such, "Title of the Song," as the album's final cut).Scott's talent and vision extend far beyond conventional "folk" or "country" structures. But by embracing so much more of American musical idiom and history, Scott runs the real risk of slipping through the industry's musical cracks, like the characters in his remarkable songs, one of whom wisely observes, "it's good to be clever, but you better be coy." Hopefully, Scott--and Sugar Hill--will take this advice to heart. It would be a real shame to lose the light of this bright promise to the cookie cutter mentality and bottom line anxiety of pop.

George H. Lewis

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